Transport thoughts.

[allmybase]

I know I know

Transports can no longer be built, and are now a golem type. Broken transport golem, costs AIP to bring online, damages itself 12.5 % every jump, and is costly to repair 

[Voodoomancer]

Wait a second, you can still repair transports that aren't in supply right? So maybe actually the changes aren't enough if you can just move your transports off to the fringes of space every couple jumps to repair their damage.

That is a perfectly valid tactic, do not touch! *hizzzzzzzz*

And I think the 12,5 health penalty on wormhole exiting is too high, my transports are getting pounded into the dirt as it is 

[WinterBorn]

Since transports regen in friendly systems making them nonrepairable makes sense.

Mysterious Space Fungus reduces health of transports until they reach a friendly system. Scientists Baffled! Government Inquiry Planed

Other thoughts

Maybe the Mysterious Space Fungus should reduce transport speed as well (8-10% per jump)


Maneuverability nerf - Transports only go full speed from wormhole to wormhole in hostile systems- if given any other destination in a hostile system they go 1/2 to 1/3 speed.

Damage to ships in cargo - if a transport is scrapped or destroyed then the ships contained within suffer an adverse result:
Could loose 75% of their health
Could suffer 90% engine damage
Some % could be taken over by the AI or be destroyed outright (their crews were killed)

[eRe4s3r]

tbh, transports are still, even after the proposed changes way overpowered (short of "blow up if out of supply after 10 seconds (so that you can still bypass a defended wormhole but not much more than that!), i mean, i can see why people want to have them... they are literally the ultimate deep raid utility.

I only even bothered to try this because i was bored, and i am on my last branch to the last homeworld, pack up 3 fake transports, move them to the front of the formation, pack up your real formation, and pack up 3 fake transports at the end. give move order to your target planet and sit back. Its the ultimate deep raid convoy of death. If you take time to optimize position (bit space between fake ones) you will lose nothing.

I lost 0 transports anyhow, reached the planet i wanted which was not on alert and had only 500 ships on it (turrets and ships), it was cleansed within seconds. Then i followed my entire trail back, destroying the home stations and cutting planets off from supply in a huge chain, from this point on i had 6 ai planets cut from supply, and could fly through them at my leisure - the freed ships all trickled against my superior defenses. And i had a open path to the enemy homeworld minus its core defense worlds (it was a long branch ^^)

I am sorry, but this needs a big fat nerf. The ai does trail fake transports, thats true - but the ai also has to do it since deploying your fleet way out of range at the border means you can roll up entire planets from the backdoor or deploy WAY nastier things. Like 600 merc bombers and beeline to its command station.

There is only 1 working nerf for this, out of supply means you get 10 seconds where you can run as fast as you can at all full speed. After that its total engine failure without chance of repair.

Thats just my opinion though, i do not use transports because i think its sort of a cheat. ^^

[FrostyThePyro]

speed reduction outside of supply is a good idea.  And yea, transports should count as starships, both for the whole mass driver thing, and for mrs tugs (though if they are made unrepairable that wont matter).  Another thought would be taking them from inf engine health to high engin health (10k?) making them cumutively vulnerable to dreadnaughts, infiltrators, ioncannons and other engine damageing things

[Draxis]

Transports are still way over-powered, they allow you to completely side-step the few systems before the AI homeworlds.  The best nerf we could come up with was to reduce their speed to 20-something when they are out of supply.  You can still ship your missile frigates around your empire with them, you can still jump over the L4's before the AI homeworld (assuming you have an adjacent planet), but you cant just bypass every last enemy defence and detonate the transports on the AI homeworlds command station (then send in another wave of transports to extract your ships).  We killed one AI 8's homeworld 3 jumps from territory with our 3800 ships, and only lost 300 ships, mostly tech 1.  Everything else made it back alive.

[superking]

speed reduction outside of supply

This sounds to me like a good solution, the unload thing really isnt much of an issue if you play at normal combat speed

[eRe4s3r]

The unload thing is completely pointless, you can scrap the transports and it evicts all units at once. 

[allmybase]

Another thing with transports is that they actually favor you using normal combat settings (not fast and furious), the reason being that transports last much longer in regular mode where things arne't firing twice as fast with twice as much firepower. There are probably many examples of this where certain units get a lot more survivability.

[WinterBorn]

The unload thing is completely pointless, you can scrap the transports and it evicts all units at once. 

Thats why I suggested an adverse result to the "cargo" if a transport is scrapped or destroyed

[snip]

Damage to ships in cargo - if a transport is scrapped or destroyed then the ships contained within suffer an adverse result:
Could loose 75% of their health
Could suffer 90% engine damage
Some % could be taken over by the AI or be destroyed outright (their crews were killed?)

[eRe4s3r]

Even if engine are damaged you could still instant evict them right next to your target, no? Though damage is good and nice but even then you have at least some time with full firepower anyway - enough to obliterate anything i know off, short of an ai home base. Transport skimming = moving transports next to guard-post on homeworld, and evict have a 2nd transport pick your troops up again would still work with these limitations. To be honest, i am not even sure how to best nerf this unit i don't think any nerf would really make them useless.

Maybe if x4000 would consider upgrading the mines to actual minefields and giving transports a massive penalty in them.. or something

[WinterBorn]

Hmm

Transports went from slow and thin skinned (few could survive more that one or two jumps thru hostile planets as the AI tends to line up along the wormhole to wormhole track) to fast and very thick skinned able to raid to the end of the map.
Then the per jump damage with friendly system regen and slow unload was introduced . These are countered by bringing engineers and by scrapping.

Now ideas are showing up like:
making them unrepairable (stops the engineer repair ploy)
Stunning units, damaging units, destroying units when the transport is destroyed or scrapped (may counter some of the "drop on the AI and kill it instantly tactics)

Slowing the transport down either per jump or when off the track between wormholes (presumably doing a drop on the AI not transiting the system) may also inhibit AI drops to some degree as it would give the AI more time to engage the transports before they get to the target

In the extreme you could make transports unable to unload in a hostile system and 100% loss of cargo if scrapped or destroyed, then they would become cargo shuttles rather than equivelent to amphibious assault ships or airborn assault craft as they are now.

Maybe a middle ground is 100% cargo loss if the transport is scrapped or destroyed, and unloaded units are stunned (transiting from storage to combat status) for 60-120 seconds after unload.

I do agree that transports as they exist now they are more like carriers/Fast Assault shuttles than the plodding Liberty ships that needed convoys to survive the wolfpacks in WW2.

I'm not sure what x4000 wants their role to be. If it is a short range (1-2 system hop) Assault shuttle then a cumulative damage and speed nerf could be all he wants to change. If it is more of a traditional transport role, then making unloading in any form outside of a friendly system very detrimental to impossible for the cargo seems the direction to take.

[allmybase]

They should keep their core functionality which is to help fleet ships bypass mine/turret fields, as well as give them the speed boost.

What they shouldn't have is super long range raiding and decoy capabilities. Not sure how to separate those out

[eRe4s3r]

Indeed, no decoy would mean limiting their build limit somehow, massively

In fact, we should completely scrap the current concept of "transports" and instead only have 1 transport, that we can upgrade with more cargo space and which becomes slower the more cargo he has. (but sensible high values for 2000 ships - not 12 speed at 2000 ,p)

Limit it to 1 ship per player - so no decoys anymore. besides that it wouldn't need many changes, except of course scrapping = full loss of contents. Then you could have your mine/turret skipping but no decoy or skimming abilities.

Also i fully agree, the balance issue this 1 unit has had over the entire development is amazing. I have both played in versions where i had no idea what to use them for, as well as now where they are so useful that not using them is like gimping yourself.

Besides that, the only reason AI War needs a unit like transports is that the AI spawns turrets on wormholes, if we could make build zone around wormholes completely forbidden then there would be no problem, and no need for transports....

[alphaone]

I think people are making this more complicated than it has to be. The primary goal of a transport is to bypass mines and heavy wormhole clusters. Right now it does this too well and has too long a range. The simple answer is to reduce the health of the transport so it doesn't last as long and therefore can't travel as far. Although I personally don't have a problem with transports as they are. If I want less of a challenge I'll use transports to their maximum advantage. If I want a harder game, I'll limit the use of transports.