Foreign stations and moving ships

[cavgunner]

So, what exactly do foreign stations do?  Why are they important?  What is the overlap, if any, between assigning a ship to a "foreign station" and simply moving it to a different area of the map?

[aeson]

Foreign Stations essentially allows a ship to be anywhere it 'needs' to be, insofar as station requirements are concerned, regardless of where it actually is, up to the limit of what its tonnage allows it to cover. It's convenient and flexible, and depending on what you have available it might also be more efficient than assigning squadrons of ships to completely cover each station's requirements - you don't really need a pair of 4,500t cruisers to cover a station that only wants 6,000 tons, so maybe it'd be better to have one or both of them on Foreign Stations so that they can give you 6,000 tons on one station while counting 3,000 tons towards another.

Say you have three sea zones that each need 6,000 tons of ships on station. You can cover these with three ships that count for 6,000 tons each, one assigned to each sea zone. You can cover these with three ships that count for 6,000 tons each, all assigned to Foreign Stations. You can cover these with four ships of 4,500 tons, one assigned to each station and the fourth on Foreign Stations, or you can cover these with six ships of 4,500 tons, two assigned to each station.

If you lose a ship that you needed to cover station requirements and don't have anything you can immediately move into the area to replace it, you can assign a ship or two to Foreign Stations until you have the ability to replace the ship you lost. If you want to pull the entire colonial fleet in for a fire control upgrade but don't want to deal with shuffling ships around to keep stations covered while you're doing that, you can put a group of ships which add up to enough tonnage to cover your total station requirements on Foreign Stations and keep them there until you've finished refitting your colonial fleet and moving the ships back to their stations. If you don't want to deal with manually assigning ships to individual stations, you can just have a bunch of ships assigned to Foreign Stations instead.

The big downside to putting a ship on Foreign Stations is that you don't have much control over where a ship on Foreign Stations will actually be - you can order it to move to a sea zone, but it's not guaranteed to stay there, and if it's not actually there it's not going to help with invasion or be drawn for regular engagements in that area. Schrodinger's cruiser is useful for covering station requirements, but it cannot be counted upon for combat.

[arminpfano]

Maybe you have noticed that the crew level of ships at foreign stations diminishes, down to "poor". It seems that morale and competence suffers during the long months far away. But if you declare the ships as active fleet and let them at the same area, crew level rises up again.

[dorn]

May 31, 2019 13:47:51 GMT -6 arminpfano said:

Maybe you have noticed that the crew level of ships at foreign stations diminishes, down to "poor". It seems that morale and competence suffers during the long months far away. But if you declare the ships as active fleet and let them at the same area, crew level rises up again.

It did not happen to me decrease experience to poor. But I think it is link to movement. So if you let your colonial cruisers in one are, they experience will stay at good level.

It can happen with cramped accomodation on ships. They are suited for foreign station duties.