Transporting Fleets

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, I think I'm getting conflicting input here: would transports be balanced if they cost 5x as much metal+crystal and energy? 10x? 20x?  The idea behind the speed-reduced-by-load thing is that having to have a lot more of them would solve the balance issue.  If that's not true, then that idea won't really help.

Increasing their fragility might make it better, but that would be a more invasive change code-wise.

Hmm, totally different idea: what if the transports self-attrition (lose health) per cycle in proportion to their load if in an AI-held system?  Or not in supply?

[corfe83]

Well, making them pretty expensive would help a lot I suppose. That in combination with the "slow down based on their % load" works well I think. Perhaps they should have a unit cap as well?

I like the attrition idea too, although I'll have to think about it some more.

[keith.lamothe]

My point about the expense is not to raise the cost but to raise the number of transports (and thus the cost) necessary to get a large enough fleet to "assassination speed", so if you were only using transports for less intense purposes it wouldn't cost any more.

[CodeMichael]

@corfe83

Speaking from experience, transports are cheap to build, but at 5k energy a crack they can overwhelm you very quickly.  I tend to ride on the edge of energy production as it is.  Most of the time I'd much rather have the resources that a Reactor II or III is eating than have excessive energy (I build Reactor IIIs but they spend most of their lives in offline mode).  Even so I think that the current speed of transports is ridiculous (when I'm using them to move ships across the same planet, they might be a little speedy).  Having to balance # of ships vs how quickly do I need to get something done is good.  If I have to stretch my resources to get optimal speed I think that's a good compromise.

@keith
Losing health while not in supply is a very interesting idea.  Depending on how you tweak that it makes deep raids less likely to be successful.  I couldn't, for example, take transports X hops from supply and expect to return with a full compliment of transports (and, most likely at that point, ships).  I could however pass ships across supply points that were X hops apart without much fear of losing them (and they'd need repairing afterwords).

In regards to increasing their cost, if they remain unchanged then I could see increasing their energy costs (10k energy per ship seems a little excessive, but I'm not sure).  This has roughly the same effect as making them slower with load (transport more ships quickly), but gives the player fewer options.  I don't feel like increasing their build cost helps fix any problems.

[CodeMichael]

My point about the expense is not to raise the cost but to raise the number of transports (and thus the cost) necessary to get a large enough fleet to "assassination speed", so if you were only using transports for less intense purposes it wouldn't cost any more.

I agree, this is the issue we should be addressing.

[corfe83]

Somehow I didn't notice transports had such high energy cost. I agree that does help mitigate the "just build a ton of them" issue.

In my current game I have space tanks, and it's tremendously easy to load 100 space tanks into a transport and take out the command center on any planet. I usually only lose a few, and I load the rest back into my transport and take them back through the friendly wormhole to help defend against all the loose ships that result. Raids to kill an ion cannon are much less successful, since they have so much health. Maybe the real solution to my problem is that AI command centers should just have more health on Mk. III and Mk. IV worlds. I'll have to think about this.

[x4000]

Right now transports are pretty darn expensive to use in any great bulk, given the high energy costs.  Making them any more fragile, or so that they carry fewer guys, is not a design change I'll be happy with.  Well, on the fragility thing, they could perhaps stand to have 20% to 40% lower health, though I'm not certain of it.  I wouldn't want to raise the knowledge cost significantly due to the common need for these units on maps such as snake, tree, etc, where the map is all but impossible without them.

I could potentially see increasing the energy cost to run these, but given that they are already at 5,000 energy I don't think that more than doubling or maybe tripling the energy costs would be warranted.

Probably the first thing to do is to try reducing their health by around 20% and see if that solves the issues.  These transports are meant to be able to take you pretty far into enemy territory (minus your starships), but not anywhere on the map.  Of course, if you are playing grid or hubs maps where everything is ~5 hops away from you at all times, then these will seem much more powerful.  On snake maps, where things can be 80 hops away, it's much less so.

[CodeMichael]

@corfe83
Actually command stations are intentionally moderate-to-easy to kill.  Teleport stations, for example, can assassinate any command station, anywhere, that's not locked inside a FFG.  The issue with killing command stations at-will is twofold: firstly you take an AIP hit, secondly you set loose all the ships on the planet, this can be a big problem if it is a mark III or a mark IV.  The Transports-as-deep raiders problem isn't command stations, it's all the other things.  Just last night me and a friend sent transports with an armada into a mark III system to take out a raid engine underneath a FFG.  Given our current resources, it wouldn't have been possible without the new transports.

@x4000
I'm glad to hear your thoughts.  Do you have a comment on the no-supply-degradation idea?  It might just be my favorite so far.




I think we can all get behind a "load to any available ship within X" command.

[IRANianCha0s]

Recently, I've been sending one or two transports into a heavily defended planet and sending them off into deep space, and when half the enemy ships are all chasing it, I send in my actual force.



Regarding transports, would you consider implementing a button combination where if you have transports selected, and you do <key> + right click on a unit/structure, the transports would unload their ships, and those ships would all immediately focus fire on what you <key> + right clicked on? It's definitely a cheap move, but fits in with the guerrilla strike feeling AI War can require.

[x4000]

Regarding no-supply-degradation, I think that could be highly undesirable in practice, because it would emphasize timing to a really great degree.  It would also lead to situations where you could get your fleet to some planet, and then there would be no way to bring that same fleet home (hmm, that part actually sounds pretty good).

I suppose that would make more sense if transports automatically regened in planets where there WAS supply, and automatically lost health everywhere else.  Really, the way that I am using transports right now is based on them losing health based on random enemies that the various planets, so it would be much the same thing.  To keep things simpler, possibly transports should then be invincible to normal attacks, and then have that sort of degradation-over-time.

Of course, "time" is a rather variable thing, too.  That will vary based on relative wormhole positions at each planet, and based on the attention of the player in some cases.  Possibly it would be better to just have "going through a wormhole into a non-supplied planet" cost (for instance) 1/5th of the max health of the transport.  That way you can make a total trip of 6 planets into enemy territory, or a round-trip of of 3 planets out and back.  But conversely, if you sent these along a path that included planets of your own on every 6ish hops, then you could send these very far indeed, which is also desirable.  Perhaps making it so that these heal superfast (as in 30ish seconds to completely heal from 1hp) when in supply would be good along with this.

Thinking about this more, that last paragraph is probably my preferred solution at the moment.  It's just a twist of the "time" based one, without making players rush.

[x4000]

Recently, I've been sending one or two transports into a heavily defended planet and sending them off into deep space, and when half the enemy ships are all chasing it, I send in my actual force.

Yeah, I know that one.  I think that my above comments in my last post would also address that.

Regarding transports, would you consider implementing a button combination where if you have transports selected, and you do <key> + right click on a unit/structure, the transports would unload their ships, and those ships would all immediately focus fire on what you <key> + right clicked on? It's definitely a cheap move, but fits in with the guerrilla strike feeling AI War can require.

Perhaps X+right-click, I think that would be good.  I do this also for gate-raiding of late, and also find this a challenge.  Keith?

Of course, I now realize that, by the same token, having transports lose health based on time or distance only, and being invulnerable other times, leads to bad situations with them being far too useful for gate raiding on planets, though. Hmmm...

[keith.lamothe]

I think the wormhole-hop-out-of-supply is a much better trigger for self-damage than time, thanks   Would probably be best to not make that proportional to load, as that would promote micro of popping units out before the hop, then back in on the other side (which would have a cost, but the micro would still probably be promoted).

I wouldn't say to make the transport invincible to normal damage, that damage is just part of the path cost, if you can avoid it then more power to you.

Perhaps X+right-click, I think that would be good.  I do this also for gate-raiding of late, and also find this a challenge.  Keith?

Can do, when I work tonight.

[x4000]

All good, Keith, I think those points all make sense.  Might need to make this take only 1/8th damage on going through each non-supplied wormhole in order to make it work with path damage.

[WinterBorn]

a differnt direction could be to make transports load/unload slower. Right now they seem to blow the walls off and everybody is out or in in notime. I've been at the back of a 747 with only one jetway active and it takes forever to get off. -- Slow load / unload cycles would still allow transport between planets but would make unloading on top of a defended hot spot suicide. as a variation a self destructive emergency unload (blow the walls off the transport -- it  loses 90% of its health but unloads fast) might be fun to play with - command station ion cannon raids still work but at the cost of getting home alive

[x4000]

Actually, I really like the idea of making them unload slower, though possibly not loading slower (since that would be a micro pain).  That would solve some of the exploits of them being able to unload to slowly.  Possibly only being able to unload 2 ships per game turn ( = 10 ships per second) would handle that.  Of course, if you want to scrap the entire transport, that would get everybody out instantly since that is also what (must) happen when the transport blows up due to enemy fire.

This would indeed encourage staging points rather than letting the transports be used as ways to get short-ranged ships past the advantage of longer-ranged stuff.  I like that a lot, actually.