Oh, I just meant that I send them to some far off corner of the galaxy to see what they uncover along the way.
I got a question about Shipyards. Do I have one when I start the game? I imagine I do, since I'm building ships, but nothing is listed on my home planet in terms of existing "shipyard" or anything. Also, I have seen mentioned that building a shipyard early is important for its unit capacity I'm assuming, but if you research "advanced shipyards" you get an extra 10units to build there without having to build a shipyard at all....
Is that right??
I don't believe that is correct, as Advanced Shipyards is a Level 2 Tier, which I believe you can't have without first getting the Tier 1 complete, ie: Shipyard.
And as far as starting with a shipyard, No. Think about it in like Star Trek terms. Harvesters and Mining Outpost ships are small in comarrison to Destroyers and their larger brothers. You can build a small boat in your garage, but you need a larger dry dock (shipyard) to build a destroyer. Or you can build a shuttle on earth, but you need a space station to build the USS Enterprise.
So I've consistently been able to build over my object limit on each of the three severs, so far up to -8 objects left (18/10). Is this a bug or am I somehow penalized for building beyond my means?
This is a bug they're working on, though I'm sure it is now substantially lower on their to do list. Especially since the servers keep crashing. I'm not sure what will happen to the extra ships when they do patch this particular bug. I'm staying within my unit limits, just to be safe.