New colony ship: Armored

[chemical_art]

This seems okay. I was worried about the idea of basically a straight upgrade to something that already exists only for a very specialized purpose (colonizing planets). Any other straight upgrades don't render the old things obsolete because the old things can be built to their caps separately-- which gives you a whole lot of extra [whatever the thing does].
So yeah I dunno, 1000k to unlock a colony starship seems fine. I just don't want it to be the only way to go obviously.

Very understandable.

Yes, its meant to be a more costly solution to a niche solution overall: It would cost overall in the realm of a starship I would imagine, 100k M + C  (maybe 10k energy too).  Keep in mind it still suffers from colony ship's quirks: If the planet the starship like craft gets toast, your starship gets toast as well.

So if you are simply colonizing the planet next door, you would of course get the cheap colony ship. However, if you have a desire to deep-colonize, or you have a galaxy that is still unsafe after neutering, then it would be almost necessary.

[LaughingThesaurus]

That's a reasonable kind of cost, I like that.
I'm still wondering about just making it a cloaked colony ship instead though. Makes you have to actually work harder (or in different ways, I guess) for your ideal planet-to-capture. I mean, odds are if you're neutering planets, you're knocking out the tachyon guardians, so you should be able to slip a cloaked colony ship through. Difference is, you don't need to bring cloaker starship escorts along in the case of a very hostile environment.
On the other hand, a Colony Starship would suffer from, say, Orbital Mass Driver fire.

[KDR_11k]

A cloaked one would suffer from different things.

I think it's pretty valid to expect the player to get rid of OMDs along the path of the colony ship. They don't even give AIP!

[chemical_art]

Cloaked colony ships suffer form different problems.

Park a cloaked colony ship onto a neighboring border world, and then have instant access to a new colony ship if the world pops. Normally you would have to use a cloaker starship to do this, but you wouldn't need to tie on of them up.

On the other hand, re builders are cloaked too, so if you have a neutered path you can send rebuilders to your popped world and fix it anyway.

A large reason why I don't like it is that if <hostile ship> has tachyon coverage in large numbers, the original problem ensues.

On yet another hand cloaker colony ships would require no thought if the AI's bonus ship is not tachyon capable (but will be shut down if the AI does). The armored colony ship would need convoys to go for its intentional need of hostile environment and/or deep colonization, but the convoy if large enough will get the colony ship to its destination.

On the big picture though, either cloaking or starship like HP would be a great help.

[KDR_11k]

The rebuilders are why I'm not worried about cheese, once the rebuild delay is up it's very easy to rebuild the station anyway. That's why the rebuild delay is there. Also when you're rebuilding the colony station that's usually because everything is dead anyway so the planet has no strategic value until it is rebuilt (preventing deep strike doesn't require the command station to be intact).

[LaughingThesaurus]

I hadn't thought of cheesy nonsense with cloaked colony ships...

I'd say a 1-cap armored colony starship that costs a bunch is a good way to go here.

[Martyn van Buren]

Also favor armored.  You can built cloakers and make a basic colony ship cloaked, but there's no way to make it armored.

[Wanderer]

However, even with group move, there is a tiny delay between wormholes where colony ships are not cloaked.

For other ship classes, either said ships are numerous or tough. The colony ship has neither. As a result, the cloaker starship is not reliable for protecting colony ships outside transport range (3 or 4 jumps)

I've found to deal with this issue I use both cloakers simultaneously, and bracket the transport/whatnot that needs cloaking so there's always a cloaker on each side of the wormhole when the transport warps through.  I also use group-move as my default.

[chemical_art]

Pst...Keith

Are you opposed to the idea of a more durable re searchable colony ship?

I'm not so much concerned with the how as the if.


I will give disclosure: My current AI Wars game hinges on the answer to this question.

[keith.lamothe]

A researchable armored colony ship is ok with me if folks want it; I'm a bit busy with other stuff right now so it may be a bit until the next AIW release, but I'll keep this in mind