About Fuel Tankers...

[krugg.the.gamer]

I've always had trouble with these things, so figured I'd finally ask. How many should you have a in a fleet? Say I have 40 ships not counting tankers. What would be a good number?

Also would I even need them in defensive fleets since they stay in the empire more or less?

that's about it.. I never know if I have enough or if it's even worth having them at all. lol

[rahonbass]

Okay as a logistics nerd I will share my philosophy on tankers and their use.

Tankers are absolutely crucial in power projection over distances. Depending on galaxy size, tankers should be used in any fleet you expect to travel beyond your borders all the way through late game. Tankers should also be built outside of fleets to provide refueling to other other ships in edge cases.

Tankers are simple to enough to think about if you follow 2 basic rules.
1. How many cargo bays worth of fuel does it take to fill up the fleet.
2. Always expect half your tankers at any one point in time will be refueling/mining

So with those two rules in mind a great set up is make sure each offensive and invasion fleet has enough tankers to refill the fleet twice

An example. The current tanker design has 2 cargo holds for fuel. Cargo bays carry 1200 each so each tanker has capacity for 2400 caslon. If the fleet needs 4800 caslon for a full load (you can see the exact fuel capacity of each fleet when you click on them). Then I would have at a minimum have 4 tankers for that fleet. (Remember expect 2 to not be available for refueling operations at any one point in time). Since I usually put tankers only in invasion or attack fleets they run the chance of coming under enemy fire and being destroyed. The absolute worse thing that could happen is your fleet runs out of fuel far from home so I personally would use 6 just to be safe.

Tankers are cheap. A full fleet is not. Don't leave home without them.

Will be happy to answer any other questions and I hope that helps!

[krugg.the.gamer]

nice, that helped a lot. I've felt the pain of having my main fleet halfway across the map and out of fuel. lol So I always have them, but I was just hoping to find a more optimal number. Seems I was doing it pretty similar to what you were saying. It's funny even though I've put 100s of hours into this game and the last, I still feel like a newb half the time.

[rahonbass]

Always something to learn. This game has tons of options to fit all sorts of play styles and strategies.

Something else to remember is tankers are programmed not to run into areas with lots of danger or when fleets are conducting attacks. If your fleet is getting low on fuel and you are in a place full of danger it is often good idea to jump the fleet a few systems over and let the tankers come in and do their thing.

[krugg.the.gamer]

makes sense to me. I'm just now starting to turn off more of the automation. lol. I started with the economic and diplomatic stuff first, but now I'm wanting to get good with the fleets. Liking this update so far too, the whole game seems to be running a lot better in general and the UI stuff helped a lot with trade.

[rahonbass]

Yeah the game continues to improve. If you haven't already, join the discord! Is rewarding to interact with the devs and play the betas and help shape the updates and get issues reported and fixed.

The game starts to get really get deep when you take over designing all the ships. It allows all sorts of strategies. Then you start setting up fleets with different types of the same hull class it really takes off. You can create some unique and fun strategies.

The automation is powerful but it is not a mind reader. Once you understand the game mechanics better you can start turning the automation back on but highly customize to fit what you want it to do.

[HugsAndSnuggles]

There is also time to consider: tanker can only refuel a single ship at any given moment. Obviously, fleet does nothing particularly useful while refueling, so you want to minimize that. Also, I've no idea if ship selection logic was improved, but it was pretty random and tanker often would be traveling from one end of the fleet to another. So a single slow tanker with huge cargo bay won't really do a good job.

IMO, a "proper" fleet tanker needs maxed out engines and enough defences to survive a few (dozen) hits, then you can worry about cargo space. How many - mostly that comes down to overall strategic needs. Personally, I try to keep a tanker per ten ships (otherwise downtime is too large); if forced going over 10% of the fleet, I'd probably think about squeezing in an extra fuel cell instead.

[Nightskies]

Note that tankers under automatic behavior will refuel the fleet while it is sitting idle somewhere out of combat. Given enough, like rahonbass says, they'll do it quickly.

I've yet to see how automatic fleets use tankers now. Anyone have insight on how AI controlled fleets use them now?

[rahonbass]

In my opinion Auto fleets actually behave better than manual fleets as a player can get impatient and keep pushing while an auto fleet will wait and call on tankers to refuel if it is far enough away from a friendly mine or planet.

[jorgen_cab]

Originally posted by rahonbass:

In my opinion Auto fleets actually behave better than manual fleets as a player can get impatient and keep pushing while an auto fleet will wait and call on tankers to refuel if it is far enough away from a friendly mine or planet.

Yes, you have to understand how they behave when you use your fleet in manual mode. This is very important.