Overview
Military and civilian fleets
Battle fleets
Battle fleets are your military fleets that you can use to conquer other factions, defend your own territories, bully other fleets, or just to follow you around like some kind of a personal protection. We’ve already covered how to build your battle fleets in the “HQ” chapter, so if you’ve skipped that part, but want to know how it’s done, check it out over there. All ships that you build will spawn roughly in the same spot in the near vicinity of the base you’ve been constructing them on, They will also be merged into a single fleet if you don’t move them one by one as they get built. To get more info about any of your battle fleets, you have to find them on the starchart and select them. You can use keys Q and E to automatically select some fleets, so that you don’t have to search for them on the starchart. If you’re using the controller, the shortcut keys are left and right arrow on the d-pad.
Once you have your fleet selected, an info panel will open on the left hand side of the starchart. This panel will provide you with information about your fleet such as its name, its power, and its composition. You can do this to the other faction’s fleet as well, however you won’t see their composition unless you have the “NX Scout scanner” research conducted in your research lab. If you want to recompose your fleet, separate some of the ships into new and smaller fleets you can do that by selecting the fleet you want to separate, and selecting the “Manage ships” option. This will open a new panel, similar to the shipbuilding one. It will be split down the middle and each of your fleets will have one side. To transfer ships from one fleet to the other, simply select the ship you want to transfer and select the “Transfer” option. You can also destroy ships you don’t want in your fleets anymore, by choosing the “Scuttle” option. This will give you back a fraction of the resources it costs to build one of those ships, and will free up the space it’s been taking on your command point or supercapital ship scale (if you don’t know what those are, hop over to the HQ chapter and look under the shipbuilding part). You can also rename your fleets in the same panel, by editing the texts above the fleet lists.If you’re using a controller you do that with the L1/LB and R1/RB buttons, depending on which fleet you want to rename.
Civilian fleets
Unlike your battle fleets, your civilian fleets are not physically present in space. You use them to conduct various tasks around the gemini. You get seven of them when you start the game from your HQ, however you get one more for every freeport station you control in the Gemini. How do you use them? Glad you’ve asked. On the territory that is owned by your faction, every now and then there will be some missions spawned. The number of spawned missions depends on the amount of zones you control. Every mission has its requirements, price, duration, risk, and ultimately the reward. Only civilian fleet tasks that are not spawned on your grounds, are the trading tasks that are spawned on the stations of factions that are either friendly or neutral with you. The trading resources and their ratio depends on the type of station that the task is spawned on. Whether you’ll see trade tasks that are far from your HQ depends on whether you have a T-gate built in the region of your HQ. There are twelve different civilian fleet tasks that you can encounter on your Gemini crusade.
The possible civilian fleet tasks are, Survey zone, Lost cargo retrieval, Science survey, Salvage – Small derelict, Salvage – Large derelict, Salvage – Derelict convoy, Repair task, Trade task, Asteroid field ore run, Junkyard salvage run, Nebula gas run, and Construct task. There are four different risk indicators, Very low, Elevated, High, and Severe, that determine how much of your civilian fleets the task needs, but also how big the reward is upon completion.