A few Newb questions

[warzer]

1. Any way to fleet up all ships in an area easily?
I have been just trying to use the dragnet select on the main screen but that does not work so well.

2. Can resupply ships resupply themselves?
I notice that my resupply ship keeps going back to base when it has a cargo hold full of fuel from being deployed on the border if my empire. I seem to be treating them as mini-stations and putting them on frontier worlds until they can get some kind of defense. Doesn't help much when it fly's halfway to the center of my empire to get gas.

3. Does the Resupply ship need to be deployed to refuel other ships? if it has a commerce station can it trade the fuel?

4. What is the star base supposed to be used for?

5. Stances. What do they actually do? Example I know standoff stays at max range assuming the longest range weapons equipped. no idea what all weapons do or how that compares with point blank. How do any of the stances affect stations and immobile objects?

5a. how does the ship/station determine if the what its attacking is strong or weak to use a different stance?

6. ship/station design question. would it be better to use lots of variation in weapons or only pick a few and more of them?

7. what is the logic behind constructor automation? I am noticing it likes to go to the middle of know where to building mining stations instead of the many in my empire.

Thanks for any help and suggestions
Warzer

[Jim D Burns]

I’ll try and answer some of these.

1. Any way to fleet up all ships in an area easily?
I have been just trying to use the dragnet select on the main screen but that does not work so well.

Select them all and right click over one of the ships you have selected and you should have an option to form a new fleet, add them to a fleet, or remove them from an existing fleet. You can select them by dragging a box around them, or you can double click a ship and all ships of that class on screen get selected.

2. Can resupply ships resupply themselves?
I notice that my resupply ship keeps going back to base when it has a cargo hold full of fuel from being deployed on the border if my empire. I seem to be treating them as mini-stations and putting them on frontier worlds until they can get some kind of defense. Doesn't help much when it fly's halfway to the center of my empire to get gas.

If it can (can’t remember for sure) resupply itself I think it needs to be deployed to resupply itself. You can get it to stay deployed by giving it no target, no base and defend target orders (buttons along bottom row of bottom left window).

3. Does the Resupply ship need to be deployed to refuel other ships? if it has a commerce station can it trade the fuel?

Yes it only serves as a gas station once deployed. Not sure about commerce station, think only bases can use those, not ships.

4. What is the star base supposed to be used for?

Default design is basically a forward listening post with scanners. Deploy it in empty systems behind enemy lines to get scanner coverage of an area around it. Lots of players like to use it as their cutom base and use it for any number of different tasks depending on players styles.

6. ship/station design question. would it be better to use lots of variation in weapons or only pick a few and more of them?

It really depends on what you are facing. A lot of one type of weapon can easily be countered but can be devastating if the enemy isn’t set up to counter it. You could literally have a multi page discussion thread about design and tactics. I’m sure a few forum searches here will reveal many past in depth discussions on this topic, just make sure you use the pull down near the top of the forum to display all topics before your search instead of the forums default 365 day setting or you won’t search through all there is to find here.

7. what is the logic behind constructor automation? I am noticing it likes to go to the middle of know where to building mining stations instead of the many in my empire.

Dev would have to answer this as the AI choices are a mystery to me. Perhaps some of the modders have found ways to change behavior and may comment as well.

Jim

[Spacecadet]

5 - I think All Weapons fires differing ranged weapons as they reach their range.
Point Blank is possibly waiting until the shortest range is reached, or closer.

5a - Firepower seems to be the determining factor.

7 - This may be a combination of your Empires needs, what you've explored, and resource richness.

[warzer]

ok, so for stances if i want it to fire all weapons as they come into range then all weapons would be the choice?

one more

8. How much cargo is enough? how much space does one unit of raw materials and gas take up?
I just noticed a captured pirate base has a cargo hold of 5200 and yet it has about 300,000 units of cargo so far.
so i am guessing my large freighter that has 10,000 cargo capacity is overkill for anything.

[Bingeling]

I do not think there is a default star base design. If you need a new type of base in space, this one is up for grabs.

As for "fleeting" up multiple ships. If you want to put all ships in a system in a fleet, there is always the ship list. Filter on military ships, note the system. Sort on system, and it should be easy to spot if there are lots of military ships in it. Select all the ships inside with a click and a shift-click. Set fleet.

I do a lot of my fleet management in the ship list...