At present the biters don't attack non military building unless they are in the pathing way. In an ideal world a way to set distraction on the unit control would be nice. Or atleast the biters attacking miners etc when no military targets.

You can tell them to attack directly by selecting the entities using the 'Attack move' tool.

Also setting them to 'scout', they are distracted by all (In latest unit control), so will attack all player entities.

oh so thats why scouting units attacked rails after wondering down them a bit. They scouted a distance to their target position, then got distracted by everything?

Distraction for 'everything' only happens something like every 301 ticks, so they wander a while then check