Figured it out

For some reason influence areas are not displaying on the main map. No idea where to start.

Sounds like you may have expanded to fast. Check the income for each colony make sure it's positive. A net negative income on new colonies especially at the beginning of the game can create a real drag on your econemy

After you place a build order open the ships screen. The ships in yellow are under construction; select the ships want to place in the same fleet on the fleet drop down then pick the fleet. You can create a new fleet using this screen.

<t> I got this dump when zooming in. Loaded last autosave game an error occured at the same.<br/>
Distant Worlds - Crash Dump - 1.9.5.0<br/>
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8:59:13 AM Monday, May 26, 2014<br/>
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System.InvalidOperationException: Object is currently in use elsewhere.<br/>
at System.Drawing ...

Thanks for the suggestions. I usually control one or two fleets myself and let the other fleets do the suggest missions attacks.

How do you manage fleet size? Seems like every time mission is suggested the fleet is to small and ends up getting waxed by the enemy.

I had a bad time with DW until I watched LPs. I recommend Larry Monte's micromanagement he slows the game down so you can see whats going on. After watching them the learning curve for the game flattened out.

Stars! was the first 4X game I ever played.

Reinstalled DW and ROTS again everything is worrkin g fine

Uploaded zip file:ScreenGameFileDesc.zip. The file includes screen print and short description of what happens just before the error.