Fleets carry your power beyond your planets. Every ship you build waits in the hangar of its planet until you send it out. You dispatch fleets from the Fleet page or directly from the system view: pick the ships, a target and a mission. Everything after that runs on the server, so missions also complete while you are offline.
The seven missions
Which missions you can choose depends on the target:
- Deploy - move ships to one of your own planets. They stay there, together with any cargo they carry.
- Transport - deliver resources to any inhabited planet, your own or a foreign one. The full cargo is unloaded, even above the target's storage capacity, and the fleet returns empty.
- Colonize - settle a free planet with a Seedship. See Colonies.
- Attack - fight a foreign colony and take loot. See Combat.
- Espionage - scout a foreign colony with Pathfinder Probes. See Espionage.
- Mining - mine an asteroid field or a nebula with Prospectors. See Mining.
- Salvage - collect a debris field with Reclaimers. See Salvage.
Attack and Espionage are the only hostile missions. They are blocked against members of your own alliance and while you or the target are under new player protection.
Flight time and speed
Fleets fly directly to their target, there are no jump gates. A fleet is only as fast as its slowest ship, so a single Reclaimer slows down a whole squadron of Wasp Interceptors.
- Flight time grows with the square root of distance divided by speed. Doubling the speed therefore does not halve the flight, and even a short hop inside your own system takes a few minutes.
- Every ship uses one of three drives. Each level of Drift Drive adds 10 percent speed to ships with that drive, Ion Propulsion 20 percent and Warp Theory 30 percent.
- Haulers, probes, the Wasp Interceptor, Prospector and Reclaimer use Drift Drive. Corvettes, frigates and the Seedship use Ion Propulsion. The Bastion Cruiser and Sovereign Dreadnought use Warp Theory.
- All flight times scale with the universe speed of your server.
Cargo
Every ship has a cargo hold, and Cargo Logistics raises the capacity of all ships by 5 percent per level. A Skiff Hauler carries 5,000 resources, a Bulk Freighter 25,000. You cannot load more than the fleet holds or more than the planet has in stock. Espionage, Mining and Salvage fleets always start with an empty hold.
Fleet slots
The number of fleets you can have underway at the same time is limited. You start with 2 fleet slots. Each level of the research Fleet Coordination adds one slot, and so does each level of the building Fleet Command on the planet the fleet starts from. A fleet occupies its slot until it is back home, including the time it spends mining at a deposit.
Recall and return
As long as a fleet is still on its way out, you can recall it. It turns around on the spot and needs exactly as long to get back as it had already flown. A mining fleet can also be recalled during its stay and brings home what it has mined so far.
Sensors
Foreign fleets are not always visible. Each of your colonies watches a sensor range of 80 map units, plus 20 per level of Deep Scan. Fleets heading for one of your own planets are always shown. Allies share what their colonies see, see Alliances.
Tips
- Keep slow ships out of fast fleets unless you really need them.
- Research Fleet Coordination early - two slots fill up quickly once you mine and transport at the same time.
- Use Transport to move resources to the colony where you are building instead of waiting for local production.