On a related topic, where are my Tech III Engineers? 
Just give the Tech I & II cloaking and you're all set for two new Tech III ones! You don't even need to change the images, they'll have a purple halo to differentiate them from I & II (which is more visible then the art difference between the two! ).
Yes, I did just play a game with close to 40 planets and not enough of the little buggers to go around. That was only on an 80 planet map, I've no idea how people playing 120 planets cope!
Wow, you must have been using a lot of engineers -- I'm curious what you were doing with all of them. Generally I have around 4 active docks at once, and even if I have 3x engineers on all of those (which I usually don't), that's 12 engineers right there. Then I tend to have an engineer or two on the various contested planets, roaming around, and as soon as the planet is no longer contested I move them away.
I'm not too excited about giving them cloaking, just because I think that would be a bit overpowerful, but perhaps more health and letting them keep the teleportation. I've added it to my list. I doubt that I personally will ever find a use for them, but that's just me -- I certainly want to support a lot of play styles and different strategies, and if the knowledge is worth it to you to have tons of engineers, then okay! I'm actually really happy that you've clearly found something to do with them that I never thought of.
Hrm... last game had three or four active docks, plus Tech IV Factory, plus Starship factory, plus missile silo, each of which had 3 engineers on each, so that's 21 non-teleporting ones. For each planet with a wormhole that opens to a AI planet (that is, almost all of them) I have one teleport one on auto-repair, particularly heavily attacked planets (aka, the ones where I have to continually rebuild harvesters...) might get a second one, or have a couple of non-teleporting ones on auto-repair as well.
Then I usually try to drag 3 or 4 along with me whenever I'm going to drag a colony ship into a new world, to help it build up quicker, and repair ships a bit quicker as well. After which I build a teleporting one which helps build stuff and/or repair my ships as I reinforce the world (which remains there as it's "defense" repairer as mentioned above), then I plot on hitting the next world.
Essentially I setup most of my planets to be as self-sustaining as possible. Each wormhole to an AI world is fairly heavily turreted, also I usually leave a dozen assorted ships at each one as well so it has a nice variety of things should the AI throw something particularly offbeat at me. (I tend to play with the Schizophrenic AI modifier on; there's little more panic inducing then seeing a pair of attack starships wander through the wormhole along with a bunch of chaff, when 99.99% of your forces are on the other side of the map...)
As to the cloaking, maybe have them de-cloak whilst repairing? Only reason I'd want it is because by about half way through the game the AI seems to decide that the Engineers are the most threatening ship in the galaxy and so tends to take them out first.
Not that it'd help them much, but it would help defend them against sneak attacks by space planes.
Isn't using engineers to boost space docks only useful in an emergency?
To build a space dock and boost it using 3 engineers entails a total cost of 8200 Metal and 4100 Crystal. Using Mark III cruisers as an example this would allow you to pump out a cruiser every 7 seconds.
For a cost of 8000 Metal and 4000 Crystal I can build 8 space docks, with no engineers boosting the docks this allows me to build a Mark III cruiser every 3.75 seconds. Clearly this is much more efficient.
Very true -- this is why I don't have 3x engineers on all my docks. However, the one advantage that engineers have is their mobility. so, for example, I tend to build 6x engineers on my home planet for assisting space docks, and then shift them between planets as I decide to put up more forward space docks. Over time, that's a pretty large savings as long as the engineers don't get killed. With this strategy I do never wind up needing anywhere near even all the Mark I engineers, let alone any more -- but, I like I said above, to each his/her own.
That's pretty much the same reason for me. I tend to build all the big-ticket items on my home planet so at the start of the game having lots of spare engineers I can yank off a space dock to accelerate building something is convenient. Plus if I only have 3-4 docks (which eventually ends up being one dock per tech level, plus one dock that's usually populated with whatever happens to be the most-killed for that game, usually bombers or if the special ship has a ton of them in it's cap, that in addition to the normal tech queues), it means it's easy to shut off production of the less important items, then restart it quickly again.
Usually since I try to start on worlds with large numbers of wormholes (I usually try for 6 or more), most of the engineers I use were originally built to repair the defenses on the start world, or the first couple of worlds I take, wormholes (one engineer per wormhole, since they don't travel all that fast, teleport engineers I just have one per world). So the cost has already been paid for another use, so the accelleration of mostly free.
I have no where near the resource gather rate to sustain this level of production, let alone what it would be if I were utilising more docks, so engineer assistance would be futile. It would only be worth doing if I needed ships rapidly in order to defend a system and did not have time to build another dock.
Given that it is possible to have a whopping 30 space docks this is hardly restrictive, and the engineers are much more useful on repair duty. Still, I rarely manage to use up all my engineers in a game.
Yup, same here. The resources are limiting for me, also, way before I hit the engineer cap. I've been sort of thinking of the mobile repair station as basically the honorary Mark III engineer. It will be more useful once some of the current glitches are out of it, and once it has the space tugs to pull allied ships back to it for repairs.
I tend to play with both myself and the AIs at +50% resources, and even then it tends to be only near the end of the game when I have enough resources to run all the production facilities full tilt. Most of the use/abuse of engineers is so I can be lazy and minimize my interaction with the boring parts (economy, and slapping down annoying things killing my harvesters, and economy, and repairing defenses and rebuilding harvesters and occasional command centers, and well, economy
), so I can have fun with, well, pretty much everything that isn't an economics simulator.
