A lot of Beginner Player Questions

[Starfry]

Check the quality of the caslon gas your extracting from the gas giant. IF it is low, the resuplly ship needs time to fill the tanks and the wierd behaviour is the ships going to refual only to see that there is not enough to go around.

[turtlefang]

Also check the number of docking bays on the resupply ship. If it has too few, the excess ships will "exit, stage left" to the nearest fuel source if ordered to refuel.

Mining ships, and resupply ships, exact gas at 1/2 the rate of a gas mining station, so it takes them a lot longer to fill up. The advantage is that you can refill them at different places but on a big ship, it takes a long time. So a resupply ship is usually good to resupply a big fleet about once, then it takes a long time to refill. So if you are relying on one mining ship, you can end up with an offense that literally grinds to a halt way out of range of a refueling station and the resupply ship takes forever to refuel (take if from the guy who has made this mistake a couple of times).

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: turtlefang

Also check the number of docking bays on the resupply ship. If it has too few, the excess ships will "exit, stage left" to the nearest fuel source if ordered to refuel.

Since when? I have never noticed a fleet heading off to different fuel sources. If there is not enough fuel, ships and new fleets (and ships) getting refuel orders may head off to far away sources, though. If you tell a giant fleet to refuel at a gas mine, they will happily wait in line.

With multiple fleets in the area, the excessive reservations of refueling ships/fleets may give issues. Until they have refueled they will reserve their full fuel capacity, even if they only miss 10% fuel. This could leave some ships out of fuel even if there was enough fuel for them all. That happens if one of the first ships to arrive was among the last ships to reserve their fuel.

The large reservations also means it may make sense to manually order another fleet to refuel there (by clicking the resupply ship) if another fleet is already incoming on refuel order, and the fleet in questions wants to head off for a remote fuel source. Unless the fleets are very low on fuel, there is likely to be enough fuel for both.

Resupply ships are lovely, and mine always got fuel. Probably because I fill them before they travel to their locations during war. And because I deploy more than one if I have lots of fleets in the area.

[turtlefang]

Bingleling -

Ships wait at a mining station or spaceport for refueling. But for some reason, they will leave a resupply ship and I have had fleets split when told to refuel at a resupply ship. The number of ships that leave seem to be tied to the number of docking bays at the resupply ships.

Not sure why this happens but I have observed it several times.

[MoloMowChow]

Cool, I as a result of learning how resupply ships work I learned how to use the Ships & Bases browser better.

Still having the Fleet Retrofit problem and having to command them to retrofit manually via the Ships & Bases browser though, unfortunately. It seems in general my retrofitting via fleet commands aren't going for the latest designs but old obsolete designs from 1 or 2 iterations back, even the AI automatically managed ones.

Something I noticed about the Colonies screen is that there are various policies for the colony populations. I feel the urge to play like "Glorious Human Master race, Exterminatus all the Xenos." What are the details on what each policy does? Exterminate seems self explanatory but what about the others like enslave or resettle? Do they move to other colonies in your empire or move to other AI empires? What are the pros and cons?

For some reason almost all of my researcher characters spawn as Foreign spies or get the Foreign spy trait later on. I also got hit with economic crisis twice. I am ahead in probably both research and economy so could that have something to do with it or is it just a coincidence.

It seems getting rid of pirates for good is a bit more annoying then I thought. I usually steal their territory/galaxy maps then wipe out their bases. But it seems that somehow they manage to set up a base soon after somewhere else and continue their assaults. I assume it's because they somehow have a construction ship alive but it seems every pirate I try to eradicate has spare resources everywhere. Do I just have to tough it out and keep stealing territory maps?

[invaderzim]

Mining ships, and resupply ships, exact gas at 1/2 the rate of a gas mining station, so it takes them a lot longer to fill up. The advantage is that you can refill them at different places but on a big ship, it takes a long time. So a resupply ship is usually good to resupply a big fleet about once, then it takes a long time to refill. So if you are relying on one mining ship, you can end up with an offense that literally grinds to a halt way out of range of a refueling station and the resupply ship takes forever to refuel (take if from the guy who has made this mistake a couple of times).

Do resupply ships extract at 1/2 the speed of gas mining stations even if they have the same number of extractors? Also how many cargo bays do you like to have on them?

I tried cutting the cargo bays down 1 thinking gas mining stations would use the planet for storage, but this didn't work and they just filled up at 650 and stopped working.

But then I went back to the AI standard of 20 cargo bays (13,000 capacity) and they filled up to around 11,000 hydrogen, 6,000 argon, 6,000 caslon and 5,000 helium using 4 extractors and they just keep mining. The game started in 2250, so it's been 7 months. The only problem now is getting the materials to a star port since the AI only transports it at about 600 units per trip.

[FerretStyle]

Still having the Fleet Retrofit problem and having to command them to retrofit manually via the Ships & Bases browser though, unfortunately. It seems in general my retrofitting via fleet commands aren't going for the latest designs but old obsolete designs from 1 or 2 iterations back, even the AI automatically managed ones.

The AI never deletes old designs. I'd strongly suggest pruning your design screen yourself (set it to show all designs) and delete every obsolete design and anything that's been updated that's not currently in use. It's work, but that screen is important and it's nice to not have it cluttered when you do need it.

Something I noticed about the Colonies screen is that there are various policies for the colony populations. I feel the urge to play like "Glorious Human Master race, Exterminatus all the Xenos." What are the details on what each policy does? Exterminate seems self explanatory but what about the others like enslave or resettle? Do they move to other colonies in your empire or move to other AI empires? What are the pros and cons?

This is explained thoroughly in the galactopedia, but to summarize:
Resettle: transports them off of the colony to any that will accept them, prioritizing penal colonies.
Enslave: turns that colony into a penal colony, sets growth of those races to zero and gives a boost to money earned.
Exterminate: kills off those races.

Enslave and exterminate will piss off any AI that belong to their respective race.

For some reason almost all of my researcher characters spawn as Foreign spies or get the Foreign spy trait later on. I also got hit with economic crisis twice. I am ahead in probably both research and economy so could that have something to do with it or is it just a coincidence.

I've never seen that trait. What does it do?

It seems getting rid of pirates for good is a bit more annoying then I thought. I usually steal their territory/galaxy maps then wipe out their bases. But it seems that somehow they manage to set up a base soon after somewhere else and continue their assaults. I assume it's because they somehow have a construction ship alive but it seems every pirate I try to eradicate has spare resources everywhere. Do I just have to tough it out and keep stealing territory maps?

Maps don't show you pirate ship locations, not even galaxy maps. If you destroy a pirate faction's bases their ships will sometimes just idle around, possibly even in deep space making them hard to find.

I've got a game with about 15 pirate factions that have no bases, no leaders and no ships that I've been able to find. I'm researching the best long-range scanners in an attempt to locate them with a network of monitoring stations.

[MoloMowChow]

ORIGINAL: FerretStyle

For some reason almost all of my researcher characters spawn as Foreign spies or get the Foreign spy trait later on. I also got hit with economic crisis twice. I am ahead in probably both research and economy so could that have something to do with it or is it just a coincidence.

I've never seen that trait. What does it do?

It makes any other faction's steal research attempts on you gain a massive success rate, according to its description.

Not sure how high a rate though, no other faction was brave enough to launch research intelligence missions on me before I learned how to dismiss characters and promptly fired them all.

Also, I did try deleting all the obsolete designs. The problem is that once it reaches the current obsolete design it's using, I can'ty delete it cause it's currently used by the ships. Whenever they retrofit they don't change to the latest design but stay on their current design.