Need help on micromanagement

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Grains!

[El_Phil]

Grainy cheese? It wont catch on I tell you!

[heimheim]

Thank you.
I will try everything you told me this weekend.

When I send a ship to a target location, is there any easy way to know whether it can reach with its current supplies?
I always have supply problems, especially in using "send colony" order in "Planet Menu". Because they have orders, the "next ship" order will skip them, until I find ships filled with screen, which have already been out of supplies for a couple of turns.

[douglas]

I'm afraid that one requires some calculation. First, figure out how many movement points it's going to take to get there. It helps to turn on ship movement lines in the F2->Options menu for this. Assuming you have movement lines turned on and the ship selected, count the squares from the destination to the last square with a lower number in it, add that lower number times the ship's movement per turn, and add the ship's current remaining movement points for this turn. For a ship with 5 movement per turn, none left, and the following movement line in the final system:

Code:

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-------766666

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The movement points required to get there would be 3 + (6 * 5) + 0 = 33. Multiply this number by 10 times the number of engines on the ship. The result is the required amount of supplies for the trip.

A ship with full supplies and no supply storage from anything but the engines can move 50 squares before running out of supplies.

To find ships that are low on supplies, browse the ships list (F6) and look for a barrel with a yellow or red bottom under the name. Yellow indicated less than 1000 supplies, red means no supplies.

[Renegade 13]

Another option is to research Solar Collectors, which will supply your ships with, at the highest tech level, 150 points of supply for each solar collector component per star in the system each turn. For example, say you have two level 2 solar collectors on your colony ship, and are in a system with 2 stars. You would get (100*2)*2=400 supplies. 100 for the component, multiplied by 2 for the number of components and 2 for the number of stars. This number of bonus supplies would last a colony ship for 8 moves, and you're unlikely to get ships with no supplies.

[boran_blok]

Another way to reduce micro management is to enable only colonize homeworld type and only colonize breathable type.

Makes for a very different game.