Tips to get through the tedium of combat?

[se5a (OP)]

especially where combat has gone bad.

ie you've got a lot of little fast ships chasing down your one ship that's fast enough to run away(keeping the little enemy ships away from my larger slower and useless in combat ships) and keep firing.

I've got a couple of missile fighters, but having to set up orders each time to get them reloaded, then only fire so many missiles on a target etc etc etc.

got some laser fighters too, but they're proving to be useless due to the incredibly low rate of fire.
and getting errors popping up. - I think I'm following a target that no longer exists. got to figure out which one.

but yeah... this is less than fun. click clikc click click clikc

[Nathan_]

Nothing you can do about modifying follow orders, or weapons orders for ships. there is an autofire option, but it is more for the ai.  Fighters should rearm and refuel automatically upon landing on their carrier craft though, that shouldn't be an issue. The subspace bubble option(on the contacts tab) is probably the most helpful thing you can do. It will turn off the rest of the galaxy and let you focus on just the fight, which speeds up turn processing. Subspace bubble requires SM mode to be on, so turn that on, close the system map if it is open, and re open it, and the option should appear.

If you feel that you're totally outmatched and don't want to wait for all of your ships to die you can abandon those via the f6 menu.