Since there are now hundreds of thousands of ships in TLE, and some planets have thousands of ships, the current system is in-efficient in dealing with all of them and the user interface is slower as a consequence.

Work is now in hand to address this problem, this page is to capture the changes being made so that you are aware of the changes and also so you have a chance to add suggestions yourself.

So, what are we doing?

The basic idea is that instead of a colony having (say) 100 identical sweepers, it now has a single fleet which represents those 100 ships. Everywhere that the current system shows ships, it will instead show fleets. For example, when you view your ships in the Space Port, instead of seeing pages and pages of ships, you will instead see a couple of pages of fleets.

What is a fleet?

A fleet is a collection of ships, all of which have the same characteristics, the same home port, the same task and the same name.

So, for example, all your sweepers on a colony, which have the same speed, stealth, combat, hull_size, berth, task and name will automatically be grouped into a fleet. It will appear everywhere that a ship currently is displayed but it will now show a quantity (the number of ships)

How do you manage fleets?

In general, everywhere that you can select a ship (e.g. sending a ship to a colony) you will now select a fleet, and a quantity. So for example, when you push resources to another colony, you can specify 1 billion of the resource and then select enough ships from a single fleet to transport that resource. 

You don't need to select all ships from a fleet, if you select less ships than are in a fleet, then it automatically splits the fleets, forming two, one fleet stays at home, the other is sent out to the other colony.

When the fleet returns from pushing the resources, it will automatically be merged with the part of the fleet that stayed at home.

The benefit of fleets is that you have less 'things' to manage so you should help the system to merge ships into a small number of fleets. The main way you can do this giving all ships with the same characteristics the same name. If you really want to have several fleets of ships then just give them different names.

What are the main consequences of the changes?

• Almost every API call involving ships will changes.
• Any external scripts using the API will need to be changed
• The User Interface will be updated to support all the API changes and released at the same time
• The iPhone application will be broken until it is updated