Various things

[zoutzakje]

I can only answer your third question, as my knowledge about the other 2 is limited. The number next to the bonus ship icons on your galaxy layout in the lobby indicates the number of wormholes which are on that planet. For starters, I suggest picking a planet with only 2 or 3 wormholes. Defending can be tricky when faced with many wormholes.

[PokerChen]

More !
- How do you best defend against spire devourer ships ?
- How again can you "manually" alter the galaxy setup, i.e. move systems ?

1) Maws, right? One possibility: you can try to pop them ASAP with Bomber starships or Plasma Siege starships.
2) Alt-right click on the galaxy map and switch to "Galaxy Layout ->My Layout". Shift-left-click and drag the planets.

[Ragnarok]

When setting engineers to free roaming mode, where they independently repair / assist, why wont they repair spirecraft vessels ? Cant they be repaired ?

p.s. spirecraft implosion artillery is awesome versus forcefields !

[Hearteater]

Some units are immune to repair; it should say so in their tooltip.  For example, Spirecraft Shield Bearers are immune to repair.  Other units are so expensive to repair that engineers won't automatically repair them.  There is nothing you can do about the first issue, but you can get around the second by increasing the CTRLS setting for the repair threshold called something like "Engineers do not assist large projects".  There is a text box you can put a number in.  The larger the number, the larger the ship/structure your engineers will repair automatically.  A value of 0 tells them to repair anything.  Use with caution.

[zoutzakje]

also, if you're playing with Spirecraft Moderate, you will not be able to repair any of the spirecraft vessels. that's a rule that goes with moderate spirecraft.

[rwst9]

If you have built a warp sensor, and at least one bordering warp gate is alive, the wormhole ships will be coming from is coloured red, instead of green. That's where the ships will come from.

May I remark that this goes against accessibility in programming?
About 10% of men are partially color blind and cannot distinguish certain colors (especially red/green).
http://accessibility.psu.edu/usability
Wikipedia says 5% but that's still enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

I nevertheless enjoy the game, now that I'm managing the AI's warp gates
I would post some report but at level 5 or 6 that would bore you to death...

Regards,

[zoutzakje]

welcome to the forums =)
Don't worry about posting After Action Reports of low difficulty games, there are still plenty of people who enjoy reading them (including me). Plus it's a great way to ask more experienced players for advice, in case you get stuck =)
As for the color issue... I wouldn't know why it has been programmed the way it is, so I'll leave that one up to the devs

[madcow]

Devs seem receptive enough here that if it was brought to their attention, I'm sure they would patch in an alternative way to tell beyond color-coding the wormholes if it was remotely feasible. Personally I'm not color blind, but I still have trouble telling what units are in FRD mode, which is apparently color-coded on the system unit listing.

[Wanderer]

Devs seem receptive enough here that if it was brought to their attention, I'm sure they would patch in an alternative way to tell beyond color-coding the wormholes if it was remotely feasible. Personally I'm not color blind, but I still have trouble telling what units are in FRD mode, which is apparently color-coded on the system unit listing.

There's currently a discussion about a more obvious 'this is the wormhole you're going to be attacked from' visual.  There's a few user created icons and an explanation of how to mod it if you're willing.

The FRDs are only colored on screen, not the side-bar unit list.

[madcow]

Oh, that might explain why I never noticed a difference on the sidebar...

[Hearteater]

You can also press T.  The blinking wormhole is the one the attack will be coming from.

[zoutzakje]

You can also press T.  The blinking wormhole is the one the attack will be coming from.

Really? Didn't know that.

[rwst9]

You can also press T.  The blinking wormhole is the one the attack will be coming from.

It appears (not only from this) you know what you're doing. Thanks for your work!

[Ragnarok]

3 quick questions:

- What good are scout starships ? why would i need them over scout strikecraft ?
- is there any way to highlight warppoints in a system ? i.e. i want to spread scouts from within an AI system through the various wormholes. but i cant find them. i always have to scroll zoom in and out big time
- when constructing engineers using shift-v, they auto-assist/fly once ready. when building cleanup or rebuild-drones using shift-v (or normal v) they dont enter auto-roaming mode. bug ?

[Wanderer]

3 quick questions:

- What good are scout starships ? why would i need them over scout strikecraft ?

They're primarily good for cloaked short-range tachyon work.  Excellent for finding minefields and the like.  The other time you typically want them is for their sniper flare abilities to protect your fleet if you're getting hammered by the AI with those ship types.  The other aspect is very cheap to upgrade to level 2 if you've used up all your fleet-ships doing picketing and don't want to spend the K on III ships yet.

- is there any way to highlight warppoints in a system ? i.e. i want to spread scouts from within an AI system through the various wormholes. but i cant find them. i always have to scroll zoom in and out big time

Hold down CTRL and they'll pop up on top of the local defenders.

- when constructing engineers using shift-v, they auto-assist/fly once ready. when building cleanup or rebuild-drones using shift-v (or normal v) they dont enter auto-roaming mode. bug ?

I've never seen this happen unless there was nothing in need of repair.  Cleanups really do nothing, they need a review, rebuilders are pretty much all you need.  But if there's nothing for them to FRD repair, they won't typically get moving.  They don't repair ships, btw, they repair destroyed turrets, minefields, stuff like that.  Anything that leaves scrap behind.  They get it back to 50% built and then they have to reconstruct themselves to be operational.