I attacked Orion with 4 battleships and it started 1 battleship near the middle of the circle, 2 on the edge of the circle where I would say as being the normal starting distance and the 4th battleship off screen further away. Since the Guardian has such a long range for its attacks this formation resulted in feeding it the first ship without doing much damage. This left the next two to fend for themselves and they died before the 4th Battleship could get into range.


Is there a way to set a fleet's formation ahead of time or is there a bug causing ships to be randomly distributed at the start of combat?

You need to be able to start tactical combat in formation already and with your ships stopped.


Edit: Also the Guardian needs to be about 3-5x stronger: somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000.