I make a fleet for each kind of ship. That way ships of the same kind will always join that fleet! And it lets me set behavior for each ship type.

Also certain ships will not autojoin fleets. These are Siege, colony, and scouts.

I get the impression it doesn't work very well at all. For instance, last night, I had two fleets around the same planet. One set to auto-join and the other where this was disabled. Every ship that was produced auto-joined the fleet that where this was disabled.

I have other problems with fleets:
1) The last ship to leave my frigate factory was staying right next to the frigate factory but was joining the fleet. Moving the fleet then moved the frigate, but after the movement was over, it went back to the frigate factory...??!?!?!?!
2) You can't select the fleet leader and I would like this to be the Cap Ship when it is included rather than it sometimes randomly choosing some other ship.

You can select the fleet leader. Select the fleet, then hit TAB to cycle through the ships within the fleet (the selection circle will be slightly brighter for the current "lead" ship), or SHIFT-TAB to cycle backwards. Then click the create fleet button again to set the leader to the currently selected ship. You could also accomplish this by clicking on the specific ship you want, then shift-selecting the rest of the ships - I believe this leaves the original one as the current focus within the group.

As for auto-join fleet - I believe (I haven't tested this) that it's a ship designation, rather than a fleet designation. By which I mean, if the *ship* has auto-join fleet turned on, it will auto-join fleets, but they setting for the fleet has no effect (other than meaning that, if you were to disband that fleet, all of the ships within would no longer auto-join fleets, as they would have it turned off). This does make sense logically, but it makes it a bit clumsy in practice, I think. Unless there's a factory setting so that all ships produced at that factory will have auto-join either on or off (again, I haven't checked), you'd have to micromanage, anyway.

Yeah, I don't recommend the shift-selection, especially with large groups. It's very literal - if you select half the ships, then hold shift and drag a box over all of the ships, it will deselect the first half and select only the second half. Which can be good, I suppose, but it can be quite a pain when trying to create a fleet properly. Combine that with the clumsy separation of fleets and "groups," and I've given up on trying to have meaningful fleet logistics.

Of course, tabbing through 160 ships would be a pain, as well.

Hm, actually, I've just remembered another way to do it. Find the ship you want to lead, remove it from the fleet, select it, then hold shift and click on the fleet icon. Then click the create fleet button again. Not absolutely sure you need to remove it from the fleet. Actually, you *may* be able to select the specific ship, then select the fleet by clicking on the tab (or using the group number - this is what I tend to do, but it can be inaccurate, since auto-join fleet doesn't auto-join group), then reform the fleet. Basically just look for the brighter selection circle, and that'll be the leader if you reform the fleet.

I'd like to see a simple and easy way to change a fleet's lead ship as well. Tabbing through and recreating the fleet is fine for very small groups but when you have a big fleet going then it becomes a pain. You shouldn't have to be doing multiple selections and multiple combinations of keys either. This gets even more annoying if you're trying to split up into several fleets.

The addition of a simple "Make fleet leader" icon would be very nice!