Edited: Slick's question thread.

[Baron Munchausen]

Slick said:
Ok, new question: Is there a limit to the number of fleets you can have?

The reason I ask is that I'm in a game now where I have between 30 & 35 fleets and a very wierd thing just happened. I assembled a fleet of about 35 ships at a training world and sent it on its way, but on the next turn all the ships had stopped after moving the expected distance but their "fleet" had disappeared. All the 35 ships were in the same sector awaiting orders. Then I had to send them back to my training world to become part of another trained fleet.

Anyone else ever see a fleet disappear from under its ships?

There is a long-standing problem with fleets in SE IV. Since SE V is by the same programmer it may well have inherited the bug or some variation. All of the AIs use the same routine to create their fleets, and somewhere or other the AI sometimes gets confused about fleet names, or perhaps ID codes. It causes two different fleets to get identified together and locks them both up. It is entirely possible for one of the 'other' fleets to be a player's instead of an AI's fleet! The only way to 'fix' this is to disband one of the fleets. I described this problem to MM several times but he never seemed to be able to find the source of the screwup. So, he might have built in some 'automatic' failsafe to at least keep fleets from getting jammed. And that might have resulted in the accidental disappearance of one of your fleets.