Melee ships seem to be having a hard time being effective since the recent targeting changes though.
You've mentioned this before, I believe. In response to earlier complaints I changed how aggregating handles melee ships (they do aggregate, but it "rolls" the source target list by 1 each time its copied, so they spread out across targets much better). What specifically do they do wrong now? A save for unit testing would be great, as well. We'll get it sorted out
Melee units do a bunch of strange things really. First and most glaringly, when melee units come into your systems in a large group, usually they'll just sit there, even if you shoot at them, until you come close to them (I think it's related to their seek radius). I can probably easily find a save for this behavior, it happens almost every time a cross planet wave of cutlasses or viral shredders appears, which is common when you play on cross planet waves.
Otherwise, they just seem to do kind of odd things that makes them really inefficient. Cutlasses love fighters, which is odd cause they can't actually hurt fighters, or catch up to fighters. These 300 cutlasses fly directly over my fleet of 200 frigates, which the cutlasses I'm sure could wreck in an instant, but don't attack them because I'm microing the fighter they so desire. In other cases groups of melee ships will seemingly become indecisive and start shifting about in two different directions. In another incident I was watching some cutlasses attacking my ships, and watched as a single cutlass would attack one ship, fly a fair distance, hit another ship once, and then repeat until it died.
I dunno, they just don't seem to be very efficient. They should be like "dude, I'm in attack range of an enemy ship, its slicing time" instead of focusing on idividual targets. Well they still can but if someone is close enough to cut up they should probably take the opportunity.