Expeditions

As promised, a guide to expedition fleets.

In constructing your fleet, there are a few principles you should keep in mind:

-You can never find more than 2 Million of any resource. A fleet with a cargo capacity larger than this is probably bigger than you want to use.
-The value of resources you can find is scaled according to the combined structural integrity of your fleet.
-The value of ships you can find is scaled according to structural integrity, and what type of ships you can find is determined by the strongest ship in your fleet. The combined value of ships you can find is never going to be more than 600K resources.
-Probes will greatly increase your odds of finding something useful. My experimentation has shown that their effectiveness increases with more probes sent along, but only to a point - anything more than 150 probes is unnecessary.

In theory, constructing a useful, balanced expedition fleet should consist of as many cargos as you can spare, up to the 2mil resource limit, one of your strongest ship (BUT SEE BELOW), 150 probes, and a smattering of fighters as an escort. This will, hopefully, maximize your potential finds while minimizing your risk of losing anything you can't cheaply replace. For the sake of maximizing your cargo cap in case you luck out and get one of those rare "fill up the entire hold" encounters, you should just use as many cargos as it takes to get to a 2 million capacity, but if you are building a fleet from scratch, remember: 5 small cargos might cost almost twice as much as a single large cargo, but their combined structural integrity is much greater, meaning better finds.

In choosing escorts, there are two things to keep in mind: The enemy fleet will never have ships stronger than your strongest ship (and probably won't come anywhere close once you get strong enough), and with exceptions, your strongest ship can find the next-strongest ship. You want to minimize the chance that they will field anything with rapid fire against cargoes, which means never send a cruiser on an expedition. Besides inviting pirates and aliens to tear into your cargos, cruisers also almost never, for whatever reason, seem to make the jump to finding battleships. Before I learned this lesson I had sent out dozens of expeditions with cruisers, and only ever found two battleships... which is small compensation for the hundreds of cargoes I lost in the process. Battleships, however, can find battlecruisers, battlecruisers can find bombers, and bombers can find destroyers. Destroyers can't find death stars, unfortunately, but they are still the best expedition escort by virtue of being faster, more durable, and less costly to move than bombers. If you find ships you can't build yet, resist the temptation to use them against enemies and instead send them along on expeditions, at least until you've got a healthy stockpile of destroyers to send along.

In regards to expedition length: Longer expeditions are supposed to make better finds, but I've found that sending out several one-hour expeditions over the course of the day is going to profit you more than a few long expeditions.

Hopefully this guide gives you a general idea of how to construct expedition fleets. As a final measure, here's an "ideal" fleet, according to my experimentation:

-400 Small Cargo
-150 Espionage Probe
-100 Heavy Fighter
-1 Destroyer

The destroyer almost always survives, and everything else is cheap enough that you can pretty easily replace losses. However, this "ideal" is difficult to construct and maintain even for me, so just try to get as close to it as you can.