Right now military fleets can explore, sentry, or guard. However, late-game I spend far too much time chasing down the 500-odd single ship fleets the AI keeps sending into my territory. In the game I'm currently playing, I massively outgun them by an absurd margin, but finishing them off requires an insane amount of micro-management because I have to keep sending ships manually to intercept and the second I lose sensor coverage I have to retask the ship that was on intercept. There's no good reason why I shouldn't be able to put a couple small, fast patrol fleets on autopilot to chase all these annoying flies while my main fleet wreaks havok in enemy territory.
Autopilot logic should be something like:
- Move to the nearest visible hostile fleet and engage.
- If no hostile fleet is present, move to the nearest point within range that doesn't have sensor coverage.
- In the unlikely event that the whole range bubble has sensor coverage, sentry.