This is an interesting quality of life suggestion, would you be kind enough to elaborate a bit? So they aren't going after priority targets in already engaged battles. While I do know you can designate specific targets during a battle by highlighting and clicking, an auto combat priority could be interesting. Thanks ahead of time for the feedback!

In the original game you could set your ships to attack within 3-4 different ring diameters. This would do the trick to fix the problem.

What was happening for me was that ships near to being  engaged with enemy blue warships were pulling off at the last second to go after enemy greens scout that had just entered the system on the other side of the system. Perhaps the scout ship was closer to planetary assets my ships thought they had to defend as a priority?

As an addendum untelated to the problem it would be nice to be able to give ship attack priority 1-10 for each ship class i ln a fleet. This way my ships attack targets I want to kill first without targetting the meat shields out front and without me needing to intervene in large battles. This could even make flanking more wccessible if combined with waypoints.

Exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. What I have noticed so far is more that functionality is streamlined in the interface and easier to use, but at the same time a tonne of functionality was lost (like fleet commands and jump stances etc) INSTEAD of adding new features and functionality. I would site having to press a key to get ships to jump individually as something you would do because you had no choice because you wanted to make a game console controller compatible rather than a pc game where you can just add a tonne of button toggles anywhere you want and see at a glance what all the settings are.

I really hate the general trend for most things these days of interfaces that decide for themselves what to do without telling the user and then make the user find hidden functionality to turn behaviour off only to find that the cost of streamlining and hiding things was to lose 90% of the choice the user could have had to customise things. Interfaces like this might look pretty but they sure prevent player creativity. That kind of interface is what I see in sins2. Usually when I saw this kind of thing I suspect a developer is hoping to sell a game on other platforms later on and thus has to dumb things down and prevent an interface from offering too much beyond what a controller could easily handle, these days I just put it down to a "prettiness" trend. 

Apologies for the rant. I just want sins to offer more functionality not less and need the devs to see what I am seeing early enough to change it or at least throw off the chains of pretty interface syndrome. If they so wish to do that anyway. I like the game well enough at the moment but would probably play sins1 over it at the moment just because I can control things better and see what is going on with my fleet better at a glance. But sins1 is old and there is nothing new to do in it. This is where I am hoping sins2 will offer new things to do and new behaiviours to try. New ways to connect with my empire and new ways for others players to connect with it.