Found some spare time and decided to hop back in and try an old craver strat that I managed to make work before the latest version (pre new tech tree and system razing).

I managed to lose twice horribly, mostly because I'm still not sure how to proceed down the new tech tree, but one major issue I keptt running into was that I could not get my ships to full manpower.    The system manpower was capped, but the ships often had nothing close to full manpower meaning my aggressive invasions strategy wasn't aggressive or invasive at all, and really more just mildly threatening.

Further when I finally got into a war with the UE (who had a battleship to my basic attacker....yeah..need to work on my tech path) I noticed that his invasion forces consisted of 100% harroshim, and no weak UE troops.  

I've found the screen to upgrade your  invasion forces, but is there somewhere I can load up my ships, because even leaving them in orbit around friendly systems with max manpower (or disbanding, waiting a turn, and reforming) did nothing.

Default manpower generation is really slow. You need to use one of the manpower generation system improvements or laws.

Exotic Rations (unlocked by Ubiquitous Surveillance in the Warfare sector) converts 1 Pop into 300 manpower

Exotic Rations (yes, another one. This is probably a bug. This one unlocked by Applied Cryogenics in the Empire sector) converts 10% of Food to manpower

Patriot Pills Plant (unlocked with Agri Drugs in Empire sector) turns 20% of food into manpower

And finally, the Runts as Grunts law turns ALL your food into manpower.

Eji1700 wrote:

Further when I finally got into a war with the UE (who had a battleship to my basic attacker....yeah..need to work on my tech path) I noticed that his invasion forces consisted of 100% harroshim, and no weak UE troops.  

I don't know what propaganda the hive has been feeding you, but UE troops aren't weak by any stretch.

What Cat said is correct.

One additional precision: the manpower in your systems is used exclusively for defense at the moment. The manpower used to fill ships is the same one used to fill your systems: the one at the empire-level (that you can view in the Military screen, little ship icon).

If this is correct, is there any way to tell?

In the situation i'm talking about manpower was shown as :

0/100 when away from home systems

and 0/100 (+100) when at systems, but the numbers never went up. 

It seems quite confusing because the system manpower was capped (200/200) and the numbers for the fleet didn't go up at all when staying at the system.  Where is the indicator so I know how quickly they're going to be fueled up?

Finally weak UE troops or not, this was a huge force of, as far as I can tell, 100% Hissho (got the name wrong earlier.  Samurai space birds).  Point being that regardless of troop stregth, i would LOVE to not take weak minor races along with my craver fletts, but it seems to always happen.  Is there some way to control this?

Thanks.  I did just figure it out in game, but yeah it's super non obvious.

Further, as I currently understand it, it seems bugged.

Lets say I have a fleet trying to take 2000 manpower thats empty, and i make 200 manpower a turn across my empire.

If the fleet is parked at a system, it'll be at full in 10 turns, and then the excess manpower will go into my stockpile (i assume...i never had this happen though due to the bug)

Further if the fleet is full, and not in a local system, it will still generate excess manpower to the pool.

HOWEVER, it seems that if your 0/2000 manpower fleet is off raiding/warring en enemy territory you will never gain manpower. The fleet will not gain the manpower, and it will not show up in your bank, and you will never net manpower.  I could be misunderstanding something (the guide doesn't seem to touch on it, but even with a supposedly negative net my fleets were filling up) but if that's the case it seems extremely bad given it hobbles the growth of your systems.

Eji1700, I had a devil of a time understanding this too (so I definitely think it's something worth clarifying; in fact, most of the complaints I've had, or others have had, boil down largely to "the game could be clearer," which isn't actually that bad of a place for a game to be).  For the Cravers, I solved the problem with liberal uses of Exotic Rations, which keeps my manpower high.  But given that the manpower stat we actually care about is buried in another screen (which is worth exploring, by the way; did you know you can upgrade your troops?  I missed that for an entire Update!), I think it's easy to miss!