Fleet AI re-assigned undamaged ship(s) during battle

[dunnjona]

I was not able to find a post that already mentioned this specifically.

An attack fleet, set on Auo with a specific high powered ship (repaired ghost frigate).
Advisor suggested this fleet should attack a pirate base, I agreed.
Once the battle started, I zoomed in to watch. We weren't making good progress so I paid close attention to ship health and saw that the high power ship warped away and on top of that disappeared from the list of ships in the fleet!
So I zoomed out to find this ship and see it is perfectly healthy but has be re-assigned by the AI to a newly formed fleet and sent elsewhere!
In the middle of a battle that we couldn't win without this ship.

I put ship(s) in the title because I am now wondering if this scenario might explain other oddities I've noticed with fleet sizes changing while on assignment.

I suppose this isn't so much a bug as it is an overzealous fleet assignment officer (AI)

[CypherLH]

Yes! I keep having ships get unassigned from fleets. Which automation setting controls this? Is it the ship automation doing this or a fleet automation setting that allows this? I want ships to be automated and fleets to automatically topoff based on their template....but I NEVER want ships unassigned from my fleets unless I direct them to!

[100thMonkey]

Yes! I keep having ships get unassigned from fleets. Which automation setting controls this? Is it the ship automation doing this or a fleet automation setting that allows this? I want ships to be automated and fleets to automatically topoff based on their template....but I NEVER want ships unassigned from my fleets unless I direct them to!

Same here: generally don't want ships unassigned from fleets, definitely not while in battles!

I think there should be an empire policy AND a fleet setting that says something like "Never unassigned ships from fleets" and, at the fleet level: "Never unassigned ships from this fleet".

The reason why I'd like to also have the setting at fleet level is that it "might" be a good idea to leave the possibility for the AI/automation to shuffle ships from some small fleets to other small fleets (ie: raiding or defnse fleets) according to need.