Selecting ships?

[water]

Does anyone known why you can't select multiple ships at one by dragging a box around them and then tell them to do something. You can tell them to move, but you can't just right click for them to attack, or tell them to patrol something. The only way, as far as I can tell, to tell multiple ships to do something easily is to have them in a fleet and select the fleet.

[smidlee]

The answer is 42.