Transport Ship Question

[Flavin]

Hi, I'm brand new to this game and while playing the Intermediate Tutorial I ran into a really frustrating problem and I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Following the instructions given by the tutorial dialogue I loaded my ships into some transport ships and sent them to a planet I needed to gate raid. I sent my transports over to the warp gate, unloaded them and then started attacking the warp gate. Once the warp gate was destroyed I immediately tried to send all of the ships I had released back into my transport ships so I could quickly escape without losing too many ships. However, I couldn't figure out any way to stop the transports from unloading, because there is only an unload button and not a cancel button, so as I was trying to put my ships back into the transports new ones were leaking out. I've already tried the wiki/google and I can't find the answer, is there a way to stop transports from unloading or are they actually designed only to unload once you start the process?

[Radiant Phoenix]

I haven't used regular transports as anything but disposable in quite a while, but Assault Transports can definitely be reloaded.

... had the transport ship finished unloading?

[Flavin]

I haven't used regular transports as anything but disposable in quite a while, but Assault Transports can definitely be reloaded.

... had the transport ship finished unloading?

No, the warp gate was destroyed well before my transports finished unloading and each one still had over 100 ships in it. Do you need to completely empty a transport before you can put ships back in it? If so that seems like a pretty lame and irrational way to punish you for bringing more than enough ships in your transports to get a job done.

[Pumpkin]

I think the problem is here: as Radiant Phoenix said, maybe you should wait for the transport to finish unloading. I suspect that, as a gate is very fragile, you killed it with the 10 first ships unloaded by the transport, then ordered these first ships to go back in the transport... I think the logic for the transport unloading is this: when you give it the order to unload, it unload 10 ships, wait one second, check if it's empty, and if not empty it unload 10 more ships and repeat the loop. So if you "feed" it with ships before it's empty, it will continue to ask itself "Am I empty? No? I continue unloading." Until it's empty, stops the loop and stop unloading ships you load into it.

Maybe it's that, or it's a bug, but transports can definitely be reloaded. They are intended to, at least.

EDIT:
I just saw your post before posting mine. Maybe you can post a Mantis suggestion to make transports stop unloading when they are loaded while unloading. Sounds like a good idea.

[Chris_Stalis]

Welcome to the game, welcome to the forums, and welcome to the weirdness of transports

Ok, so there is a way to do it, but it is... really weird. By default, if you press "ctrl+U" you can bring up the transport unload contextual menu. If you go into the controls, you can create a key combo so that, when this special menu is open, you can cancel the unloading of further ships.

It is....... phenomenally obtuse. If you have difficulty finding the menus and control settings, let me know and I'll take some screenshots for a quick "how-to".

[Flavin]

Welcome to the game, welcome to the forums, and welcome to the weirdness of transports

Ok, so there is a way to do it, but it is... really weird. By default, if you press "ctrl+U" you can bring up the transport unload contextual menu. If you go into the controls, you can create a key combo so that, when this special menu is open, you can cancel the unloading of further ships.

It is....... phenomenally obtuse. If you have difficulty finding the menus and control settings, let me know and I'll take some screenshots for a quick "how-to".

Thanks Chris, your solution worked like a charm! For anyone wondering how to set this up themselves:

While in game hit escape, click "View Controls" and then click the "Context Menu" tab. You'll then see a purple bar, click it and select "Special Unload Menu." You can then set a key binding for Cancel Unload (I used cntrl + I). As Chris said, in order for this to work you need to have the special unload menu (cntrl + U) open while you're using Cancel Unload in order for it to work, and obviously have your Transport Ships selected.

[Chris_Stalis]

Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you can bind key combinations in these contextual menus that are already mapped to some other effect in normal game operation. I haven't seen the key combos cascade yet when overloading hotkeys this way, but I'd still generally exercise some caution. The game doesn't warn you if you overload hotkeys this way, so definitely test it out a few times when you first set it to make sure it doesn't trigger any secondary effects.

[Flavin]

Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you can bind key combinations in these contextual menus that are already mapped to some other effect in normal game operation. I haven't seen the key combos cascade yet when overloading hotkeys this way, but I'd still generally exercise some caution. The game doesn't warn you if you overload hotkeys this way, so definitely test it out a few times when you first set it to make sure it doesn't trigger any secondary effects.

There is a .DAT file that shows all of the key bindings in the game. It's a pain to look through because of how it was formatted but it is pretty helpful with avoiding that problem.

[Draco18s]

You can also hit [End] to stop any orders for the selected units. For a transport, this will stop the unload process, letting you reload again immediately.