Strange ship capture thing !

[QuarianRex]

This may sound simplistic, but have you tried setting the primary strategy on optimal and the secondary on ship capture?

This might tell the capture ships to use their weapons until there is an opening. I don't have 1.49 so I don't know if this would have an effect.

[Dragonlord]

Quarian,
yes I have tried that too

As for fleets, fleet orders are ignored if the ship's strategy includes "ships break formation"
as far as I know.

[Mephisto]

Boarding ships in Version 1.49 and below are only engaging ships that have no shields (either from start or dropped by fire from another ship). They will not engage any ship with shields with the "capture ship" strategy. There is no way around this. The bug was fixed in the gold release and the boarding ship will now hunt down the enemy, lower the enemies shields with weapon fire and then capture him.

[LGM]

I would suggest that you employ your boarding parties for taking colony ships to populations that breath another atmostphere. I have done that in one of my current PBW games. I have also captured enemy warships that do not have shields. My enemy does not have Phased Shields and I have many Ph Polaron Beams on my ships, so if he wants to defend against my two or three boarding party ships by putting shields on his ships, I would welcome that. It will leave him less room for armor. Use boarding parties as a threat that your opponent must think about, but do not use them as your main stay attack force until the bug gets fixed. I would suggest that you have 5-10% of your ships have boarding parties. Those few ships will be affective unless your opponent counters on all his ships. Do a similar thing with employing Carrier/Fighters or Missles to force your opponent to deploy Point Defenses.

[PvK]

To answer an earlier question, you can get boarding ships to attack unshielded auxiliaries by giving them a strategy which goes after unarmed ships before armed ships. Depending on the size of the conventional battle going on between armed ships, though, they may or may not get caught in the battle en route.

PvK