Through this you have the ability to add orders for any and all of your positions. First select the position you wish to add a turn for. It will then be listed (in this case a turn has been added for New Starbase (5680).

This screen allows you to sequence turns, allowing one to be run before another. This is useful if you are moving freight – you would not want one ship moving off before the delivering ship had transferred its cargo. If you are still working on the turn but have completed orders for other positions you can flag Don’t Send when you wish to submit all the others.

You might also want to sequence your turn to be run after a position that is not listed in this set of turns. This could be useful for fleet actions where you are co-ordinating your positions with those run by other players.

Once it is shown here you need only click on the base and it will take you to the order editor below.

Once you have selected a position, entering orders is straight forward. Simply selecting orders from the left column displays them in the centre where you can submit parameters for them. The dropdowns give you options from known data though you always have the option to issue specific numbers. You might wish to do this based on what you expect to occur during the turn.

Once you have completed the order, the issue button queues it with the previous orders on the right. You can expand previous orders to double check parameters as shown in the Build Complex and Exploit Resource orders in the example below.

You can even edit previous orders without having to resubmit all the ones following it. Finally, if you realise that you wish to change which order comes before or after which, you can use the up and down arrows on the issued orders.

Macros are designed to make life a lot easier. We appreciate that freighters tend to run circular routes, we also know that a battle commander wants all the ships in the fleet to submit the same orders, even when run by different people.

For this reason we have created macros. These allow you to create a set of orders just as though you were creating them for a position.

A freight macro might be to move between a few outposts on a long circuitous route, picking up ores and dropping off at a base. You might call it the ‘Capellan Ore Freight 1’

Then all you need to is select the ships you wish to run these orders and select the macro ‘Capellan Ore Freight 1’ and it will then add all the specific orders that were listed in the macro to the position.

Like turns, we have allowed macros to be shared by players. A fleet commander could therefore create a patrol macro and inform the players in the fleet to run the macro for all their ships in the fleet. There has also been a security filter added to this though, thereby preventing just any person in the group having access to the macros - who knows what spies might be lurking?