Fleet Evaluator

Knowing your enemy is a vital part of winning a war, nobody has to tell you that. Experience and research can help you a lot in knowing your enemy. You may know from previous games how race X is likely to act, and how you can counter their moves. By doing some searching around you can also find out some common tactics even without ever having faced them in a game.

But when it comes to the real deal, knowing their tactics is not all there is to it. Wouldn't it be nice to know how many and what ships you're up against? You could try keeping notes of every enemy ship you ever see, but that's a bit senseless. Fleet Evaluator can do this for you.

Fleet Evaluator goes through your unpacked RST (and, if you have them, RSTs from your allies too) like a regular Sherlock Holmes to find out all it can about your enemies' warfleets. It can then report it's findings into some very clear and easy to use plain text files so that you know what you're up against.

I call Fleet Evaluator a "fire and forget" utility, since it becomes more useful over the course of a game. Ofcourse there is not much of an enemy fleet to report on at turn two, but once you've met some neighbours and/or sent out some scouts it gets to build up quite a useful database.

The program writes four convenient lists for you. It can produce listings of all known ships sorted by ID or mass, but probably more useful: it can create lists sorted by race. The first option is to create a file with a list of all ships for each race. This results in a list of ships for each race, including the ships' names, types, last known coordinates, warpsetting and heading.

As easy reference Fleet Evaluator can also give you a summary of each race's fleet, similar to what Echoview can show. Instead of the usual division in warships and freighters this list specifies what known ships that race has, which is a bit more useful (e.g. "3 Q tankers and one Pawn" or "2 Golems, 1 Automa and 1 Instrumentality" tells you a lot more than "4 battleships")

Fleet Evaluator is very easy to use and comes clearly documented, and once you have included it in your batchfiles you'll hardly notice you are using it. Until you have a look at it's assembled information ofcourse....