Using ship components from within a fleet
 

Hi,

Great game. I actually took a couple of days off from work to play it.

How do use an individual ship's components (i.e. the emergency supply pod) when a ship is in a fleet? I had to keep removing ships from the fleet, use a ship's component one at a time, then put them back in the fleet. It would be nice if you could hightlight a ship in a fleet and have the Use Component icon in the toolbar activate. But maybe I missed something.

I was using a possibly cheesy tactic. I built a 'Tanker' Cruiser which has a lot of extra supply capacity and emergency supply pods(only 10k in size). Since fleets pool their supplies, one of these could keep a fleet supplied for a long time. I say it was cheesy because I could go on deep raids into enemy territory without having to worry about the AI targeting the tanker. A human probably would, though, which would strand the fleet. In addition, I was able to bypass AI satellites defending warp points by simply staying out of their range. I think you should have to defeat all enemy units/ships before traversing a warp point.

One Last question. What setting is everyone using for a very hard game? So far, on high difficulty with equal starting points and no computer bonuses, I can win fairly easily. Propulsion experts, high research and high space yard rate is a lethal combo agains the AI.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance,

Jeff.

Re: Using ship components from within a fleet
 

I used the "tanker" approach before, but I find far better success with researching "Stellar Harnessing" (I think) and got some solar collectors. Outfit your tanker with these and not Supply units. You would be amazed at how fast a cruiser with Solar Collector III's on board can fill up a fleet when parking for 2-3 turns in a trinary star system!!!!

As for the emergency pods - I never use 'em so I don't know how they work in SE4. Used to use 'em in SE3 but since they (SE4) have solar collectors as an early tech in SE4, I haven't even bothered with 'em. I only research Resupply to get to the Quantum Reactor.