Movement

Strategic movement in FrEee uses an initiative system based on ships' speed. Each ship gets an opportunity to move X times per turn, evenly divided throughout the turn, where X is the ship's speed. Unlike in SE4, there is no fixed number of "days" per turn; instead, the turn is divided up into however many time chunks are needed.

A ship's speed is computed using the following formula:

#!c#

Thrust / Mass + Bonus + Extra

where:

• Thrust is the ship's Standard Ship Movement ability
• Mass is the Engines Per Move rating of the ship's hull
• Bonus is the ship's Movement Bonus ability (in stock, this is provided by advanced engines)
• Extra is the ship's Extra Movement Generation ability (in stock, this is provided by solar sails)

There is one special case: if Mass is zero, the ship will always have zero movement, regardless of any other factors. Also, if Thrust is not an exact multiple of Mass, then the result of dividing them will be truncated (e.g. 7 thrust and 2 mass provides 3 speed).

Not all ship actions consume movement. Actions which consume movement currently always consume exactly one movement and take an amount of time equal to 1 turn divided by the ship's speed. This may change at some point in the future. Examples of ship actions that consume movement are moving, warping, and colonizing. Examples of actions that do not consume movement are transferring cargo and construction.