Question from the demo

[khagler]

Hello, I recently discovered the SEIV demo and was so impressed I ordered the full Version within the first ten turns. :-)

I ran across a few situations that had me puzzled in the demo. Perhaps these are explained in the manual (which should be arriving this week), but if not maybe someone can answer these questions:

1. I figured out how to refit (or retrofit) a ship, but there was something odd about it. I wanted to refit a frigate to a newer Version of the same basic design, but the only choice I had was to refit it to my only other frigate-hull design, an unarmed remote mining ship. I thought at first that maybe it was because I hadn't built a prototype of the new design yet, but I still couldn't refit to that design after building a prototype. What am I missing?

2. Is there any way to automate remote mining? For example, designate a target asteroid field and tell a ship to go there and mine until I say otherwise, resupplying at the nearest base and returning to the asteroids as needed? I only had two mining ships and I still managed to forget about them...

3. This is the most likely to be explained in the manual, but... is there any way to make fighters more aggressive? I ran a couple of completely one-sided battles on auto, and discovered that my fighters (which represented the vast majority of my striking power) either wouldn't close at all or else held back and let my carrier escort ships close in ahead of them--at which point they couldn't do anything because the ships were in the way.

Thanks, and I look forward to playing the full game. I've been playing turn-based space strategy games since Reach For The Stars on the Apple II, and this is the best I've seen!