1. Couple of possibilities: If you have a treaty with a race, your ships/planets can pass or coexist without starting battle.
Also, if your ship doesn't have weapons, it will just run for the corners. Plus, each weapon is specific to what kind of targets it can hit. Missles, for example, only hit Ships or Planets, not Satellites, Fighters, Mines, or Drones.
Remember that "Tactical" means that YOU control the ships, "Strategic" means that the COMPUTER quickly runs through the battle with default ship strategies to see who wins. The strategy assigned to the ship will determine its behavior.
2. To "colonize" an enemy planet, you need to do one of 3 things: "Glass" the planet (kill every existing colonist) and colonize the now-empty planet, Capture the planet with troops (later in the game when you've reasearched troops), or Steal the planet with intelligence (WAY later in the game when you've reasearched "Puppet Political Parties"--Applied Intelligence Level 4)
3. If you populate a non-breathable planet, you should STILL be able to put population there. The colony will be "domed" (a little white dome icon shows next to the planet), which means you can build a FEW facilities and put SOME supplies there, but not as much as you could if it were breathable.
Most likely, you simply forgot to transfer some population to your colony ship before you sent it out exploring. You'll need to build a transport ship (with some Cargo containers--yes, population is considered Cargo) and move some people to the planet. Then you can build stuff.
You can ultimately change the atmosphere type, but my favorite strategy is to either CONQUER a race that can breathe a different atmosphere, or TRADE a colony ship full of people with another empire. Then take these people and put them on your domed colonies.
In my current game, I have almost 300 populated planets, ALL with native-breathing population. With NO atmospheric converters
Not too late, just giving additional possibilities.
[ February 06, 2003, 17:38: Message edited by: MegaTrain ]