Transporting Fleets

[superspeck]

Just started using transports last night, and I burnt through a level IV planet with about 1/3 the effort I felt it should have taken.

They're a complete game-changer, and they're essential to gameplay as they currently are. With 4 million HP, I can wormhole in, transit an entire sector to an ion cannon, use 600 Tech-I and Tech-II ships to blow the special ops post that it's protecting, load back up, and wormhole out losing maybe 1/5th of my entire force.

After doing a few more ludicrous things, like crossing half of known space to take out a datacenter just for the hell of it, blowing a command center in a dead-end level IV planet that had built up to about 3,000 tech-IV ships into a flypaper system that bulked my fleet by about 500 level IV units, and several other sick and sadistic things, I came up with a few recommendations.

1) Transports are basically big, empty volume that stores ships. They don't have 4 million points of armor covering the entire thing. Ships that are inside should take damage (spread out over the entire thing) at the same rate the transport itself does.
1.1) This should extend to ion cannons. An ion cannon that can single-shot a normal ship should single-shot a ship inside a transport, or do the equivalent.
2) Transports need to unload slower. They should need a beachhead to expand into, as opposed to BEING a beachhead.
2.1) It might be worthwhile to explore an "Assault Transport", "Raid Transport" or "Breaching Craft" sort of unit that takes the place of the guerilla role. Smaller unit capacity, lower expense, same fast speed and without the "holes in the outside damage things on the inside" nerf
2.2) Add a "Fleet Transport" that moves relatively slowly but can haul 500-1000 ships + a flagship/Light Starship for those long-distance delivery runs of an entire fleet.
2.3) Assault Transports should not be able to hold starships, but bigger transports should be able to. Having to wait a half hour for your dreadnaught to transit five planets sucks when the rest of your units got there in thirty seconds in the transports.

I would also categorize them as a starship and build them in a starship shipyard.

[Thiima]

Definately have to agree with superspeck.

Noticed on monday that they had insane stat increases (I was quite content using them when they were 580k health and 12 speed to transport colonising fleets about (with a few starship escorts)).

So I decided with a friend to see how far their usefulness could be pushed, and we're easily holding our own against two difficulty 10 ai's (one entrance to our cluster of systems thats heavily defended, whilst transports push out with 100 or so fighters to blow command stations on opportune planets, the retaliating ai's hit our wall of defenses and perish, so eventually I dont see any reason that we won't win it)

They make the higher tier scouts a bit redundant, as all you need to do is load one into a transport and can go scout the entire map, and you dont have to worry about whether your colonising fleets will survive the long trek to a distant star, as now you can be guarnteed they will get there 100% intact.

they definately need to lose some health / shields, and maybe knock the speed down to levels of starships, so that they can maintain a reasonable speed and have the starship escort providing enough protection to help them reach their target safely except in really extreme cases like AI Homeworlds (Maybe make mass drivers target them?) as currently I can load up 10-20 transports with bombers and tanks and obliterate a home command station in a fairly short period of time.

Sorry about all the incoherent babbling, but just felt I needed to say something.

EDIT: Slightly off topic, but thought i'd mention it, has anyone noticed that the AI progress sometimes isn't going up after its scheduled interval sometimes, or is it just me (Playing 1 AI progress every 5 minutes)

[WinterBorn]

I like the idea of some kind of "Super Guppy" that could haul the Slower starships like the dreadnaught or an outrageous number of small ships and would require the Stardock to build.

I would not like to see the current transports loose speed.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, don't want to change everything at once, but a first batch for 3.083:

-Transports:
Capacity from 100 to 200
Energy cost from 5000 to 10000
Metal/Crystal cost from 5000/3000 to 10000/6000
Now unloads a maximum of 10 ships per game second if out of supply, still unloads all if in supply or scrapped/destroyed.
Now loses 12.5% of max health when traversing a wormhole to a planet that is out-of-supply.
Now regens health very quickly (30 seconds from 1hp to full) when on a planet controlled by its team that is in supply.


Thanks for the discussion and suggestions, everyone

[xeren]

Why does the transport lose health by going through a wormhole? That seems really unintuitive

[keith.lamothe]

EDIT: Slightly off topic, but thought i'd mention it, has anyone noticed that the AI progress sometimes isn't going up after its scheduled interval sometimes, or is it just me (Playing 1 AI progress every 5 minutes)

That could be due to a fix we made a few versions ago to prevent it from "doubling" the progress when loading an autosave on the exact game second of the increase.  If you could post a save before an expected-auto-progress-that-doesn't-happen in the bug report forum I can take a look

Why does the transport lose health by going through a wormhole? That seems really unintuitive

I was going with Chris's suggestion earlier in place of the earlier idea of having the transport gradually lose health out-of-supply.  Both ideas are designed to reduce the currently nearly-infinite depth of deep raiding you can do with the transports.

As for intuitive, the lore explanation could be that the transports are almost too big to go through a wormhole and need special stabilizers (handily equipped on all friendly command stations) or it's a rough ride.  Said stabilization effect extends one planet out from each friendly wormhole.

In any event, if the mechanic proves undesirable it's a <1 minute change to remove

[IRANianCha0s]

Another "cheap" strategy involving transports: to attack the each planet, we would send in an empty transport, move it WAY into deep space, and then when almost all of their forces chase it and are far away enough, we send in our actual fleet.

And yes, as mentioned earlier, we now use transports for everything: attacking, knowledge stealing, even scouting (fill it with 10 scouts, go to planet, drop one off, repeat).

[snrub_guy]

Just throwing this out there, but what if transports were vulnerable to Orbital Mass Drivers? Or there was something similar to kill transports more easily on some of the A.I's planets, or a transport tractor beam turret? This would help prevent really deep raids and deep scouting with them by throwing up planets that the transports cant just rush through. Like can happen now with scouts hitting planets with ion cannons and sensors or whatever.

Just a thought.

[xeren]

Another possibility would be an AI only turret that they automatically build in response to deep transport raids, and gives a warning similar to the Ion Cannon when it has been built and your transports start getting shot up by it.

[WinterBorn]

The new 3082 Heavy Beam Cannons hose the Transports in almost no time. -- I hav only been able to get single transports past one planet with the new cannons the 2cond planet it hits with the new beam cannon will kill it.

[keith.lamothe]

There won't be so many AI cannons in the next prerelease... well, for new games started in the next prerelease; existing games started in 3.082 will retain their existing populations (though it won't plant so many moving forward).

[HitmanN]

The Heavy Beam Cannons could still retain a bonus against transports though, even if the AI won't have many of 'em. ;P

They could be THE anti-transport unit to watch out for when moving about with transports.

[superspeck]

*thumbs up* That's what i was looking for, in a way. Poor AI was almost defenseless against my deep raid attacks!

[keith.lamothe]

The insta-hit beam does have a certain natural use against fast moving units like the transport.

Also, the "punch a hole through the big slab" is a nice aesthetic

[Garthor]

Would it also be possible to get the AI to build Gravity Turrets (but not an absurd number...) in response to tractor-immune ships like Transports?  That would definitely increase the damage a transport takes when going through an AI-held system.