fighters as escorts

With the current tools, there's no good way that'll work all the time.

You might try reducing the speed of your fighters to just under the speed of your ships. I've had decent results using single-engine fighters to defend planets & bases, and this is the same principle. You can also get them to slow down just a fraction by having them stay in formation, if you need to.

I've never done it, but you're supposed to be able to put a fighter group into a fleet - or you will be able to do so with the next patch - I can't remember which. Anyhow, the drawback would be that they wouldn't be carried inside a ship. Once they were in a TF & set to stay in formation, that's what they'd do.

There may be some other tricks, but that's all I've got just now.

In order to do what you (and I) would like, the fighters would have to be aware of the presence of the friendly ships. They aren't.

The only exception is when they're part of a formation, and then they're still pretty limited. If they're 'core' they just stay in position relative to the leader. If they're 'escort' they start out in formation, but they'll leave in a hurry to go chase down enemies. I haven't used 'picket' enough to say for sure what it does. I think it works just about like escort except the starting position is farther from the leader.

Reminds me of SFC, where ships'd get insubordinate and I'd just slap a tractor beam on 'em and hold 'em in place 'til it was time to fight. SEV won't let us tractor friendlies. Pity...

It may be that fiddleing with the "break formation when" section in the strategies menu will help in some way.

Fighters are aware of other ships, and each other, i tried telling them to instantly retreat with the retreat strategy as stay close to other ships, this just resulted in them huddling together somewhere on the map rather uselessly.

I haven't yet found a way around this and would also like to be able to have this behaviour, I was planning on using escort fighters in combat as point defense ships.

There is sort of a way to do this, actually - you just need to designate what targets for your fighters to engage, and give them rigorous strategies that force them to adhere to Target Priority.

I've been experimenting with creating interceptor fighters, who are only allowed to engage enemy fighters, seekers, and satellites. All other vehicle/ship types it is told not to engage - and so far it has been working pretty well. They will, however, seek out the nearest (or strongest, or whatever) enemy target that meets the criteria.

This works fine unless there is a ton of enemy PD... fighters, particularly in BM mod, work better in massed groups, as they aren't the superweapon like you'll find in the normal mod.

But well-defined custom strategies work well in the unmodded game, too.

In something similar i've thought of having drones that are launched that contain lots of PD. That way the ship suddenly has lots more PD. I haven't completely tested the idea though. I suspect the drones will fly off and drone attack the enemy.

lol if we made SE 5 like galactic civ it wouldnt be a little uder 600megs all this stuff we want in it would like require another year of modding the AI and stuff in the game and it would be a massive 5 gigs XD

Would something like this work? Set the fighters guarding your planet to the lowest possible combat loss percentage to force them to retreat as quickly as possible and have them set to retreat back to the planet. This way, you have an escort force to defend your planet that cannot go anywhere else since it is also the place they've retreated to. So, if you can set your ships as a retreat point for the fighters they will "escort" them.