All the fleet modules seem to have this capability of attracting fire when used on an armed ship.  It is still possible for a heavily damaged ship with enough firepower (without a fleet support module) to be fired on first though.  In practical terms, you want to use the smallest or cheapest module you can so that you can pack enough defence to make it worthwhile, or so that the ship is cheap enough to be considered expendable in combat.

Anything you fleet up with one of these armed support ships will get experience but have less risk of being expended in combat.  A swarm of light fighters will for example do quite well with this strategy.  After a while, these escorts have many bonus hitpoints on top of the basic amount they get when built, so you can upgrade and use them without a support ship taking fire.

The thing is, you can't not fire on a support ship if it is providing the fleet with a decisive advantage.  You might as well be wasting one third of your firepower (or having to withstand more incoming firepower) if you leave it until last.  I would go so far as to suggest that all ships with support modules be targeted even if they don't have weapons, that would make defences a necessity on support ships.

Well the trouble with the strategy is that if your enemies pack lots of firepower, the ship running interference will not have enough defence or hitpoints to keep the rest of the fleet shielded.  You can scale things up and use a ship with a larger hull (and more base hitpoints) which can pack in more defence modules, but that does mean less logistics for ships with some serious firepower.

Dystopic, being able to prioritize (not speaking of tactical battles) would be a good feature if AI was capable of handling it. Just putting the feature in without some clever AI code (read: lot of development time) would put the poor AI to a further disadvantage. I am calling the fleet tactic cheese for the same reason: AI is not capable of countering it. (At least, in my limited experience it is helpless)  I think that 2.0 should tweak the targeting formula so that the special modules would have much less impact.

I wouldn't consider that to be cheese either. It's a tactic that is supposed to work that way. No matter what kinda of ordering calculation the program would use to target ships, there would be a way to design your ships to counter it. This is using strategy to win battles / save your more important ships. Hwere it gets cheesy is that the AI wouldn't be able to think of it, but since the AI probably won't arm the fleet support ships, they would remain safe.

If there wasn't a way to keep the "Command" ship from being attacked first, there would be no need to build it since it would never get to do whats it supoposed to, it would be lost on its first battle. The modules would become as useful as life support on tiny maps.

Even before the use of fleet modules this has been possible to do. I just never took the time to create a ship that is supposed to absorb the enemy's entire attack simply to save tghe other ships in the fleet. By late game all of my ships generally take no damage, once the initial onslaught is over. ANd thats in DA where there are no fleet modules.

To Kryo and dystopic:  instead of having the player choose the exact order of attack for each battle (sounds cumbersome anyway) and thereby creating tactical combat in this game, couldn't the payer just get to chooe between 2 options; 1)attack strongest first (as it is now) and 2) attach weakest first (which is just the opposite ordering of the current system). The newer way would target transporst and other unarmed ships first. It would be just the reciprocal of the current formula.  Is this doable?

 well, having pretty much zero knowledge of how Brad coded the AI, i don't think either of us are in a sound position to do more than speculate. however, it'd seem to me figuring out a simple and mostly effective algorithm for target prioritization wouldn't be nearly as difficult or time consuming as, say, those for planetary development or starbase placement. all i think it'd need to do is use the normal targeting algorithm and then apply a few if/then caveats (if target X might be too well defended to take out, focus attacks on other targets).

Well, yes, but note that AI sucks as regards star base placement and development. It has become much better at planetary development but is still clearly inferior to experienced players. So, while it may be true that it is easier to write a code on targeting it is not neccessarily a simple task. Moreover, there are still many areas where extra development time is much more needed (such as the path finding near asteroid fields).

 Even before the use of fleet modules this has been possible to do. I just never took the time to create a ship that is supposed to absorb the enemy's entire attack simply to save tghe other ships in the fleet. By late game all of my ships generally take no damage, once the initial onslaught is over. ANd thats in DA where there are no fleet modules.

Against a fleet with comparable level of logistics, hulls, attack and defense and without Super Warrior or overlapping military starbases? How? In ToA you may lag behind in tech race (to a certain extent) but still easily win every fleet battle without losses by using the special module tactic.  

Yes. However, it is hardly a problem. The solution is to build several defense ships each with different type of defense. Before each battle you have to ensure that the fleet includes the appropirate defense ship.For instance, in my current game (the same experimental one - I do not have much time to play) most AIs have mass drivers but one has missiles.I have two defense ships with my attack ships: one with armor and the other with point defense. I rotate the defense ships depending whom I am fighting against and avoid positions where I could be attacked by several fleets with diffrent weapon types in the same turn. This involves some micormanagement but not much.

My TA 101 guide mentions that fleet support modules will draw the attacks of enemy ships. You may wish to look at it. It would be in the "Fleet support modules" section.

TA 101

However, I was unaware that ships without weapons would not be attacked. I'm going to have to look into this detail and see if this multiplier effect is really the case.

ditto. plus there are times mainly during late game/cleanup when my ships are so powerful off-type defenses are still typically enough. i'm talking 150 missile and about 2500 armor. after i got to that point, i only lost one ship, and that was to the newly beefed-up precursor ranger.

Thanks for the info. I was wondering (playing as a Terran) why my Fleet bonus ships were getting targetted first (1 for +defense, 1 for +attack and +speed).

I guess the fourms dont like things copied from word and its not letting me even go into the edit thing to delete it