Do you feel Transports are too weak?

[Vinraith]

Not having seen this problem myself, I'm suspicious that it's a scaling isue either with ship cap (I play on normal) or game speed (I play on epic). Is this one of those things only the normal/blitz-speed players are seeing?

[Varone]

The AI has autobombs in my game and unless i neuter the planet first any transport that enters the system goes boom

[lanstro]

The balance seems alright right now.  Maybe you could make them a little bit cheaper, but durability seems at about the right level.

The last game I played, they were almost completely countered by gravity rippers, which made them almost useless when used without decoy transports.  However it's not every game that you get gravity rippers. 

[TechSY730]

Overall that brief exposure to the Spireling AI felt like it should be made a 'hard' AI, it has over-ship-cap of many spire ships even on a world that has less than 100 ships. 10% of all it's ships being blade spawners... ugh, can you say ouch? With gravity drains all around you can't even get to them=)

Well about this part, it seems it (or part of it) has been fixed.

• Fixed a relatively longstanding bug where AIPerPlanetShipCap and AIPerGuardPostShipCap were generally not being enforced when loading a game (either just-starting or loading later).

[keith.lamothe]

Here is a save for you keith of the current game going.   Both ends of the bottleneck got around 600-800 ships.  I took 12 transports up north to the p4 and they pretty much got insta popped once they got there.  (FYI they had supply at the time, I had to revert the save due to me sending emps at the same time...that didn't work out so well... )  Hope it helps you track what your looking for.

I don't have the transports built at this moment.  I only have 1 in the bottleneck.  But you can take it on a cruise next door where 600 ships + a carrier are, and see how far you can get.

Ohhhh, I had suspected this: it's the giant stalking groups of AI ships.  Yea, there's not much you can do to get any one ship through 600 mkIII (if I read it correctly) AI ships.  Not sure what to do about that other than maybe give MkII transports cloaking or something like that.  I had been thinking of giving transports radar-jamming but it wouldn't really help in this case.

Has anyone seen alarmingly low transport durability in a case _other_ than a big pile of stalking AI ships on the other side of the wormhole?  Save?

Thanks

[Rustayne]

Well how well are they supposed to survive against a system that has 600 or so, but spread out some.  Like a normal mk3 system after they are put on alert.  I took 20 of them filled with my fleet to go deal with a superfort, and they didn't even make it halfway through the system before dying.  They had a station next door to it, so there was no 35% degrade on them.  Took me EMP'ing the system to get the transports to the side with the superfort, but they were badly beat up still.  Maybe it is just me remembering how nice they used to be, but they really seem useless for moving to objectives in a hostile system, which is what I thought they were supposed to be used for.

[BobTheJanitor]

Maybe the amount of threat that a transport generates could be tweaked? Are the AI basing the firepower rating of it on the number of ships that it's carrying? Because that could make a lot more break off and attack it.

[TechSY730]

Well how well are they supposed to survive against a system that has 600 or so, but spread out some.  Like a normal mk3 system after they are put on alert.  I took 20 of them filled with my fleet to go deal with a superfort, and they didn't even make it halfway through the system before dying.  They had a station next door to it, so there was no 35% degrade on them.  Took me EMP'ing the system to get the transports to the side with the superfort, but they were badly beat up still.  Maybe it is just me remembering how nice they used to be, but they really seem useless for moving to objectives in a hostile system, which is what I thought they were supposed to be used for.

Do you have a save from when that planet was untraversible by a solitary transport? It would be nice to see what is taking out the transport so quickly and why the AI is reacting to it as it did.

[BobTheJanitor]

Do you have a save from when that planet was untraversible by a solitary transport? It would be nice to see what is taking out the transport so quickly and why the AI is reacting to it as it did.

If it's from the scenario with 600 stalking ships on the wormhole, just about anything going through there is going to get plowed. Something is going to have to clear those ships first. That's the kind of thing I love when Spirecraft are on. Send one martyr through and scrap it and suddenly you have a nice clean wormhole.  Otherwise, warheads or just fleet ships will need to clean it up. Although a big enough fleet to clean that up might just end up pulling even more ships over to the wormhole...

I guess the real problem comes when you end up doing so much work to clean a system so your transport can get through that you might as well just outright neuter or capture the world. Then you wonder why you're using a transport in the first place.

[LordSloth]

I've seen some appalling survivability BEFORE the fortress range reduction, but that's a moot point.

Has the mark two transport been tweaked any time in January? The ability to heal ships inside, is practically non-existent. Perhaps you could replace that with some kind of cloaking or radar jamming? I'm thinking the problem the transports have is the same as Stealth Battleships have if you're not conducting hit and runs - a few million health isn't nearly as big a deal as it sounds. Mind you, right now, I'm reinstalling AI War for the extra music tracks, so I can't check.

[Rustayne]

Well how well are they supposed to survive against a system that has 600 or so, but spread out some.  Like a normal mk3 system after they are put on alert.  I took 20 of them filled with my fleet to go deal with a superfort, and they didn't even make it halfway through the system before dying.  They had a station next door to it, so there was no 35% degrade on them.  Took me EMP'ing the system to get the transports to the side with the superfort, but they were badly beat up still.  Maybe it is just me remembering how nice they used to be, but they really seem useless for moving to objectives in a hostile system, which is what I thought they were supposed to be used for.

Do you have a save from when that planet was untraversible by a solitary transport? It would be nice to see what is taking out the transport so quickly and why the AI is reacting to it as it did.

Sadly no.  I saved over the instance I was talking about with the super fortress.  I had already killed it and gotten the shard back, so figured that would be a good place to call it a day.  If your willing though, you can take 5 mins and build a station up north, where the super fort is, and try it yourself.  The save is attached earlier in the thread.  It only took me a couple mins to get it all setup.

[Sunshine!]

No save for transports, but my problem is usually with the Guardians - laser, artillery, beam and I think there's one other main combat one I'm not remembering all have ridiculously high damage, and get get numerous shots off on transports because of their long range.  If there are guardians on the wormhole, or on nearby guard posts, I can usually expect my transports to not get far.  Same thing if a Fortress is within range of either wormhole or some point on the path between wormholes - at least that was the case before they took the penalty against Scouts.

[TechSY730]

No save for transports, but my problem is usually with the Guardians - laser, artillery, beam and I think there's one other main combat one I'm not remembering all have ridiculously high damage, and get get numerous shots off on transports because of their long range.  If there are guardians on the wormhole, or on nearby guard posts, I can usually expect my transports to not get far.  Same thing if a Fortress is within range of either wormhole or some point on the path between wormholes - at least that was the case before they took the penalty against Scouts.

It used to be worse. Artillery guardians (and I think one other in your list) used to have a multiplier against scout hulls.