Fleets should be on "Intercept" setting by default when moving, creating or merging fleets. Its extremely annoying to turn this back on every time your fleets change systems or you merge fleets. Once the empire grows, you need to se this manualy at least 5 times every turn.



So far I played about 20 hours and never needed fleet not intecepting, but i was surprised lots of times by enemy armada sneeking past my border systems and blocading my strategic resources because i did not notice that intercept switched off again.



I suppose unless you have scouts or some special task force its useless to not intecept.

Well, version 0.30.x is better than version 0.20.x because at least now we *can* intercept fleets. I am curious about exactly how intercepting works. For example, suppose I have five fleets over an enemy world I am sieging; one weak combat fleet, one strong combat fleet, and three fleets which have ground combat modules only. (This is a typical fleet combination for me). I have been going to some trouble to make sure that only the weak combat fleet has intercept. I am doing this because I "assume" that the intercept fleet does not take part in ground combat, so I don't want to put all the fleets on intercept. Also, I "assume" that fleets which are on intercept may be called to fight a huge enemy fleet which suddenly enters the system, so I don't want to put my ground combat fleets on intercept.



If neither of these assumptions are true, then I agree intercept should be default. I appreciate the added option to manage interception, but currently it seems to require too much micromanagement.

judging by what i have seen with other stuff, like combat and such(you can invade and fight on same turn) i'd assume they all take part in the invasion, regardless, but it's jsut an educated guess

Reposted myself from other thread (partly) about default interception.

From what I see some people think it should be default, others prefer having to enable it manually.



I think that choosing to battle or not is a important decision. What about asking the player each time a non-friendly fleet passes by whether he wants to attack or not. Or would that be to annoying in the length? Personally I don't think so since the choice can have a significant consequences.

Wow, I would hate it if a dialog box popped up N times during the enemy move phase. I think it should work the way I "assume" it works: fleets on block don't take part in ground combat, and incoming fleets must destroy all fleets on block before they can attack any other fleets or blockade or leave the system.



This makes sense to me from a "realism" standpoint; a fleet which is on block is hovering around the string entry/exit points, so it can't do anything else; and incoming fleets can't really dodge a block fleet since the string entry/exit points are known and fixed.



I guess we need to think out what happens for ships that are free-moving using warp drive; they could conceivably enter the system without being detected. But they still could not blockade without detection.

davea wrote:
Wow, I would hate it if a dialog box popped up N times during the enemy move phase. I think it should work the way I "assume" it works: fleets on block don't take part in ground combat, and incoming fleets must destroy all fleets on block before they can attack any other fleets or blockade or leave the system.

I feared the dialog box thingy would be too extreme.



When thinking more closely about the matters I realize i'm discussing two different things.



What this thread proposes (and another) is that interception should be on by default. To me this makes sense since then you don't forget to enable interception -- you only forget disabling it. If you want to invade you manually activate invasion instead.



Another thing i'm discussing which AFAIK is not possible, is to ignore interception of a fleet. Maybe there are 2 factions one i'm at war with other i'm in cold war against. I don't want to waste my resources fighting the cold war 'enemy' so I don't want to intercept his ships. Is this a planned feature?