Okay, so I'm sort of thinking out loud here. At the moment, in my view transports are ALMOST perfect, but with one big glaring flaw: they can so easily be used to make offense against an enemy system vastly easier by bringing the transport up close to the command station (or whatever target) and deleting it. This devalues beachheads, skews the difficulty especially for new players who don't realize the power of transports-at-present, and so on.
So I want to make a change to them, probably a significant change, but I'm having trouble deciding on a design. With this topic I'm looking for feedback and ideas from the folks here.
Immutable Design Goals For TransportsThese are the things that I will not budge on, at all, period. If a design seems awesome but doesn't conform to these design goals, it has no chance of being considered, so please don't fill up space and waste your time with posting it. I don't mean to be harsh, just clear.
1. Transports must not be so powerful as to remove the logistical penalty of having your fleet in the wrong place at the wrong time.In other words, when you attack an enemy plant with your fleet, and then the enemy does a raid on an unprotected planet of yours several hops away, you're intended to be pretty much SOL. Transports should not be so fast and powerful that they can allow you to quickly reorganize your fleet to deal with any threat. That's the main benefit of teleporting ships, but anything else isn't allowed to violate that rule, or the risk/reward system of the ship caps goes down the toilet.
This pretty much rules out teleporting or warping transports, which otherwise are attractive to me for a few reasons. Perhaps if the right restrictions were placed on how they can teleport or warp, but I can't think of those at the moment.
2. Transports should be very effective at moving groups of ships between player planets, but at an increasing time-to-target based on the number of hops, etc.This is basically a corollary to the first.
3. Transports should be moderately-to-fairly effective at moving groups of ships about 3 hops into enemy territory.If there's a benefit to moving in bulk (as now, it spreads out the enemy firepower between the multiple targets, which helps), then so much the better. But that part is not a strict requirement.
4. Transports should be lowly-to-moderately effective at moving groups of ships about 5 hops into enemy territory, and that should be a 1-way trip if it's >= 4 hops.Right now this is accomplished with the self-attrition when moving through wormholes. Honestly, so far with my immutable design goals, the current transports implementation just does smashingly, right? I mean, this is why I say it's pretty much perfect with that one exception.
5. Transports should not provide a significant combat bonus within an individual system.This is a newly-added goal; when the current transports were designed, this was not a goal, but now it has become one because balancing the transports when taking them into a system hasn't worked out too well. Basically, in most cases there should not be a reason to use a transport to take your ships into an adjacent enemy system. The
one acceptable reason would be if the wormhole guards leading into that system were just so harsh that you needed to transport your guys into a safe zone and then unload, either for raiding or for establishing a beachhead. But that would be the extent of the benefit, ideally.
6. No Micromanagement NeededThis is the reason why transports just eject the guys inside when they die, rather than killing them. Otherwise you have to babysit the transports the entire way, and eject the guys right before death if death looks likely. Ugh.
Potential DesignsA number of these don't meet all the design criteria above (otherwise I'd just do one of them), but my hope is that posting my various avenues of thought and why I've discarded various potentials might help with the ideas others might have. It's possible that an invalid design can be tweaked to be valid with the addition of a few other ideas, after all.
For folks that might have an idea that almost-works-except-I-can't-solve-this-one-thing, please feel free to post with your caveat on that; my note at the start of the prior section wasn't intended to scare off that kind of post, just the "what if transports did something totally else" type of posts.
A. Warping Transports That Die On DeliveryThis would meet the goal #5 very well, and it could be made to work for ?#3 and #4 pretty easily, but it would violate goals #1 and #2 unless a time lag was put on the transports' warp. And that could be done. But in the meantime you'd have all these ships out there in limbo, which would be a real pain.
Unless, potentially, the transport just sat on the planet that it was warping from, with a "warp timer" counting down, after which it moved instantly. Then you could cancel the warp and get your guys out if you had to, while still having the time penalty. That actually would work really well.
But then there is a secondary problem of where the ships would actually appear when reaching the destination planet, which is not easy to solve. They could appear somewhere at random if no friendly ships are there, or they could appear next to a random friendly ship if friendly ships are there (so a scout could be seeded in enemy territory, for instance), or next to the command station if it's a friendly planet.
Of course, the scout thing could lead to abuse with the mark IV scouts, so maybe it would have to be limited to the lower-level scouts, which would get revealed by the tachyons of all the various guard posts and command stations. And I guess the guard posts and command stations would then ALL need to have tachyons, too.
This design might actually work, come to think of it, with the warp timer on local planet thing. That just occurred to me. Of course, it's a pretty big departure and would make the regenerating transports useless, but those could be turned into something else.
B. Lower-Heath Transports With No Self-Attrition But With Move RestrictionsBasically, transports simply would not be able to get further away than 5 hops, period. That would meet #4, mostly. With the lower health, it might be really hard to get them out to 5 hops, though, or even 3 sometimes. One of the benefits of the high health on the transports right now is that they are pretty reliable at going certain distances, which is important. With more fragile transports, they would be pretty bad at #3. And if the health wasn't low enough, then it wouldn't meet #5. And I'm not sure this would meet #5, anyway.
All in all, this one seems un-salvageable.
C. Anti-Transport Guns on AI Guard Posts And Command StationsBasically, the current model of transports is great, except that they provide that bonus when parking right up next to the big AI structures. Well -- the AI structures of note are always next to a guard post or command station. So if those had a big gun, that killed transports that got too near, that would be helpful.
Except not, because that would just eject all the ships inside the transport, unless that was changed. But then THAT would make transport use really risky because they tend to die on 3-4 hops, and then you have the whole micromanagement issue that invalidates #6.
Not to mention that the transports have a legitimate reason to pass by command stations and guard posts while en route to a different planet, and they'd get shot to pieces in those circumstances, which would randomly violate both #3 and #4. Unless there was some sort of "transports are immune while going cross-planet" logic, but then players could give extra-far move orders to go cross planet, and then could simply cancel those when the transport was in range of the target structure, so long as the target structure was within a line between the destination and the starting point. So that would violate #5 and #6.
This one seems even more un-salvageable than B, above.
Conclusion So FarSo far, A is actually looking fairly promising with the additions that I'd just made there. But I'm not of the belief that it's watertight just yet, and it's enough work that I'd rather discuss it before just springing it on people. And it's a fairly significant departure from the current transport model, which is both a good and a bad thing. I really do love the current model with just the one exception, and going in such a drastically different direction is not my first choice under ideal circumstances.
Anyway... what do people think?
