What causes blockade fleets to lose supply?

[von Beanie]

I just had much of my blockade fleet become unsupplied. I have no idea why it happened, or how I can prevent it.

So I extracted the unsupplied fleet units and tried to recombine them to send them to a port. But I can't seem to recombine the fleets anymore in the naval boxes. Are there new bugs with the naval units, because I don't recall these problems happening in the earlier versions of the game?

[Rafiki]

Unless you have chosen the option to have fleets in blockade boxes not use supplies, they'll use supplies just like any other.

As for the recombining problems, I've seen the same. What I do is move the destination fleet to a different part of the blockade box, then I drag the tab of the merging fleet onto the destination fleet's icon (quickly, since the destination fleet tends to "bounce back").

[von Beanie]

Where do the ships get the supply that they use? I can trace a supply line to nearby ports. And one of the ships that became unsupplied was a transport ship I believe (with supplies I think).

Could you briefly explain how to keep the ships at sea supplied...OR, if they must periodically move to a port for resupply, how can you tell ahead of time when that will need to be done?

[Rafiki]

Ships need to go to a port to get resupplied. They can get general supply if they are next to a land region with a stockpile, but that is far from the case in the blockade boxes.

To see how much supply your fleet has, and how much it uses, simply hover your mouse over the supply icon on the unit display. The supply of the individual units may vary a bit, but I don't know exactly what will happen if a unit runs out while other units in the stack have supplies remaining, e.g. whether they'll redistribute or not.

[richfed]

I have experienced the non-combining thing with fleets. Discovered that you need to make sure your screen is located over the actual area [not just the tabs]. Then everything will merge nicely.

[Rafiki]

I have had the screen located over the area, and still had to follow the procedure outlined above.

[Le Ricain]

Of course, the other way to supply blockading ships is to shuttle transport ships back and forth from the ports. In the blockade box, simply combine the transports with the blockade fleet (either by tabs which can be difficult or by directly placing one unit on top of the other) and the supplies are distributed throughout the fleet's elements.

When the fleet's supplies start to become low, seperate the transports which will be empty and send them back to port.