[jreid]

Hi,

Great game. I actually took a couple of days off from work to play it.

How do use an individual ship's components (i.e. the emergency supply pod) when a ship is in a fleet? I had to keep removing ships from the fleet, use a ship's component one at a time, then put them back in the fleet. It would be nice if you could hightlight a ship in a fleet and have the Use Component icon in the toolbar activate. But maybe I missed something.

I was using a possibly cheesy tactic. I built a 'Tanker' Cruiser which has a lot of extra supply capacity and emergency supply pods(only 10k in size). Since fleets pool their supplies, one of these could keep a fleet supplied for a long time. I say it was cheesy because I could go on deep raids into enemy territory without having to worry about the AI targeting the tanker. A human probably would, though, which would strand the fleet. In addition, I was able to bypass AI satellites defending warp points by simply staying out of their range. I think you should have to defeat all enemy units/ships before traversing a warp point.

One Last question. What setting is everyone using for a very hard game? So far, on high difficulty with equal starting points and no computer bonuses, I can win fairly easily. Propulsion experts, high research and high space yard rate is a lethal combo agains the AI.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance,

Jeff.