How to automatically merge the fleet when towing?

Player Questions
1

I have several terraforming stations without engines in my fleet. For towing, I use a cyclic command ‘take any ship in tow’. The problem is that one fleet eventually splits into several fleets, each containing only one ship. Is it possible to create an instruction that immediately merges ships at the destination? Also, when transferring ships from one fleet to another, the old fleet is not automatically deleted. I have to additionally click through each empty fleet and delete it every time.
This is not a problem at the beginning of the game, but manually moving a hundred terraforming stations is extremely tedious.

2

I’m not really sure what problem you are encountering, but if I have to move a hundred terraforming stations, I generally:

  1. Move the first station and create a fleet at the destination.

  2. Create cycling orders for ‘Tractor any ship in Fleet A. Release tractored ship in Fleet B’ and move on to something else.

BTW, if you have a fleet of 5 tugs, you can issue the ‘tractor any ship’ five times and you will end up with a fleet of 5 tugs and 5 stations. There is no need to split them.

1 Like
3

Thank you. The solution works. Let me just describe the problem in more detail:
The mechanic of ‘create a fleet at the point’ before sending all the ships there is not obvious. I was sending ships directly to the system body. With that approach, a fleet of 10 ships turns into 10 fleets of 1 ship each. Then you manually transfer 10 ships into 1 fleet. In the end, you get 1 fleet of 10 ships, and 9 fleets with no ships. Those 9 empty fleets have to be manually deleted.

4

I’ve just done exactly this in my own game and that doesn’t happen. I tractored four ships with my fleet of four tugs and delivered them to a body. I ended up with four individual terraformer fleets. However, when I drag and drop them it becomes one fleet with four terraformers. There are not three empty fleets.

I even checked the code and it triggers the AbsorbFleet function.

Are you dragging the ships instead of the fleets?

5

This is the key.
Drag and drop one fleet into another, and the original fleet disappears.
Drag and drop the last ship from one fleet into another fleet, and the original fleet remains.

6

FWIW, I always create an empty target fleet at the destination before I bring the first station.

That way I’m always releasing stations into a fleet, and never have to do additional merging.

7

Yes, I was indeed dragging ships rather than fleets. Because I assumed that when dragging a fleet, it would become a sub-fleet. If you drag ships, an empty fleet remains. If you drag fleets, they merge. This solves another one of my problems.

8

How to create an empty fleet at the destination point?

9

Create a fleet, select it, then on the Miscellaneous tab you can move it to any colony (left pane) or any Rendezvous waypoint (right pane).

3 Likes
10

This is the way, it’s the fastest way to move large numbers of stations. In my last game I had ten tugs, sixty fuel harvesting stations, fifty terraforming stations and eighty mining stations so smooth managing of tug operations was important.