Fleets

A fleet is a group of your ships flying somewhere. Ships parked on a planet are not a fleet. They become one the moment you send them out, and they stop being one when they land again.

Everything a fleet does is a mission: attack, espionage, transport, deploy, harvest, fleet save, group defend, colonization and the Warp Gate jump. You pick the mission first, then the destination, then the ships.

Fleet slots

You can only have so many fleets out at once. The number is your A.I. Tech level plus one, and it covers your whole account rather than each planet. Ten planets do not give you ten fleets.

Things that take a slot:

• Every mission you dispatch from the Fleets page.
• Every mission you start on the Missions page. Starting the same mission five times at once costs five slots, not one.
• Joining somebody else's group attack.
• Deploying a Hephaestus Class Attack Platform, and moving or docking one that is already out there.

Things that do not:

• Ships sitting at home.
• Missile strikes. Missiles are not fleets, even though they turn up in the same list.
• Fleets other players send at you, and defenders other players send to you.

A slot stays busy for the whole round trip, not just the way out. Deploy is the one exception, because those ships stay where they land, so the slot comes free on arrival. A Warp Gate jump needs a free slot to start but only holds it for five seconds. Cancelling does not give a slot back either. It turns the fleet around, and you get the slot when it lands.

When every slot is busy the game simply stops you. The Dispatch Fleet button goes dead, missions show No Fleets instead of Start, and anything else comes back with "No available fleet slots".

The Fleets page

Fleets is the command screen for everything moving in or out of your account, across every planet you own. That is why the counter in the corner reads the same wherever you see it, on Fleets, on Galaxy, on Missions or on Overview.

The panel at the top lists each fleet with a progress bar, a countdown, the route and the ships in it. Both legs of a trip get their own row. A raid on a neighbour shows as an Attack row and an Attack Return row even though it is one fleet holding one slot, which is why the list is usually longer than the counter above it.

It is not only your own outgoing ships. The same panel also shows:

• Missions you started on the Missions page, listed under their own names.
• Missile strikes you have launched.
• Attacks and spy probes flying at you, in red.
• Missiles flying at you.
• Group defend fleets your allies have sent to your planets.

Incoming rows are read only. You cannot cancel somebody else's fleet.

The buttons on the right depend on what the fleet is doing:

• Cancel turns an outgoing fleet around.
• Withdraw pulls you out of an attack, and Formation opens the group so you can see who else is coming and invite more people.
• Recall shows up on a group defend fleet once it has landed and is hovering, so you can bring your defenders home before their time is up.
• Return legs have no buttons at all. Once a fleet is heading home you cannot stop it.

The missions

Mission	Where it can go	What it needs	Comes home
Colonization	An empty slot	A Gaia Class Colony Ship	Only if it fails
Transport	One of your own planets	Anything that moves	Yes
Deploy	One of your own planets	Anything that moves	No, the ships stay
Attack	Another player's planet or moon	Anything that moves	Yes
Espionage	Any occupied slot	Probes, and nothing else	Yes, apart from the Shadow Probe
Harvest	A slot with a debris field	A recycler	Yes
Fleet Save	Any slot	A recycler	Yes
Group Defend	An ally or buddy planet	Anything that moves	Yes, after the wait
Warp Gate	Another of your own moons	A Warp Gate on both moons	One way, five seconds

A few things the table cannot say in one line:

• Colonization. If the slot is still empty when you arrive, exactly one colony ship is used up and every other ship in the fleet stays at the new colony. If somebody beat you to it, or you are already at ten planets, the whole fleet comes home with the cargo.
• Espionage. Probes only. The game will not let you slip a fighter in. A Shadow Probe goes one at a time, never mixed with Hermes, and does not come back.
• Fleet Save is the harvest mission with the ship list opened up to your whole fleet, so it still needs at least one recycler in it. Send it without one and you get "A Recycler Ship is required for harvest". See Fleet / Resource Saving.
• Group Defend. You set how long the fleet sits over the target, one hour to twenty four, and the hovering costs extra hydrogen that is paid up front with the rest of the fuel.
• Transport and Deploy only go to your own planets. There is no way to hand ships or resources to another player.
• Warp Gate only appears as a mission when you are on a moon that has a Warp Gate, and the moon you are jumping to needs one too.
• Platform missions are dispatched from the Galaxy screen and the platform's own controls, not from the Fleet Dispatch panel.

Sending a fleet

There are two ways in. The first is the Fleet Dispatch panel on the Fleets page. Pick the mission, type the coordinates or click one of your own planets, then fill in the ships.

The Summary box does the sums as you go: distance, flight time, hydrogen, and how much cargo you have loaded against how much the selected ships can carry. Nothing is spent until you press the button, and the button stays dead until the fleet is legal.

Put a number followed by m in the third coordinate box, like 5m, to aim at the moon in that slot instead of the planet.

The other way is the Actions column on the Galaxy screen. Each icon starts the matching mission with the target already filled in, which is much quicker for spying, raiding and picking up debris. Icons you cannot use are greyed out, and hovering one tells you why.

The eye icon is a one click spy. It sends the number of probes you set under Settings, Espionage, without opening a form at all. Set that count to zero and the eye opens the normal espionage form instead. The Oracle on a moon can fire the same one click spy straight off a scan result.

Speed and fuel

A fleet travels at the speed of its slowest ship, and you choose what share of that speed to use, anywhere from 5% to 100% in steps of 5. Slower is a longer trip but a much cheaper one. Hydrogen comes off the departure planet when the fleet launches, and the trip home is free.

Here is the same fleet on the same trip at different settings. Twenty five Hercules Class Cargo going from 1:2:8 to 1:2:11, a distance of 1,015:

Speed	Flight time	Hydrogen
100%	22:58	145
75%	30:36	112
50%	45:51	82
25%	1h 31m 36s	57
10%	3h 48m 51s	44
5%	7h 37m 37s	40

Half speed doubles the trip and saves about 43% of the fuel. That trade is why long raids and long transports rarely go out at full speed.

Those times belong to one particular pilot. Drive techs raise a ship's speed, so the same fleet on the same route lands sooner for a player with better engines. The distance, time and fuel formulas are all on Starfleet Universe.

Warp Gate is the odd one out. It is a flat five seconds and it burns no hydrogen at all, whatever you load into it.

Recalling a fleet

Cancel only works while a fleet is still outgoing. Once it arrives it does whatever you sent it to do. The exception is a group defend fleet, which you can Recall at any point while it is hovering over the planet it went to protect.

The flight home takes exactly as long as the fleet has already been flying. Recall a minute after launch and it is back in a minute. Recall five minutes before it lands and you are looking at most of the outward trip all over again. Ships and cargo come back. The hydrogen does not.

Warp Gate jumps cannot be cancelled, and they are over in five seconds anyway.

How big can a fleet be

There is no limit on the number of ships in one fleet. You can load everything on the planet into it if you want. What actually stops you is what is standing on that planet, because a fleet is built only from ships already there, and the hydrogen on that planet, because the fuel comes off before the fleet leaves.

The rules that do apply:

• At least one ship, and at least one that can move. Ships that cannot move, like the Helios Class Solar Satellite, never appear in the ship list at all.
• Cargo cannot go over the total cargo space of the ships you picked. Fuel is separate and does not eat into it.
• Attacks carry no cargo. The ore, crystal and hydrogen boxes are simply not there on an attack.
• Espionage takes probes and nothing else.
• Missions started on the Missions page come with a fixed ship list. You cannot pad them out.

Group fleets

Two missions let several players arrive together. A group attack holds up to seven fleets and a group defend allows up to six on the same planet. Everyone taking part spends one of their own slots, and joining somebody else's group works the same as sending your own fleet.