#675 enemy ships run away instead of fight

[Anonymous]

while on a patrol and clean sweep mission the enemy ships that i needed to kill to complete the mission just kept running away or flying around but not wanting to mix it up. i chased that dam ship all over the place for an eternity but he always kept a distance of 20 - 50 kilometers. i spent all the credits that i had to upgrade my ship and the enemy ships just kept running away. i finally got fed up and was forced to abort the mission. i feel that the game AI was cheating.

[Turbo Beholder]

Not really. AI just doesn't want to be killed =)))
They don't cheat other than lack of collision test due to lack of fast collision avoidance (currently).

Which version, which ships (or rather, their ship and your main thruust from ship info)?
If they are faster and don't SPEC all the time, try missiles - 20-50 km is well in range.
If the target is slow enough, but SPEC is the problem, pin it between your ship and interdicting mass (station or planet). If it's a pirate or luddite, almost everyone hates them, and you're still paid for ally kills, so baiting or chasing them into a heavily armed station or capship usually does the job quickly.

But yes, it's possible that you have enough of thrust AND adequate warp caps, but can't catch them because SPEC allows them to get away. It's mostly bad default parameters in autopilot behaviour and warp interdiction. Manual SPEC kind of helps, though it's still very inconvenient.
But interdiction by 3rd party should work even then.
As a stopgap solution, try to spam insults until the other guy wants to fight.