ship gather point?

[capnq]

Captain Kwok said: If you give your colonizer the colonize order when it's in orbit of a planet, it will attempt to automatically pick up population from the planet prior to moving to its target.

It will attempt to pick up population whether it's orbiting a planet or not, even if it's already fully loaded. The Colonize order always produces the orders "Load All Populations; Move to <target>; Colonize <target>".

I've never given the Colonize order to an empty colonizer in the same sector as a loaded population transport, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took that population if there was no planet to draw from.

[Slick]

Another method I use is the "Join Fleet" command, which works pretty well in SEV. Establish a fleet, even with just 1 ship at your gather point. Name the fleet appropriately so you can easily idenitify it. Send ships to the gather point with the "Join Fleet" command. When you want to move your gather point, just move the fleet to the new location and ships already enroute will continue to meet up and join the fleet.

Just style, I guess. I like to use waypoints for permanent locations such as homeworld, training planets, big planets for siphoning off population, etc.

2 things to watch out for:
- if you move the fleet a lot and you have slow ships enroute, these ships may get outrun and take a long time to catch up.
- if you send ships from a long distance, they can run low on supplies before they get to the fleet, worsened if you advance the fleet.

The best way to avoid these is to chain orders and ensure that ships load supplies along the way, and make sure that your ships won't run out of supplies. This is not different from sending ships to waypoints.

[Sardia]

For colonies ships, sometimes they strip a planet dry of population, especially if you use the colonize planet command on the list of uncolonized planets.

Will there be a fix for this, so that ships always leave 1M people on the planet? Or am I suppose to keep a sharper eye on things?