Just realized that after rescuing survivors from life pods and selecting the Unload Survivors fleet order at a population, any commanders you rescued do not get unloaded and remain on the vessel. Would it be possible for the Unload Survivors order to also include any officers without assignments onboard the unloading vessel? Or, if they must be separated for whatever reason, an "Unload Unassigned Officers" order for any ship with officers onboard that do not have an assignment?

ftp://So here is a setup for scenario "Small Fleet Action"

Red team:
CA
[3] S×7 A×8 Q (I I) R Q (I I) R R Q (I I) R R Q R R Y (I I) R [4]
Destruction

CT
[2] S S A A (I) (I) Q L (I) L [6]
Ruin
Despair

Green Team:
CA
[3] S×8 A×9 Q (I I) Pt Q (I I) Pt Q (I I) Pt Q Pt Y (I I) Pt [4]
Eisenhower

CT
[2] S A A (I) (I) Q F (I) L [6]
Lee
Patton

Setup:


First round:
The red team gets the initiative.
After the move, Heavy cruiser "Destruction" scored a first long-range hit on a green team Corvette "Lee" (4 out of 8 shoots on a 4 to Hit, tons of luck) taking one of its engine room.
Green Team Eisenhower was also shooting but with no luck.


Round two:
This one was unlucky for the Red team. CT "Ruin" was reduced to:
[2] XXXX(X)(X)XX(X)L [0/6]


Round three:
Red team "Despair" was trying to kill green CT "Patton" at point-blank range, and it did not go as planned. "Eisenhower" took the red CT with one shoot.
Another red CT was killed by a green CT "Patton".
CA "Destruction" decide to stay back and use its range.



Round for:
CA "Destruction" is desperately trying to catch up with "Eisenhower". On its way, it took green "Patton" CT.
Hits from green CA took almost all of its shields, and laser from CT "Lee" took some of its armor.


Round five:
CA "Destruction" almost got into an "Esenhover" blind spot. In the CA fire exchange red heavy cruiser took 6 damage from torpedos and inflict only 2 on the green CA.
After a shot from "Lee", "Destruction" started streaming atmosphere.


Round six:
A real good shoot from the "Destruction" inflict 7 damage from 8 possible to the "Eisenhower", unfortunately, it did not get through the armor.
One shoot from corvette "Lee" took out crew quarters, on the "Destruction".
Return salvo from the green team heavy cruiser destroyed red CA two engine rooms one missile launcher and also a crew quarters.

After this blow, the captain of the heavy cruiser "Destruction" sent a signal to the "Eisenhower" that he wanted to surrender.

So yes, corvettes should not move too far away from the cruiser, it seems that this was the main reason for the defeat of the red team.



For playing I use Roll20, if anyone would like to try it, I can arrange for some skirmish....

I think a big part of the issues with escorts is the sheer number of individual commercial vessels that build over time. Would a better approach be for commercial ships to form task groups of their own so as to significantly reduce the number of journeys that players are trying to cover.

Otherwise just having an order that allows ships to follow through a warp point would be great. 

Is the DR setting only my attitude towards them,

Yes. Their attitude towards you is hidden from you, so your only insight is the treaties they offer you. Or, you know, opening the DB.

or is it just that nobody wants aliens in their home system? Would this idea work, or would there be territory disputes between the player and NPRs despite being allies?

It could work if you don't mind popping into the DB and editing the relations every so often, although if you want the possibility for things to go sour in a "natural" way, this would make that difficult. Unfortunately, Aurora is not really set up for playing Space Crusader Kings.

One possible coding of the automatic escort role:

All purely-civilian fleets in the system are sorted by total build+cargo cost. Sorting happens each time a fleet is created or destroyed, appears in or disappears from the system, arrives at a body or another fleet (move to, join - both count), or begins loading or unloading a cargo capable of being valued, or begins a move order. This is the list of "escortables". As you will appreciate, sorting will need to be reasonably efficient (but, honestly, modern code on non-crap hardware will have no issues).

All escortables are marked eligible or ineligible.
Escortables orbiting a body, even one with military protection, do not, for this reason alone, lose their eligibility. This is advisable for several reasons, of which one is the need not to yank escorts away from valuable fleets only temporarily docked and which will immediately thereafter venture back into dangerous space.
Instead, escortables lose their eligibility if they are docked at such a body or in the same place as such a fleet, and have no follow-up movement orders.

The list of escortables is not re-sorted when ships are added to or taken away from a fleet, but the presence of military ships within a fleet at the time of a re-sort marks it as ineligible until the next re-sort.

All fleets in the system with unfulfilled auto-escort missions are scanned each time the list of escortables is sorted. They are sorted by military power (the calculation of which is not specified here). In order from highest to lowest power, they scan the escortable list, weighting by travel time and escortable value, picking the escortable with highest weight.
(Calculation of opportunities to "swap jobs" is omitted here.)

What does travel time mean? Any escortable has a present position, an estimated time before it moves (possibly zero), and a calculable path of its next expected movement. The math problem here is to draw an intercept line from the present position of the potential escort, to the future position of the escortable fleet at some future time. I may be mistaken, but I think Aurora already knows how to do this(?). Time to intercept is calculated. If greater than the time that the next movement order completes, this escortable fleet is not a suitable target for escorting by this escort. If the calculated distance to intercept, or the distance to the next destination, is greater than some percentage of the escort's remaining fuel range, this potential escortable is likewise ignored.
Otherwise, intercept time acts as a reduction of the value of choosing this particular escortable.
 
A fleet actively escorting will stop doing so for one of several reasons:
The escortable leaves the system, or is destroyed.
The escortable arrives at a destination, and some other escortable has sufficiently higher weighted escort value (here also, a "swap jobs" code would be groovy).
The escortable now has one or more military ships included.
Or, for whatever other reason, it is removed from the list of escortables.
 
Any fleet with an auto-escort mission is marked as being in one or more of several states:
1. Currently escorting.
2. Moving to intercept next escortable.
3. Refueling, and so forth (auto-fuel, auto-supply, auto-sustain-self).
4. No eligible escortables.
5. No eligible escortables within range.
5. Unable to escort (lacking fuel, supplies, movement capability, missiles, etc.).
6. Unable to escort (needs repair, and cannot move to a repair yard).
 
Again, several of these states are non-exclusive.

Note that some of this code would be of great benefit to a fleet marked as a response force, looking for battles to auto-respond to. Or, if such code already exists, then it can be profitably generalised to auto-escort missions.