Yes, indeed! LOAD and UNLOAD work on fleets. Unload, of course, can only unload what is already there. But if you load a fleet, it will fill up each ship to capacity before moving on to the next one, so you can't use it to put only 10 PI each in a fleet of 30-bay cargo ships.
BTW, if you get to the point where you have a large attack fleet that uses lots of missiles then you'll probably want to carry plenty of reloads with you, and that usually means a whole flock of individual cargo ships in your fleet that you'd load at once with a single command. Reloading the warships' missile bays after combat from this group supply is also a fleet-based order.
Correct -- Join, then Unload, then Develop. All these operations prior to actually moving the ships are done in the order they are encountered. So first you make sure they're treated as a unit, then make sure they're empty, then load the PI necessary to carry out the Develop orders.
If you'd like more detail about the order in which things happen in a turn, check out my article on turn sequence on p18 of S&D issue #14 (or the copy on my web site).
Actually, it does. If you really need to do something weird that doesn't make very much sense (e.g. load something, then unload it, then load something different), then fix the ordering to be what you need after you use the sorting facility. But I've never seen the auto-sort get things out of order for any typical play that I've run across.
I thought I'd offer up a little advice... Making lots of production centers increases your productivity, but strategically it also (a) makes your empire harder to defend, and (b) makes it harder to build large warfleets.
You've apparently downloaded GTac, too. Have you had a chance to play with much of it yet?
I mainly use it for validating/sorting orders and designing ships.
I looked at the maps etc, but found a spreadsheet with exact distances between PCs/Home more useful economically. In a war scenario that may be different.
Thanks for the tip.
I'm considering either downgrading some of my production systems back to colonies after I go tech 2, yeah it produces more *raw* PI, but not much usable PI unless I want to spend all the little bits on research, and employing a more hub and spoke system.
Is there any issues keeping fleets in deep space in between two production systems/home systems so they are both within 1 turn movement?
I'm glad you're finding GTac of some use! Have you tried double-clicking on a star on the map? It shows you a lot of information about the star, including exact distances to everywhere else. It also shows a history of everything that's ever happened at that location, a list of ships located there, and another list of ships that can reach there in one turn (based on the speed of each ship). On either list of ships, you can right-click a ship and issue it an order directly from the map.
Of course, an overview of where all your ships and stars are located in visual 2-D is handy, especially when you're managing war fleets, and you can customize the map to look however you want and show whatever you want to see on it (including the ability to "program" conditions). (Don't forget to save customizations that you want to re-use -- they'll update automatically every turn.)
There's also an Empire Status Report that gives you lots of summary information, like how much PI you've got coming into each location or a list of all your shuttle routes and whether there are any problems with them or not (missing or undersized ships, cross-linked routes, etc.) -- very handy for optimizing your income.
While you're entering orders, you'd probably like to bring up a Cash Flow report next to your order entry list. As you type in your orders it dynamically shows you how much PI you've got left to spend at each production center, so you don't run out of PI unexpectedly.
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Is there any issues keeping fleets in deep space in between two production systems/home systems so they are both within 1 turn movement?
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That's actually a really good plan in some ways. It means your defensive fleets can be bigger because they can be in one place instead of two. Of course, there's a catch strategically (like most things in Galac-Tac). Think about what you're defending against. You might generalize an attack fleet into one of three groups -- let's call them small, medium, and large.
A small attack would be something that's not of any concern to a PC. It might be made by an exploratory scout or a few small combat ships that are expecting just a colony. A small platform would have no trouble fending off such things.
A medium attack means something significant, say in the vicinity of a fleet size similar to (or a little smaller than) what you'd be defending with.
A large attack would be a much larger fleet than your defenses, and you'd have no hope unless you had reinforcements from elsewhere.
Let's look at the defense-fleet location in terms of these situations. Small doesn't matter either way.
A medium attack fleet means you might well be able to fight them off (more-or-less) if you kept your defense fleet in-system, but if your fleet is out-system then what you've left there is going to die. That means your static platforms and patrol ships, plus all of your cargo ships (and their PV) are going to be lost, along with all the actions, time and cost it will take to replace them. That's the main drawback to out-system fleets, but if you're willing to take that risk then it's a good idea.
For a large attack fleet, you're not going to win the initial battle anyway. Your only choices there are to give up that system to the enemy (not an option for your home world) or to collect all your available ships and counter-attack with everything that can reach there within two turns (and hope he doesn't reinforce, too). If your defense fleet is out-system, then they (a) won't be lost in the initial attack and (b) can participate in the counter-attack. Losing your whole defense fleet in the initial attack is the main disadvantage to keeping them all in-system.