ship gather point?

[Dogboy]

If you click on the wrench symbol (queue list) and select a planet, you can pull up "queue settings". If you scroll down, there is a "queue move to" button, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Is there a way to send ships to selected locations when they're built?

[Captain Kwok]

Set waypoints by selecting a sector and hitting CTRL+# (# = 1-9) and that will set a marker where you can send ships via the queue settings function.

[Dogboy]

Wow. That will really reduce micromanagement!

Thanks,DB

[Fyron]

One can also order ships and fleets to move to such waypoints by hitting the corresponding number key. I find it much more useful to cycle through new ships and send them to waypoints manually, than using the automatic queue moveto. I can be far more flexible with a set of waypoints to move new ships to, depending on how current fronts are faring, than just a rigid queue setting.

[Dogboy]

Thanks. Yes, one thing I discovered is that the way points mean colony ships leave without colonists. Is there a way to name each waypoint ("assault point", "military academy", etc.)?

[BlueTemplar]

That's one of many good reasons for not having "Automatic Colonization Population" set to 0.

[Dogboy]

Hmm...not sure I follow that. I looked in the empire settings and did not see that as an option. Is this a way to auto load colonizers when they're built?

[Fyron]

Its a mod setting, in Data\Settings.txt. It basically creates free population on every newly colonized world. At one point, this population was always the native type for your empire. This screwed up colonization of different-atmosphere planets with aliens, since it would add a few million oxygen breathers to methane worlds where you had loaded methane breathers on your colony ship. This is primarily why some mods, such as BM, set the value to 0. There was talk of a fix, where it would instead add pop of the type on the colonizer (if there was any), but I don't recall if it made it into a patch or not.

[Dogboy]

Ah, ok. Thanks!

[BlueTemplar]

The AI (if activated) will scrap the problematic population on the next turn, right?

Wouldn't a simpler fix be to only add population when there was none on the cololizer to start with?