Patrolling trade routes?

[Shadowlord]

Can you assign fleets to patrol trade routes, or to protect the freighters on the routes? Or would you have to micro-manage them to do that?

[oldstatesman]

If not, that would be a great additon IMHO. The ability to form trade 'convoys' with escorts would be cool - as long as it was not too mm intense.

On Edit:
This would go great hand in hand with 'stealth' type ships you posted about in another thread - acting as intersteller 'submarines' for lack of a better word.

[proviisori]

I think you can't. If you want you have to mm it. I might be wrong on this because I'm still a newbie regarding this game.

[bonscott]

There is a wonder you can build which will protect your trade freighters. Nice one to get.

[Veblen]

Here's something that I've found works.

1. As much as possible, try to keep your freighters in a fairly compact lane. I usually build them in only a few planets, ideally close together, and send them to a destination planets that are close to each other. This keeps your freighters in a together along a narrow highway from your planets to your trade partners', and means you can defend them with fewer ships.

2. Sensor ships are cheap. Cargo hull, a couple engines, and as many sensors as you can fit. These are so useful, in fact, that I never put any sensors on any other ships (after the opening--sometimes it's helpful to have an extra anomaly-grabber). A few of these posted along the route will help you spot pirates and other threats.

3. The sensor ships should give you enough advance warning to dispatch an intercept fleet. If there are many threats, the intercept fleet many be best posted out in deep space near your routes, although I've found there are usually enough ships moving around that I can divert a few to deal with threats to shipping, and not have a fleet dedicated to freighter defense. You can lose a freighter or two without losing the route, so you have some time.

Overall, it's an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure situation. If keep your routes together and away from current or future enemies and post some sensor ships in the area, it becomes relatively easy to respond to threats.

[Peets]

It takes a while before a trade route goes away.
So when they are attacking one, you have time to intercept.

[Hansolo88]

I've wondered about that myself, I'll attack and kill freighters along a trade route, but the route itself seems to persist. How many times do you have to kill the mini-freighter before the route dissapears, I wonder?

Regarding sensor ships, yes they work great. I have a new class of ship that I call "Science Vessel" (tribute to Scarcraft) that I have started building early in the game; cargo hull, engines, survey module, and the rest packed with sensors. The survey module has 2 pscs of inherent sensors capability and isn't too big, so its a doubly nice to have since it can explore anomalies too.