Foreign ships join us & tank our economy

[twent]

Hi all,

First of all, I would like to thank the developers - it is a nice game, I am enjoying it a lot.

Second of all, thank you Scott for the YouTube mechanics & playthrough playlists and the PDF guide.

Last but not least, the matter at hand...
I have an issue, and I am hoping someone can help me showing an easier way or a setting I (hopefully!) missed somewhere.

SITUATION: After bombarding and destroying the last planet of another empire, I get a screen which reads: "Foreign ships join us. After eliminating the <EMPIRE NAME> some of their ships have decided to join our empire (696 ships)".
I see that bulk of their ships are freighters, say 450 out of 700. I have been scuttling them.

QUESTION 1: One issue is why did this happen? I do not want their ships. Can I do anything to REFUSE them joining us?
I should add: I thought/assumed the setting: "Policy > Military > Enlist Civilian Ship = Never" would have helped me NOT ENLIST these ships after the war but clearly it does not help with that because my setting is set to NEVER and they still "joined us".

QUESTION 2: These (or other) CIVILIAN ships - if I want to bulk delete hundreds or thousands of them, is there no quick way?

My issue with scuttling is, it appears, I can scuttle one at a time so it is a waste of time problem (not fun) and also a potential repetitive strain injury problem (not healthy & painful).
What I have been doing is a clickfest, just to delete just ONE ship.
Then, it is repeated about 1600+ times in the last 2 hours in my playthrough (that is, for the 4x empires I fought & killed so far, with ~400+ ships each).
After killing the last planet, what I do is, to get rid of the excess ship maintenance cost, pause the game & scuttle all their ships immediately.
To do this, I go to the CIVILIAN menu option, then FREIGHTERS subsection.
Then comes the clickfest:
1) Click on ship name to highlight/select it.
2) Click on "Scuttle" button.
3) Click on "Scuttle Ship?" confirmation box.
(Side note & feedback to the developer: to me, it looks like an "action button". While it sits under a question popup window, the button itself is not a question (onClick, it triggers an action) therefore the button should not have a question mark - just the words "Scuttle Ship" should be adequate).
So that is, 3 mouse clicks + plus some mouse movement, all that effort then multiplied 400 times in one go, 1600 times mid campaign in a few hours is a lot of effort for me.
Is there a bulk deletion option/mod/save game file text edit method etc.?

Thank you, in advance.

[MaximKI]

Thanks for the post.

To respond to some of your points, it's intended that the AI should auto-scuttle ships that it believes it doesn't need. If you see a situation where the AI is clearly not doing this, definitely upload a save showing the situation.

Regarding mass scuttling - we're intending to include a new feature in an upcoming update that will allow users to mass scuttle, so do look out for that.

[Foraven]

Thanks for the post.

To respond to some of your points, it's intended that the AI should auto-scuttle ships that it believes it doesn't need. If you see a situation where the AI is clearly not doing this, definitely upload a save showing the situation.

Regarding mass scuttling - we're intending to include a new feature in an upcoming update that will allow users to mass scuttle, so do look out for that.

The AI should but clearly doesn't for the player's Empire. Had the same issue as the OP but with pirate ships and stations after I won them over destroying hive ships. I had to manually get rid of them and it took a long time.

[Jorgen_CAB]

As far as I remember there was a way to mass scuttle ships before, or that might just have been civilian ships. My memory might not be accurate though. Not sure it was removed because people just scuttled allot of civilian ships to get access to the civilian cash when they built new ships.

That still is a pretty big exploit you can do, but when you need to individually scuttle every ship you are not inclined to do that very often.

Genrally I think a mass scuttle of ships should exist. If people want to exploit the game it is their business as this is not multi-player game anyway.