I split my fleet into two parts, with some long (320km) range beam ships out in front (let's call this Fleet A) toward the enemy missile frigates, who are firing at the rear-half of the fleet (call that Fleet B). Fleet A's fire controls are all set to Area Defense, no targets are set, and I have tried Open Fire All (which doesn't seem to do anything when BFCs are set to Area Defense with no target), leaving them off, etc with no luck. None of Fleet A's weapons fire while set to Area Defense. For context, Final Defensive Fire doesn't work either, despite several salvos stopping for the increment directly in range of my PD turrets on Fleet A. I'm partly wondering if Fleet A isn't firing in Area Defense because it doesn't recognize the missiles as hostile (to Fleet A), but that would prevent Area Defense from being useful in protecting a 2nd fleet in any scenario, which doesn't seem likely.
I verified that the weapons can fire on salvos passing through Fleet A's range by targetting salvos manually, and the weapons get two rounds of shots in (one as the salvos close and one as they pass by and on toward Fleet B) before the missiles get past. This gets the job done, I guess, but is extremely tedious since I'm having to manually target each salvo and it's going to take Fleet A quite a while to close with the enemy.
I'm 90% sure that I'm just not configuring something right. Can someone please, please enlighten me on how to get Area Defense BFCs to fire automatically?
(Yes, I searched the forums exhaustively for this issue. I found a few posts that said "Just set BFC to Area Defense, don't assign any targets, and click Open Fire and it will work", it's not working for me. )