Newbie questions.

[Narlotep]

Ebony,

1.) You select the ship. A button with a green triangular shape will be available on the main control bar. Click on it and it will display the ship in the left side of the screen and there will be several choices in a list on the right side. If you have already designed an upgrade, the "retrofit" option will be available. Click and let the magic begin.

Note: Your ship must be colocated with a ship yard.
Note: If you've added/subtracted components to the upgraded design, you will be able to select "retrofit" but it won't work...Says some dribble about "sizes must match" or some such.

2.) You can start a game with your basic empire as you defined at the beginning of the game, build basic ship designs and then select "Save Empire" (I think) from the save game button.

3.) Er, teh only propulsion that-may-be possible for bases is Emergency Propulsion pods and I think only one is permitted per vessel. I'm not sure, but you definitely cannot use Ion Drives on a base.

4.) Good question. It's supposed to be impossible to have more than one shipyard per planet. There was (is?) a bug that would permit more in a specific case, but it's not by design. There is no advantage to building multiple Resupply Depots.

5.) Click on the ship once it enters your fleet. A button labelled "Name" will appear on the button bar. CLick and modify name of the vessel. (Similarly click on a planet and the same will permit renaming of planets.)

6.) Overtly collected general intelligence information is available upon contact, i.e. racial characteristics. Specific intelligence can be acquired after the development of Applied Intelligence, which gives you Intell centers. These in turn produce Intell points which can be applied to different missions. The types of missions expand when App. Intell 2 is reached.

Hope it helps.

Narlotep