Some New Player Qs

[Kynalvarus]

Ok, so I've played a couple of games against the AI, tried out stuff in the Simulator, read data and AI files, and lurked about on these Boards for a while. I've still got a few questions that I just can't answer. All questions refer to 1.60 Gold, unmodded or TDM. Apologies in advance if there's a FAQ with these and I didn't find it.

Ground Combat:

• How is militia strength and hp determined? Is it tech dependent? Do they secretly have components?
• How are ground battles run? Everyone fires, clean up the dead, repeat?
• The AIs use them, so Sensors & ECM must have some effect, but what's the base To-Hit%? Shields? Armor? Multiple Weapons?

Weapons:

• Shield Depleters seem to behave inconsistently against units, since units seem to count shield & armor HP together. How does this work?
• Ditto Weapon and Engine Destroyers.
• What do the damage values mean on the Allegiance Subverter?

Defenses:

• Is the order in which armor components take damage random? Does it matter in which order they appear on the component list?
• Does Emissive Armor decrease the total damage done by attacks stronger than it can absorb?
• I heard a rumor that Organic Armor builds up hp even before it is damaged. Is it true in Gold?

Other Components:

• Emergency Propulsion can be put on Bases, but does not seem to work. Can it be made to work? Is there any way at all to move a Base?
• It seems broken to me that you can retrofit expensive, even Stellar Manipulation components into ships, repair them in .1 year, and go, provided you have the resources. If you have spare repair capability, why not build empty hulls and just retrofit them up? Am I missing something?

Ship Combat:

• Do ship and fleet XP bonuses apply to defense as well as offense?
• What are the off/def modifiers for loss of B/LS/CQ/MC components? For combat speed?
• Is the order in which combatants begin random? How is it determined who gets the first shot?
• Is there any way to control/predict where launched ftr/sat units will appear on the map?
• There doesn't seem to be much control over the order of wingmen in formations. You set the leader and the rest seems arbitrary. True, or did I miss something?
• Worse, if you move a ship from one combat group to another, it retains its position number from the first formation, which can cause it to do some ridiculous things, e.g. moving to slot 20 of an arrowhead with only three ships. Former leaders reassigned as wingmen do bizarre things.
  Any way to change this?
• Is there any way to tell how badly you've wrecked the environment of a planet with Radiation bombs during combat?

Strategy:

• You can give strategies to your units, but can you give a strategy to your planets so that they'll launch their satellites?
• How does the strategy system define "Transport" and "Colony Ship"? Is it based on the hull, the components, the cargo carried? Can any strategy change behavior based on cargo content of targets?
• Is there any way to set up a strategy so that my planet defenders will pick on the troop transport 5 spaces away instead of the almost unhittable battlecruiser 10 spaces away?
• Conversely, can I set strategies that will cause my ships to fire on a planet until all its weapon platforms and troops are dead, then stop? That will make my troop transport wait outside range until there is no more threat?

Other:

• Does the Climate Control Facility actually do anything? Is there a way to assign number values to the range Optimal, Good, Mild, Unpleasant, Harsh, Deadly? It just seems to work so slowly!
• If you radiation bomb a planet to Deadly, is there a lower limit to the damage done, or can you just keep worsening things till you overflow the variables?
• Is there any functional difference between the five kinds of scans? Any point to researching/using more than one?
• Can the location of a new warp point, if created by an enemy from a known system, be predicted? My minelayers need to know! :-)

Thanks for reading this long list of questions!

--Kynalvarus