Ah, well that would explain it then. The first things to die in any attack are gonna be the minefields...
Yep; the remains "ships" are created on-death, so if there were no remains on the planet then the first thing to die gets its remains at the front of the list, etc.
Though when I looked more closely at the code while putting in some prioritization last night I noticed that it did already have some prioritization based on range. I put in more emphasis on "stuff that's already in range is preferable" in cases where there's no overriding concern.
On having them not fly back to their FRD point between every rebuild, that would be considerably more complex as that's more an attribute of FRD behavior than of rebuilder behavior. Got a bunch of other code I've been messing with lately, not wanting to add that particular can of worms right now.
Speaking of cans of worms, my last batch of AI tweaks basically made a goodly chunk of its "ok, I've got some threat on this planet now, what is there to do?" logic go heavily sideways. Basically it's always acting as if there's no interesting human presence to attack or fend off, so it just finds somewhere else to go. Kind of a "Three Sheets To The Wind" AI Type
It's eerie how the overall effect of the AI's behavior still often hovers around the edges of making sense.
Anyway, going to try to get that fix out with the other pending stuff tonight after normal work hours (TLF's in crunch mode right now, don't want to be on-call for critical AIW bugs during the day).