Transport Suggestion

'On the other hand, if it's too low, invading high pop planets will become very tedious.'

Read: 'Impossible for all but the most technologically advanced civilization in the game.'

Hopefully that will change once the new anomalies are in and the AI learns to use them.

A Terror Start will be nice on taking out those planets that arn't capturable

A terror star would destroy a good planet, removing a valuable resource. I didn't use them in the OS/2 version and I won't use them here if it damages the habitability of the planet.

This idea would work well if transports could then be combined. Indeed standard fixed transport size would also work if they could be combined into a larger 'fleet' of transports. You could then build your invasion force over a number of systems and send them to the destination, where they would combine before invading. This would also allow huge systems to be invaded. At the moment this is nearly impossible unless you have much higher technology or a system with more people.

As mentioned in many previous posts, I'm a big fan of limited colony ship and transport size.

Paul.

Paul,

Have you forgotten the technique of building a transport in one system then having it travel from planet to planet loading troops from each? Even if your planets are low on population they can contribute personel to the war effort. Machina's idea would have to be done in a way that would still allow this to be done.

I think it would be pretty cool if when you used a Terrorstar to destroy/raze a planet you get a massive Influence drop because it's a bad thing to do...

Maybe I'm missing a point here...but I seem to remember seeing in the documentation somewhere that the colony and transport ships weren't individual ships, but actually a fleet of ships, represented by one "icon", if you will. With that in mind, it seems reasonable to have NO limit on the number of people you can load onto one...however, common sense would dictate an increase in price for larger troop loads. For example, a colony "ship" (actually fleet) to carry 100 billion should cost more than one carrying 1 billion people, since you would actually be buying more ships for the fleet.

Jack,
I do use the transport loading trick, and it does work, but it's a pain to send transports from all my colonies to a colony near the enemy off load all population and then launch them on a new transport. Merging transports in space would be preferable.
I do feel that the cost of transports should at least reflect the number of people being transported. Also hopping invasion populations from one conquered planet to the next by buying a new transport on the conquered planet needs to be stopped as its too unbalancing.

Paul.

I am against preventing the buying of transports on a newly conquered planet. One of the uncertainties in conquering a planet is whether you will have too many people left on the planet, creating a morale problem. If you remove a method of solving that problem (buying and loading up a transport has been my method of choice) you remove any chance of preventing a low morale planet from rebelling. Any sane General is going to have plans to offload excess troops from a planet he/she has just conquered.

Speaking of infinite capacity ships, do any of you remember the series of books about a galactic hichhiker by, I think his first name was Scott, Adams? If you have trouble with the infinite capacity concept, just think of the ships as having some kind of space anomaly that allows it.

That would be Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all those books, by Douglas Adams...the infinite improbability drive. heh

Yep. That's him.

Jack,
I have no problem with being able to balance your population, but you must admit that the land 150B troops to conquer a planet one turn, take 149B troops off the planet and attack the next planet is a bit abusive!
I think the fundamental problem here is the fact that troops and population are the same thing.
As for infitinte capacity, that's fine. Maybe as a tech advancement. Then you could apply the tech to planets as well and have infinite capacity planets! It makes perfect sense. If you allow infinite capacity ships then why not infinite capacity planets? Would completely change the game though. But it should cost you to build infinite capacity ships.

Paul.

Paul,

Anyone who sends 150B troops to conquer a 20B planet is asking for trouble. So far I have been loading my transports with 2 - 4 B and still, occasionally, end up with a conquered planet with a morale below 30%.

I guess I don't understand why it matters. If I can't buy a transport after capturing it I will build another transport to send with the full one and offload the excess from the captured planet the same turn I capture it, so putting in such a restriction seems to me to be no more than a cosmetic that serves little if any purpose.

As to the infinite capacity, or imagining a transport as a fleet, the OS/2 version had a limit. At first it was a small limit that required many transports to conquer a planet with a small population. This came under fire by those that bought the game, so the limit was increases by many fold to make the game more "playable".

Jack,
I agree with you that the game needs to be playable, but I do fee lthat there needs to be some balance between size of invasion force and cost. At the moment there is not. YOu just build the transport and place how ever many troops on it.

Perhaps a solution would be to keep the transports as they are but to add the cost to the loading?

When you load transports and click the launch button a cost would be deducted from your treasury in relation to the size of the force loaded. This would keep the game playable but add the strategy factor and the realism. It would be like an outfitting cost. You have the transport but you need to equip the troops!

Do I load billions of troops, or would 1 billion be enough? This would also mimic the huge costs of moving populations around, making that 'load 30B troops on a transport to control moral' very expensive.

Maybe a cost of 100 credits per billion troops?

Paul.

$100BC per billion troops? That is way too severe. Perhaps, if this idea was implemented, building a transport could include an allowance for a base number of troops, say, 4B troops (being that any transport has to have an initial capacity). Then a cost of, say, %10BC per billion over that might make sense. Your ship with 150B troops would then cost $1100BC to load. (Even that looks a bit severe to me, but maybe it would cause sufficiently reasonable restraint in the players.)

However, because the risk of overpopulating a planet as a result of conquest, I don't think this kind of restraint is needed. You and I both know better than to load up transports this way from experience in what happens when using that many troops in conquering planets. So why not let others learn the same leason either from our comments or the hard way.

One other point I would like to make against this idea. One of the morale balancing techniques we used in GC/OS2 was to use a transport to redestribute population amongst our own planets. Adding a cost to the number of troops we coulld load into a transport would be a negative impact to that technique.

Jack,
once moral is balanced correctly then there should be no need to move population for moral reasons. This balancing could possibly also include an automatic redistribution of excess populations from low moral to high moral planets (up to the population limits).

Also consider what you're suggesting. Should the US government be allowed move half the population of New York to the Rocky mountains to reduce the moral problems associated with over crowding???? Should it cost them to do it??? Are you playing a Democracy??? As I said before the basic problem is that troops = population.

I think there should be at least some cost. If you assume the cost is to equip and train the invasion troops (seperate from the cost to build the transport) then it makes sense. You numbers work out much better though .

Paul.

Solitair said:
As I said before the basic problem is that troops = population.

I agree. That's the crux of the problem. I haven't come up with any elegant way around it but the following did come to mind...

Just think of the planetary population as Dorsai.

Paul said "Should the US government be allowed move half the population of New York to the Rocky mountains to reduce the moral problems associated with over crowding????"

No. But as you well know there is a natural tendency for some people to voluntarily move from crowded locations to less populous ones. GC doesn't allow movement between planets within a system no matter who might instigate the move. And the unloading of transports into a star system, even one of your own, is a flat, even division, which is useless in population redistribution. Colony ships also are not a viable option because you have to build one for each and every move (way too expensive). Perhaps we need some kind of an interplanet and interstellar transportation system as a technology (or two) to research.

And morale isn't the only reason for population redistribution. If it was for morale reasons only I would not be as eager for a method of population redistribution at a planet to planet level.

I would like the idea of linking population distribution with research techs. A tech which distributed unhappy populations to happier planets would be very nice. Perhaps a series of techs changing the rate/range of distribution.

Another interesting related tech could be

Population control: reduces the growth rate on unhappy planets (irrespective of planet qualtiy). This could even reduce populations over time until the moral increased. Different techs could keep the population at various moral levels (40%, 70%, 100%).


Paul.

It would be interesting galciv 1.x development to try and develop a way for the population to begin distributing themselves between various planets. Planets that had a certain level of overcrowding would have people move from that planet to other planets or even out of the empire if there were open borders.

That would make it a different game all together if you had less control over what population was where. Worse yet if there were refugees from other empires that might throw a little unpredicability in the game.

But thats definitely a long term thing.......