Any way to ignore enemy civilian ships?

[LetMeIn11]

I'm building a defence platform in ARG space and I have a few fleets protecting the building site. ARG is trolling me by sending their builders to fly pass the building site dragging all defenders away from it, then they send a behemoth to finish with the site(7.0 AI update is huge!).

Fire authorisation override for ARG is set to "chivalrous" but it doesn't seem to work for the "Protect until further notice" order. Any ideas?

[Casishur]

Unfortunately, there is no fire authorisation that covers the reputation from -25 to -30.

Completely disarming defence stations is not a solution.

[Koizuki]

I'm assuming you're basically at war with ARG, but most of the other fire authorization rules should only defend from civilian ships. Unless those builders are actively attacking your ships first, they shouldn't be trying to attack them; I have a similar rule set up in my main game to allow Xenon S/SE's to pass through my defenses unharmed, and as they never initiate any attacks on their own, my ships happily leave them alone.

If your ships are going out of their way to attack civilian ships, check that those ships actually have the fire authorization override set properly in their behavior (either individually, or make sure they're properly inheriting it from their commander if they are subordinated to one.)

[LetMeIn11]

I'm assuming you're basically at war with ARG, but most of the other fire authorization rules should only defend from civilian ships. Unless those builders are actively attacking your ships first, they shouldn't be trying to attack them; I have a similar rule set up in my main game to allow Xenon S/SE's to pass through my defenses unharmed, and as they never initiate any attacks on their own, my ships happily leave them alone.

If your ships are going out of their way to attack civilian ships, check that those ships actually have the fire authorization override set properly in their behavior (either individually, or make sure they're properly inheriting it from their commander if they are subordinated to one.)

Yes, you're right, I'm at war with them, and yes, fleets didn't inherit my custom fire authorization rule because I forgot to set it as the default one. Thank you, testing changes right now.

UPD: It works, thanks!

[LetMeIn11]

It works weirdly though. The fleet starts attacking a civilian ship does several hits and only then retreats. This is not critical because the fleet doesn't pursue the ship through a whole sector now but this is still suboptimal . Anything else that I'm probably missing?

[Koizuki]

They shouldn't be attacking at all if the rules are working properly. My defense fleets don't bat an eye at all when a Xenon S/SE pops out of the gate, and completely ignores them; even the gate defense stations don't fire a single shot at them. What you've described is pretty weird behavior all around.

Do you have any mods installed that might be changing the AI or anything? If it's completely vanilla, it might be worth reporting as a bug with a save file potentially.

Edit:
I should note that under-construction stations are also considered "civilian" structures, regardless of whether the Xenon are trying to build a new Shipyard, Wharf, or a Defense Station.
With the above rule in place, I can't even manually order my ships to go attack and destroy those under-construction stations. The order automatically cancels/disappears when they reach the station because the Fire Authorization apparently overrides my manual order, so not even I, myself, can make them attack a civilian target.
(I have a separate Destroyer hanging around elsewhere in the sector without this Fire Authorization Override set to clear these stations with.)

[LameFox]

They shouldn't be attacking at all if the rules are working properly. My defense fleets don't bat an eye at all when a Xenon S/SE pops out of the gate, and completely ignores them; even the gate defense stations don't fire a single shot at them. What you've described is pretty weird behavior all around.

Do you have any mods installed that might be changing the AI or anything? If it's completely vanilla, it might be worth reporting as a bug with a save file potentially.

Edit:
I should note that under-construction stations are also considered "civilian" structures, regardless of whether the Xenon are trying to build a new Shipyard, Wharf, or a Defense Station.
With the above rule in place, I can't even manually order my ships to go attack and destroy those under-construction stations. The order automatically cancels/disappears when they reach the station because the Fire Authorization apparently overrides my manual order, so not even I, myself, can make them attack a civilian target.
(I have a separate Destroyer hanging around elsewhere in the sector without this Fire Authorization Override set to clear these stations with.)

Can you destroy them if you change their fire override? IIRC there has been a bug with destroying stations that are being constructed which cancels the order just like that.

[Koizuki]

Can you destroy them if you change their fire override?

Yes, they were destroying everything Xenon-related without issue while the default fire authorizations allowed it, but they stopped being able to once I gave them another one that forced them to only defend from Xenon civilians. Switching it back to the default allowed them to destroy them again, which is what led me to having to add a separate Destroyer to each sector for this purpose, but leaving it far away from the Xenon gate to prevent it from picking off the S/SE's. This was in v6.20, though, as I haven't progressed that save yet in 7.00; Running some test games first, and waiting for at least one patch to drop before I resume that game, so if it's an issue introduced in 7.00, I can't really tell.

I also only just realized I had a typo in my edit there, as I meant to say that I cannot make them attack a civilian target.