Fleet orders

Every order you can give a fleet, and which ones are not picked from a list.

A fleet is never just sent somewhere — it is sent to do something, and the order decides what happens when it arrives and whether it comes home.

What you can order

These are the orders you pick when you send a fleet:

• Attack — Send a fleet at another empire's colony to fight what defends it and carry home what it can.
• Transport — Move resources you own — most often between two of your own colonies, though you can send them to somebody else. The fleet flies loaded and comes back empty.
• Pickup — The mirror of Transport: fly empty to another of your own colonies and bring its cargo home. The hold can land lighter than you asked for, since it is collected out of that colony's real stock on arrival.
• Redeploy — Move ships permanently to another of your colonies. They change home and do not come back.
• Defend — Garrison a friendly colony for a time. The ships stay yours and return on their own.
• Espionage — One probe, one snapshot of another empire — what it holds, what defends it, what it is building.
• Colonise — Found a colony on a free slot. The founding consumes ONE colonising hull and everything else you sent flies home — but if you bring both kinds, it spends the Colonial Ark and hands the Colony Ship back, so do not send both expecting the cheaper one to go.
• Explore — Chase a visible anomaly and find out what is there.
• Harvest — Lift the debris field a battle left in orbit.

The ones you do not pick from a list

These exist too, and you will see them on your fleet list, but none of them is chosen from the mission composer — each is started somewhere else, for a reason:

• Picket — A standing watch, placed from the chart rather than from the mission list.
• Intercept — A pursuit aimed at a fleet already moving, so it has no coordinate to pick from a list.
• Evacuation — The hangar emptied ahead of an incoming raid, standing off its own planet until the blow has fallen. Launched in one tap from the inbound alarm.
• Supply lane — A standing arrangement between your colonies that dispatches itself on an hourly sweep, with no fleet aboard. You open the lane; it launches.

Coming home

Most orders are a round trip: the fleet flies out, does the thing, and flies back, and it is in the air and out of your hands for both legs.

The exception is Redeploy, which changes a fleet's home for good. A Colonise is not an exception, despite appearances — only the one hull that founds the base is spent, and every other ship you sent with it flies home.

Anything in the air is anything you cannot use. That is the whole tension of the game's timing, and it is why the fleet you send at somebody is also the fleet that is not at home.