Here's the situation. I ordered a night naval bombardment of my opponent's base at Tagula Island and all looked well until I saw that the TF had sailed in the wrong direction to Rennell Island where, after I sank a couple of TKs, my opponent's LBA had a field day as my TF was left a sitting duck in the daylight, a few hexes from Lunga.
Now, I can accept that orders get misconstrued in war and commanders embark on suicidal missions (Charge of the Light Brigade?) but it still irks me that this could happen so arbitrarily in the game. If I had decided to raid Rennell and got it wrong so that my ships were still there in daylight to get bombed I could live with it.
So I had to go back to the saved turn to check if I might have targeted Rennell by mistake and this wasn't the case. However, I realised I forgot to set the TF reaction setting to zero which may be the root cause of this. I don't think the TF could have diverted to Rennell to bombard so it must have been some kind of reaction, even though the TF path was nowhere near 6 hexes of Rennell at any point. Would it really react that far in response to say a Mavis sighting a couple of Allied ships near Rennell?
As you can imagine, I'm disappointed and very wary about bombardments now so thought I would raise this in the forum in case anyone can shed any more light on this. I have also provided a map below summarising the movements as well as the task force settings I had used.
