Transporting Fleets

[keith.lamothe]

Flashback to design meeting...

Engineer: "Here's the specs on the new transport, sir"
Manager: "Wow, O(1) unload time. I'm impressed, how did you manage it?"
Engineer: "Um, well..."
Manager: "Wait a sec, those boxes spaced every 10 feet on the outer frame look an awful lot like C-4..."

Lol at "blow the walls off"

[x4000]

Flashback to design meeting...

Engineer: "Here's the specs on the new transport, sir"
Manager: "Wow, O(1) unload time. I'm impressed, how did you manage it?"
Engineer: "Um, well..."

Lol at "blow the walls off"

 

[corfe83]

Ooh, I like the "unload slower" idea too. I like that it might encourage using staging points for invasions too, and yet it wouldn't at all hinder transports' abilities to pass through enemy systems without doing battle.

[CodeMichael]

Slow unloading, that makes them useless for raiding unless you sacrifice the transport.  Makes sense to me.  Now I have to pack a mobile builder and a bunch of engineers on transport raids, I like it!

It would be nice if they could unload instantly on planets with supply, as I cant currently think of how that would be unbalancing.

[x4000]

It would be nice if they could unload instantly on planets with supply, as I cant currently think of how that would be unbalancing.

Yeah, I agree.

[CodeMichael]

And we still end up with the ability to take more transports that aren't fully loaded if we need to be able to do a quick unload.  As I'm running the numbers in my head, 10 ships a second might be a little fast if you're trying to prevent deep assassin raids, unless you also have a load time.  Play with the numbers, see what you think works.

[CodeMichael]

You could also increase the ship capacity and energy cost of transports in addition to the slow unload time to get  the numbers you want.  e.g. transports can carry 200 ships, cost 10k energy, and unload 10 ships a second.

[x4000]

Having fewer transports with higher capacity in that manner would also be good for concentrating enemy fire on them more, which is also desirable.  And not requiring SO many of them.  I think the idea of doubling capacity and energy cost, and leaving it as 10/s unload rate, is a good one.

[corfe83]

This has been quite a discussion. The result sounds great to me, too.

[CodeMichael]

Is the plan to keep the health the same or double it?  It seems to me that instead of doubling it you could go with +60% giving you the 20% health reduction you'd talked about earlier.

While we're talking about transports, one enhancement I'd like is the ability to unload by ship type.

[x4000]

I was figuring on leaving it the same, at least to start.

[Nightchill]

If transports get an unload per second restriction to make them harder to use in raiding, maybe raid starships should get a boost.
They take damage from mines (can be a problem when playing against a Mine Enthusiast) and can have trouble at heavily defended wormholes as they do not have cloaking.

 

[Draxis]

How about transports that are more like drop pods?  You load them up, give them a destination that cannot be changed, and they fly real fast to that system and explode, releasing all your units at the wormhole.  That way they can be low knowledge cost and cheap on resources.

[Ozymandiaz]

One other use I have found for transports however is science raiding.

Takea  few Mk II labs in it, send it to a WH, and make the transport move way off map center. Unload, grab tech, go home. All before the AI reached you. Does not work as well with Raid starships or toher super fast units around however.

[WinterBorn]

You can get around the 10 per second offload rule by scrapping the transport (blow the walls off - emergency eject)  or splitting units up into more transports all unloading simultaneously (more cost in res and energy) -- if you scrap unload you would need to bring an empty transport to pick up the survivors and as a bonus tactic the empty one could go in 1st to distract/lure the AI mobile forces away from your target disembark area.
Your Science raids should still work - just need more planning and one extra transport per destination and the empty luretransport might make it easier in some cases.

I think the whole idea is to make transports used as "Assault shuttles" more of a challenge and more costly but not impossible.

In my current game I started in a corner of an 8 system pocket with only 2 entrances to the pocket AI 7 and 7.3
I built 63 vampires and one shuttle and killed the command stations and guard stations of 4 of the planets very early in the game without returning to my homeworld for repairs or replacements because I could dump all 63 vamps right next to the target hot keyed the vamps to attack the station then jump back into the transport immediately. If I had to unload slower at the edge of the system the ion cannons would have had more time to work on my guys. Or I would hav had to bring 5 or 6 transports (50 or 60 k in energy)


I've started using transports to get scouts out to the edge of tough planets or past tough ones to extend their (the scouts) range. I'm going to start using you idea for science raiding

Thanks