Help with terraformer

[Rich.h (OP)]

I just built my first orbital terraformer using a base style ship with an orbital habitat. I have two of these vessels with one sitting above mars to aid the terraforming, the other I sent to a neighbouring system to begin terraforming a planet on it's own. I noticed that you can set a primary order as "terraform colony" so selected this for the second vessel to see how it functioned. After a time increment I say the second vessel had changed the orders I gave manually to head back to sol with a target in mind (not listed by name).

Does this order type turn the vessel into an auto terraformer? If that is so how do I outline how I want such vessels to perform and how can I prioritise planet terraforming and such?

[xeryon]

I can't comment on how well the terraform colony command would work as I have never found a need to use it.  Usually terraforming a system body requires multiple terraforming modules working together over a decade or more to complete their work.  It was never a tedious enough task to bother with an automation command.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I imagine it's a new auto command for use by the AI, the auto commands being exposed to players if they desire to use it.

[xeryon]

I reread my comment above and cringed a little.  It was not an attempt to be negative and disparage your question/comment.  I was only trying to point out that if the auto command isn't working as you think it should do not despair.  Terraforming is one of the least involved activities of the program and manually managing their actions is not time consuming.  Just put similar terraforming craft into one task group and set them to work.  The event log will tell you later when they have completed the current environmental task. 

Keep in mind that sometimes if you have already active terraformers in orbit of a body and you command another craft to merge with the already in-progress task group that the new terraformers will not add to their terraforming capacity until you tell the original task group to 'move to' the body they are already working on.  This refreshes the capacity of the now larger task group.  The command is a 5 second refresh kind of thing.  No actual moving is required.

[Steve Walmsley]

Keep in mind that sometimes if you have already active terraformers in orbit of a body and you command another craft to merge with the already in-progress task group that the new terraformers will not add to their terraforming capacity until you tell the original task group to 'move to' the body they are already working on.  This refreshes the capacity of the now larger task group.  The command is a 5 second refresh kind of thing.  No actual moving is required.

What I usually do is order a new terraformer to move to the target planet and then join the terraforming fleet. That way it is all automatic and you don't need to 'move' the fleet.

[MarcAFK]

..... It's so simple, and I've been doing it wrong the whole time.