ship gather point?

[Captain Kwok]

There was a fix for the auto-colonization amount some time ago. The auto-colonization amount is only used now if there is no other population on the colonizer. Since that change, the Balance Mod has 1M as the auto-colonization amount.

[Dogboy]

Odd! I am playing SE5 v1.74 with Balance Mod v1.14b and my colonizers all come up empty. Does that mean I can just send empty colonizers out and they will colonize with 1M of my colonists?

[Captain Kwok]

If you give your colonizer the colonize order when it's in orbit of a planet, it will attempt to automatically pick up population from the planet prior to moving to its target. It sounds like you might be using the move order and then the colonize order afterwards. In that case, your ship's won't pick up any population, but the auto-colonization amount will kick in.

[Dogboy]

Wow! So, if I have a shipyard set to automatically send built colonizers on to a way point, I don't have to worry about loading colonists: I can just let them accumulate at the way point, and then issue the colonization order, and they'll have a few colonists?? I guess this avoids the newbie error of moving and then colonizing. Cool!

[Fyron]

Erm... only if that waypoint is over a planet with plenty of population to spare.

[Dogboy]

Sorry -- I'm confused. I thought the point that CK was making is that if I just issue a move order (as would be the case for shipyards set to send all ships to a waypoint), they will have a default of 1M colonists available should they then be ordered to colonize a planet without actually picking up any colonists. Have I misunderstood you, CK?

[Fyron]

I think I picked up on "a few" as meaning, loaded with population, as opposed to the single pop that comes out of nowhere on a new colony. Yes, if you set up a waypoint somewhere and do not load any pop, you will get 1M on new colonies. This is not very efficient, and thus not the best way to go about it (compared to actually loading a few dozen millions on each ship), but it will work.

[Dogboy]

Thank you, Fyron, for the clarification.

[capnq]

Captain Kwok said: If you give your colonizer the colonize order when it's in orbit of a planet, it will attempt to automatically pick up population from the planet prior to moving to its target.

It will attempt to pick up population whether it's orbiting a planet or not, even if it's already fully loaded. The Colonize order always produces the orders "Load All Populations; Move to <target>; Colonize <target>".

I've never given the Colonize order to an empty colonizer in the same sector as a loaded population transport, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took that population if there was no planet to draw from.

[Slick]

Another method I use is the "Join Fleet" command, which works pretty well in SEV. Establish a fleet, even with just 1 ship at your gather point. Name the fleet appropriately so you can easily idenitify it. Send ships to the gather point with the "Join Fleet" command. When you want to move your gather point, just move the fleet to the new location and ships already enroute will continue to meet up and join the fleet.

Just style, I guess. I like to use waypoints for permanent locations such as homeworld, training planets, big planets for siphoning off population, etc.

2 things to watch out for:
- if you move the fleet a lot and you have slow ships enroute, these ships may get outrun and take a long time to catch up.
- if you send ships from a long distance, they can run low on supplies before they get to the fleet, worsened if you advance the fleet.

The best way to avoid these is to chain orders and ensure that ships load supplies along the way, and make sure that your ships won't run out of supplies. This is not different from sending ships to waypoints.