Worst idea ever.  This would reduce teamwork in attacking, not increase it.

I suggested something simular About a year ago

Make it an op or spell and make du Able to hit hovering fleets

Because the current player base is lazy and not as reliable as in the past, If you wanted to raid someone, you often have fleets arriving at different times and some attackers arriving first and waiting for others.  This would now give way too much warning to the family being attacked to take the fleets out and build more fleet.   Also when in a cancellation war and the time is up, this would give away activity on fighter runs and hovering ground attacks.  By adding more silly things like this idea, it is only going to make some of the very few players that decide to attack anymore to be lazy about it and not do it.

so... you could send figs newtons up to stop them? or do droids get flying powers and get some action? also how would this fighting order go?

you send fighters(since bombers transports and ground are useless from what i assume)
and they fight thier fighters, then bombers, then transports? as no ground would be outside of transports

do NW resrictions and morale costs apply the same way?

also this reduces the importance of infils by a bit.

and last i fear that this can be abused with a bit of programming making auto-hide, attack options now possible.

perhaps this could be an op or ability given to resource,banker rolls at some sort of cost. with a difficulty to cast much higher than most self opps. so that it is only worth while durring war time.
also is this a granted gift or casted? i find it hard to beleive that every attack is seen in time to send a distress signal and call for help

also what happens if you win? the attacking fleet leaves without ever hitting the planet fleet? it stays there? when you loose the fleet stays there for another wave of attacks?

this would make people have to be awake the tic that thier fleet arrives, reducing the chance thier fleet will e hovering and leaving thier ports open to attack.

Yeah it would be an air fight.  As for what happens after, I'd imagine the attacking fleet would remain hovering, though in a very diminished state.  It would be up to the attacker at this point to decide if he wants to stil attack or would rather keep going.

That does bring up another idea though: the ability to move fleets to systems instead of planets.  In the example above the player could move his now-diminished fleet to a nearby system while he sends another reinforcement fleet to the same system.  This would favor attackers.

Speaking of that, dfsf I think you do have valid concerns but I don't agree that the current system "isn't broken".  Things are stale, and I think there's an opportunity for improvement that could make things less stale if we can just figure out the details.  IC's attacking is fun, but it is not perfect by any means.  I think part of the problem with this game is that everything is so planet-focused when things can and perhaps should be happening outside of the planet.

An improvement on my original post here:  What if instead of being able to detect enemy fleets over your planet by default, you could detect any fleets in your system but only through a special op, as twosidedeath mentions.  So the example would then be:

Player_A sends a fleet to Player_B's planet 3 in system 1:2, and things work how they currently do.
Anybody in system 1:2, regardless of family, can cast a spell (if they have it) to see if what fleets are in their system.  They would see Player_A's fleet.
Anybody who has this information can attack Player_A's fleet.

If Player_A has his fleet attacked, he can move it to another system.  Whoever attacked him wouldn't know whether this is a complete recall or if Player_A just moved it 1 tick away.  Meanwhile, Player_A can send in a replenishing fleet and then merge it with his original fleet.  Perhaps even as a counter-balance, Player_A would be able to cast a temporary cloaking spell on his fleet (if he has it).

What I'm suggesting is essentially the introduction of war on a system level instead of just a planet level.  It give systems a much higher purpose in the game, and allowing fleets to go to systems instead of just planets would allow for some very creative (and possibly sneaky) war planning.  On top of all that, families on the defense would be able to help each other out more than they currently are able to.

Better for attackers, better for defenders, and the current stale formula that everybody follows is turned on its head.

Some of the new changes are nice, but others are not.   You can try to add bells and whistles to cover up real issues but in the end it's not going to fix anything.  You have to fix the real issues at hand.

The attacking mechanics of a war game are hardly "bells and whistles".  The are at the heart of gameplay.

That serves a similar purpose, but from the other direction.  I don't necessarily know who might be entering my systems, so I wouldn't know who to infil.  Plus this would be for fleet-specific information from potentially numerous empires rather than multiple types of information from only one.

make this an op that lasts for 5-6 tics and is fleet hovering in the systems that player is in. this would be stationed fleet, hovering.

add a second side to this to make it more useful. add the option to station fleet for defence of a system. this stationed fleet would be the first phase before getting to a planet. this would allow attackers to dirrectly defend infra players. it would be similar to a DS. this gives large reason to have the new op.

dont touch this, please

it is not a minor change, it would affect to the heart of the game and requires further discussion, it is not a slight improvement and there's no reason to do it. There's no issue to be fizzed.

Waht's wrong with the current??  let me tell you how it works and why 'hovering' fleets are suposedly not seen:

"The fleets moving from one system to another system in a galazy they do it by creating 'wormholes' in the blank space, and the ETA is only an approachment of the minimum time for arrival, but the fleets can stay inside the wormhole as long as they need to.  When they finally decide to get out of the wormhole they're settled in the borders of the destination system, so they aren't really hovering a planet, that's wrong, they are hovering a system.
If an alien race wanted to attack the Earth from the outer space they'd be seen in the outskirts of Uranus or Pluton by an astronomic observatory, then we'd send a fleet to defend our planet before they arrive our orbit.
The fleets meet at midway in the orbit of Jupiter but the bombers have already sent their missiles to our defending lasers (notice we aint talking about common bombers). The airfight happens in the orbit of Jupiter and the remaining transports move along the system until they reach our orbit, then our remaining lasers hit some of them and the others land in our planet (ground battle)."

So fleets hovering a planet is a wrong concept, you can never know they're in a wormhole ready to hover your system, and this is perfectly correct because when you have a DS in that system, the attacking forces are hit by a defensive shield just after getting out of the wormhole.

Now do you want a new op??? 'Detect Wormhole'  it tells you which of your systems have an opened wormhole, this means enemy troops are moving thru that wormhole to attack one or more planets in that system (there's no way to know which planet). You can neither know the ETA, so what's the purpose of this op? well you can increase defenses, station units or even move the DS....now really, is this worth??