Transporting Fleets

[corfe83]

Lately I've been using transports, and am starting to feel their knowledge cost should be higher. By loading a Mk. I / Mk. II combined fleet into transports, I can shuttle around assassinating AI command centers at a rate of about 1 every 3 minutes. Even Mk. IV planets are easy (haven't tried higher yet). As long as I have enough turrets to catch the staggered remains, I can easily wipe out a whole section of the map that way. Yes I know the point isn't to take out all the AI planets, but this can be really useful on some maps to quickly clear out 10+ planets leaving only 1 or 2 chokepoints to defend, or clear out a cluster of planets with an advanced factory in the middle.

Anyway, I've found that when I have 10-15 transports, it becomes really hard to load my whole fleet into the transports. So far I do so by right-clicking one transport, then when it fills right-clicking on another, and so on until I've got all my ships in transports. This takes a while, though, and is annoying to do when trying to save my fleet after just assassinating another command center!

Is there a way to tell all selected ships to load themselves into the nearest transport?

Also, does anyone else feel transports are possibly overpowered?

[keith.lamothe]

The recent buffs may have made them a bit excessive.  Whether to re-nerf somewhat or raise the knowledge costs... well, I'm listening.  Theoretically we could have two tiers, the lower being cheap and slow, the higher being expensive and fast.  Not sure if that's really worth it.

[corfe83]

What about the other question - is there a way to tell my entire fleet to load up into the nearest transport? Right-clicking each transport in-turn is really slow (I can't even use shift to queue up load orders).

At first glance, the two tiers of transport ships sounds appealing to me. I think the Mk. I would have the current knowledge cost but be about half speed and a quarter HP, or something like that. The Mk. II can be the transport as it is now, but much more expensive knowledge-wise (3,000, perhaps).

I'll be curious what other members of the community say.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, sorry, yea, I saw the other question just forgot to type my reply.  Basically it's quite doable to have the logic be "on failure to load into a full transport, and there is a non-full transport within 2000 range units, go to that one", but the question is: is that acceptable default logic, or should it be a control node, or what?

And the Mk-split for transports is one way of dealing with the situation, but I'm actually feeling hesitant to do that for a unit that's been kinda marginal in use before, I'd rather find a balance that works for just one unit type.  But if people really want two marks I'm willing to do it.

[corfe83]

Regarding the controls issue, what if transports have a "free-range defender" mode. Here's how it would work. Let's say I put 10 transports in system X on FRD mode.

This option is available all the time, but we may need a new "idle transports go into FRD mode" control node to go with it:
1) If I manually load a group of ships into a transport and the transport doesn't have space for all of those ships, any FRD transports in the system will come pick up the rest of the ships that didn't have room.

These 2 options are only enabled by building a new "ferry transport behavior" control node:

2) Let's say I select 200 space tanks (or any unit that is <50% the speed of a transport), and send them to system K, which is ~10 hops away. Two of the FRD transports will automatically pick up the space tanks and carry them to the rally point at their destination, then return to system A

3) If I set my rally point for my ship constructor to system K, the transports will automatically pick up ships of <50% transport speed. They will wait for more ships to be produced as long as the ship constructor is actively producing ships of <50% transport speed. As soon as it switches to another item in the queue, is paused, or energy supplies are empty, etc. the transport will depart immediately with whatever ships have boarded, and again return when the ships are dropped off at their destination.

[XRsyst]

For what it's worth, you can probably more easily accomplish the "assination" style by using Mark I & II Raid ships.  The standard tactic I use when playing is to find a choke point, fill it with defenses, then send out my Raid ships to destroy all command centers, and reenforment points and let the freed ships crash into my defenses.  So I don't think it's something that makes transports too powerful as it just happens to be a valid tactic.

[corfe83]

I'll have to try with raid ships (and/or the raid starship).

I've tried a number of other ship types, and they all seem to get destroyed very, very quickly by the enormous buildup of Mk. IV ships that occur over time on a Mk. IV world (the Mk. II Ion Cannon hurts too), especially if the AI command center is far from a friendly wormhole. Transports make it easy where most ship types seem to leave it at "impossible to accomplish in a single raid".

[Nightchill]

I would like to see a control node that sets -

have the logic be "on failure to load into a full transport, and there is a non-full transport within 2000 range units, go to that one"

[XRsyst]

I'll have to try with raid ships (and/or the raid starship).

I've tried a number of other ship types, and they all seem to get destroyed very, very quickly by the enormous buildup of Mk. IV ships that occur over time on a Mk. IV world (the Mk. II Ion Cannon hurts too), especially if the AI command center is far from a friendly wormhole. Transports make it easy where most ship types seem to leave it at "impossible to accomplish in a single raid".

Yeah, if you let a level 4 get built up you're in a world of hurt.  I do a lot of my expansion planning around not doing things that will cause a level 4 to reinforce much before I can kill it.

Raid I ships die pretty fast, so you might just go with Raid 2+, but with those I can usually fly around the system, blow up the command center and all the reinforment points and get back with all my ships around half health, then rinse, repeat.  Also,the flying back isn't a big deal as they are so fast.

[Ozymandiaz]

I never used transports exaclty tis way, but i see how it can easily be done. Broken or not, I dunno. You still release teh whole lanets when you do so, and its not much different then sending in suicide waves or making snipers take care of the cmd center.

I think keeping one tier of trasnports is good, after all I see little use in a slow cheap one as it will just be like the old one that was not so good .

[CodeMichael]

With the way transports are now they are practically a necessity.  I can load up, travel across a large number of insanely hostile planets with no problems.  We've been using them in place of raid starships in a game i'm currently in.  Just load up, go hit the target, load up, leave.  It really creates minimal loss of ships while traveling.  Add decoys to make traveling across any system cost you nothing at all.

Balancing them is going to be a fine trick.  Making them slower seems like the best all around compromise, but if you make them too slow they become useless again.  Too few hit points and they'd be useless.  You need a sweet spot of "they can get you across X mark I planets, X-Y mark II, etc".

Multiple tiers strikes me as a bad idea, because you would end up not using the bottom tiers at all, unless you give them some kind of mechanic for boosting each other or a cap, which both sound like overly complicated/bad ideas.

Increasing their knowledge cost is not a bad plan.  If they were 7k then you'd have to choose between transports and Raid Starships I & II (which imo is what they're competing with at that kind of cost).

One thing that might work is decreasing their speed based on their load.  That would make them less useful as raid ships since you wouldn't be able to get in and out of inner-planetary locations as quickly.

Another option would be to give them a cooldown for when they can take on passengers again.  e.g. you hit unload and it is X minutes before you can load anything back in (example 10 minutes).  Deep raids would still be possible but you'd have to use twice as many transports (costing you a boatload of energy) if you wanted to keep the ships you sent.  It wouldn't effect transporting to new planets much at all.  It would also annoy the crap out of me ;-)

[CodeMichael]

Oh, I just thought of something that might be fun.  This idea goes on the assumption that you do not want transports used for assassination raids (kill and leave quickly).

2 transport types:
Minor transport
has a riot shield, lots of health and speed to match raid starships. can carry a small number of ships (10? 20?) but the idea is for it to carry a mobile builder onto new planets.  (also fun for knowledge raids).

Major transport
Can only travel between transport stations (should be available for free if you've purchased major transport and buildable by moble builders), carries tons of ships (500? 1000?).  Moves at very good clip (40? 50?).  Massive health and shields (effectively unkillable).  Can be turned around midflight, but ships in it can only be unloaded while at a transport station.

So the idea is that you could create train stations and shuttle ships between them. To attack a new planet many hops away you would need to send an advanced party with a mobile builder to put up a transport station that the big transport could travel too.  It doesn't allow you to do anything that you can't currently do with transports and limits their usage.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, combining:
1) load reduces speed (say, full load = half speed)
2) easy command telling selection ships to load themselves evenly into transports within 2000 range units of the clicked-destination (or inside a right-click-and-drag bounding box, as has been requested for other actions).

Could work to balance them a bit better.  Basically if you want 90% of the base speed you have to only use 20% capacity in each, which means building 5x as many transports, which could be considered a fair trade.  Of course, my numbers are pretty off, but I'm sure y'all'll let me know

Thoughts?

(oh, just saw the transport-station idea; I'd prefer not to do that unless really necessary as it's a whole new movement mechanic whereas a load-based speed penalty could be fairly orthogonal).

[CodeMichael]

@keith
I didn't honestly expect the train station idea to fly, but I thought that it was fun and wanted to share (but feel free to use it for the next xpac).
Your solution sounds like a good idea, it gives us flexibility without taking anything away (you can still do what you're doing right now it just costs more energy to accomplish it).  In cases where I just need to ferry ships across stretches of AI planets I can take a speed hit without it affecting my game.

I like it.

[corfe83]

I like the "easy command telling ships to load themselves evenly.." part of the solution.

I'm not sure I like the "load reduces speed" part of the solution; if transports get slower as they're loaded up more, to me that just gives motivation to build 10x as many transports, which is really easy to do I think (they aren't expensive or slow to build, and I think the unit cap is unlimited), and then split up your ships into 10x as many transports.

I have another idea - what if transports' speed is constant, but they become easier to kill the more empty they are? Or alternately, what if transports are extremely weak on defense (and popular targets for the AI) for 30 seconds after they unload?

The idea behind either of these changes is to make your transports are really beefy if you use them to transport your ships through enemy planets, but much less useful when using them to drop a huge fleet next to something heavily fortified (like an AI command center or an ion cannon). You may succeed assassinating your target, but your fleet will likely have no safe way home, because most / all of your transports were destroyed because you unloaded your ships right next to a bunch of AI fortifications. Players may then consider unloading ships from their transports away from the enemy fortifications, and approach them more normally, which I think solves the original loophole / overpoweredness.