(QUOTE)Originally posted by Martin Turner:
(B)This takes us back to the dark days before EVO 1.0.2.
In EVO 1.0.1, the 'ships start disabled' flag didn't work. I passed this on to Matt via David Dunham, who said he would fix it. In EVO 1.0.2, along with many, many extremely cool features, it does work, which means that the ships should no longer by disabled with full shields. I'm fairly sure that I've checked this and it's fine if not I must have dreamt it.
It sounds like you were playing on 1.0.1.
As for forbidden planets, you may also have a problem if you've offended an ally of the govt.
I was playing on version 1.0.2 and i'm sure i've had the same problem before when i was trying to develop Asteroid Cruisers called Roks, they just stood still in the system and did nothing, but that was a long time ago and now i've fixed the current problem but i still don't know what went wrong.
I just ditched the Dudes then rewrote them identical to what they were before
and everything worked fine. Weird