Aha! There is an attack-move! I was looking for that. I should have RTFM.
Thanks for informing me about the free roaming mode. This is exactly what I wanted.
No problem! Glad to help.
Another little question, it seems that long range ships stop moving as soon as they are inside firing range even though they have been set to match speed with their group.
This makes it easy for my flagship to lag behind and end up not giving any attack bonuses to nearby fighters. I might be misremembering here, as I have only played the game for two hours.
Well, this is an interesting point. First off, the bonus of the starships to their surrounding ships is something of a bonus feature of them -- their primary function is their own guns, naturally. Generally speaking, having ships stop at range and fire is a very desirable behavior, because that means that the longer-range ships (which are often either more expensive, more fragile, or both) don't take as much or any damage.
With group-move, it's not really a true group move in the sense of actually trying to keep the group together -- rather, it's really just a speed setting that slows everything down to the slowest speed of the other ships in the group. So if some ships stop to attack, etc, that will cause them to lag behind.
There are a couple of solutions to this, if you're on the go with a group of ships. First, if you're not attack-moving or in FRD mode, then ships will always fire without stopping, and there shouldn't be any reason for them to lag behind. Since you're only newly-acquainted with attack-move, I'm guessing you were perhaps queuing attack targets or something of that nature, which would have a similar effect to attack-move. Generally speaking, unless you have a reason to concentrate fire on a specific target (such as with command stations and warp gates) or unless you want to set a preferred target type for a group of ships, there's not a solid reason to ever explicitly click enemy ships to target them. Instead, when on offense I typically do one of the following based on the situation:
-Group-Move into an area near the enemy ships, so that my ships all arrive at the same time and wreak havoc as they know best.
-Group-Attack-Move into an area near the enemy ships, so that my ships all arrive at the same time, but stop at the outside of their firing ranges, thus protecting themselves.
-Attack-Move into an area when I am already at fairly short range, and I want the faster ships to get there first (which happens).
For best results, you can select multiple groups of your ships and move the groups around separately to flank the enemy, or create diversions, or other similar results. Not all players do that, and I don't do that all the time, but in certain battles where the result is going to be close and I want to save my ships, it can be really helpful. The L key is really helpful for easily splitting up your group, by the way.
Great question! I've been meaning to put a topic into the wiki about tactics, and I'll probably base it off of this post.
