Matrix Games Forums

When I build ships, some of them take it upon themselves to embark on missions, such as patrolling outlying systems, etc.

How do I stop this?

How do I start this?

Thanks.

I believe they automatically receive (a)utomate. You can turn it on/off by selecting ship and pressing a. I believe currently you can't set 'what state' they're built in

The thing I did, was every message I could, I enambeled them. i am glad I did this, because one of them is when a ship is constructed. So when the message appears that a new ship is built, I pause the game, and double click on the message (the pic on the right side of the screen when it pops up) and it centers it to the ship. Then I make shure I click on the ship, (yes I know it should already be done, but I have a habit on clicking empty space and then deselect the ship) and tell it to go to any area on the map. This clears all orders (at least I think it does) and then give it what ever orders I want it to do.

I hope this helps a bit.

It's very useful for patrolling ships though, and I build a lot of beefed up escorts for that role. Those I almost always want immediately out patrolling. However ships of frigate size and larger I want formed into fleets under my personal control for raiding and defending against raids.

The Heavy Escorts can handle a single pirate ship fairly well, so no need to take them off automation.

That's pretty much what I do: leave the smaller ships on automate and let them escort, and take manual control of a fleet or two to take care of larger problems.

I don't think you can. If I want to use them in a fleet. (most of my bigger ships always end up in fleets) I just open up my ship list and add them that way.

That takes them off automode and they will go to the fleet once you tell the fleet to refuel or go to homebase or something.

Works good, good way to marshall them all up too.

The simplest way to manage this right now is to watch the messages. Once you get a message that some of your bigger military ships are finished building, go into the ships and bases screen, filter by Military Ships, sort by ship type and just click on the right column to turn off automation for everything larger than an Escort. Adding an option to allow some ships to not be automated after they are built is a request we have heard and would like to do.

Actually the easiest way I have found is to group the ships into a fleet before they are built.