Fleets in disarray: How to stop support ships from fleeing?

Arm them with some sort of weapon and give them maximum range orders rather than dont get hurt. Then They will not only not flee but contribute to your fleets fighting strength.

Disable retreat.

Maybe add weapon with zero (or 1) damage and huge range and then use this with max range settings.

Harder to do but should be possible to script something to keep them out of harm way say maintain a range of 250 ls from the nearest enemy and set it up as a new strategy. It would also allow ships to retreat which did need to. Ok your fleet would fragment if hammered but this should be a rarer occurence

Try putting all the support ships into a single task force, then, when you enter combat but before you hit Go, use the Break Formation order to break that task force. You can then clear the move orders for those particular ships and the others should* keep their formation.

* I say "should" because I haven't actually tried this myself.

Change the stradgey options