I'm running my first real game right now after playing around for a few matches, and have come up with a few issues and questions:
1) I have built up a battlefleet to take on some ships in a system next door that are in orbit of a planet around a binary that is almost 25 Billion km away from the primary star. Most of my fleet had enough fuel to get there and back, but I designed a laser skirmisher destroyer with overpowered engines that only has a range of just over 13 Billion. I was hoping to design a tug with efficient engines that would link to it and drag it to within 2 billion km and release it once it got near the combat zone. This didn't work, however, and I'm not sure if it's a limitation of the game or if I did something wrong. I went into the ship list, and established a tractor link. The game pulled the tractored ship into the tugs task group. Still, when I set off, the towed ship was using its engines along with the tug, burning a tank of fuel every 20 days. I then tried draining the tanks entirely to see if it would tow it then, and that didn't work either. I got interrupts that the fleet was out of fuel. Am I missing something, or is the tractor beam only useful for ships with no engines?
2) Is there a way to automate shoreleave? If I have a commercial fuel harvester fleet that is designed to fill its tanks in 16 months with an 18 month deployment, is there a way to automate a month of shoreleave after it returns to drop off its load at home? It is really tiring needing to manually clear default orders when it returns and then remember to turn it back on once the crew is rested.
3) Is there a way to turn off comet names in the system map? I like playing with comets relatively plentiful (set to 8 min), but the names muddy up the system display.
Thanks,