grinningman

With your ships in normal mode, they won't move unless you tell them to. So if you give them a target they'll only fire at it if they're in range. You can use the close to attack or stand off commands the AI will move yours ships for you. I usually find it easire to move them myself with a right click. The reason why ships seem to fire at random things even when you give them a target is because not all the turrets on each ship can fire at the target you've assigned. One of the cool things I like about this game is that the directions each turret can fire is limited by the shape of the ship. So when you assign a target, all the turrets that have a clear line of sight to the target will shoot at it, and any other turrets will shoot at targets of opportunity. This also means you can try to place your ships with a bit of micromanagement to allow as many turrets to fire on your target as possible (when you're only controlling one or two ships, it stops being feasible after that). Part of the design philosophy was to improve the sensor screen by researching tech. So there is a tech you can research (in the full game, not the demo) that lets you give commands to your ships from the sensor screen. The tutorial for the demo is pretty awful unfortunately.