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So, if I make a fleet of harvesters do a route, does each ship collect resources until they're all full, and then they all fly back together?
If I make a fleet with some harvesters and some combat ships, will those combat ships defend the harvesters in the event of a battle?
No and no.
Lol Tsagoth.
1. The fleet will act just like a single harvester which never waits till it is full. It will fly to source planet, spend 1 minute loading whatever is there(even if it is just 1 RU) and fly to the destination planet, spend one minute dropping off and repeat. That is if they fixed fleets. Last time I tried using fleets for harvesting they would use the source planet as the dest planet and vice versa.
2. All ships will act as combat ships when entering a battle. There are not "non-combat" and "combat" classes. All ships are combat ships even if they are probes with 0 attack and will behave as such in a battle afaik. As far as the combat tactics on which ships get targeted first that would be interesting to get an answer on. In battles I have been in before it appeared the weakest ships were targeted first so I was able to use harvesters as cannon fodder when attacking a colony.
Targeting is essentially random. In practice what I think happens is ships are targeted in the order in which they entered orbit at the combat location. Targets which have no attacker assigned are selected first. An attempt is made to ensure that all ship/orbital targets are selected before the planet is targeted.
so is it really bad to use a fleet to harvest then? Will all the ships harvest? Or just one of them?
As many will load as can. The rest will fly empty.