Heavy Transport

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I just discovered that Heavy Transport is disabled in vanilla. Don't understand why because all the code is there to increase transport capacity.
Anybody ever used it? Does it worth to be enabled?

[dino]

It's not needed, or missed, but the ability doesn't seem to be completely useless, or unbalanced either and with so little work required... why not ?

[bvanevery]

I enabled it in my mod.  I also cost balanced it.

It would rarely be needed in the early game.  You might find yourself in an interim period where you'd really like to have a capacity 3 transport, instead of capacity 2, before Cruisers become available with capacity 4.  That's theoretical conjecture on my part and has never actually come up in any game I've played with my mod.  Maybe it would be desirable if one had a "far shores caravel" style of colonization, like in Civ II.  Put a colonist, a defensive unit, and a terraformer on 1 ship and sail it far across the map.  But I don't personally produce an empire that way, I radiate in a "perfect circle" on land from a capital.  It's the ideal empire format for SMAC imo.  So I just never need that extra, one-way capacity in the early game.

The time when I actually do use Heavy Transport, is for making drop transports when orbital insertion somehow becomes available.  Typically by being 1st to build the Space Elevator.  Now, orbital drop combat is in some sense funzing around.  I'm not sure anyone actually ever needs to do drop combat, nor whether it's the most cost effective way to pursue the late game.  I question whether the late game is even needed at all.  Seems like everything can and should be won by midgame, before Fusion Power even.  But I have found myself in late game at times, and I have done orbital drop combat.  So at this time, being able to have a land transport of capacity 2 for your drop, is useful compared to just 1.

That's it.  Nothing else to say about it.  And I've been testing Heavy Transport in my own modded games for many years now.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Yeah. I feel the same. A not completely useless ability but not that crucial to boggle ones mind about adding it to strategic planning either.
Regular cruiser transport with latest reactor carries 4*4 = 16 units.

I'd say it may be worth looking into if it doubles the capacity and we disable reactor multiplier at the same time. Then it increases cruiser transport capacity from 4 to 8. Which may be useful for later game shore deployment.

[Misanthrope]

Might be fun to play around with.

Personally, by the time it would really be useful, magtubes and fusion transports would pretty well already fill the need, but yeah, that's just me.  A more aggressive strategy would def benefit  from something like that, but at the same time, packing (potentially) that much firepower onto a single vehicle would be VERY risky.... first attacks against would be crushing, and artillery would be a constant threat, but for the rewards of a successful invasion, MIGHT be a turning point in a game.

Like you said, balancing it would be critical so it doesn't end up either a suicide run or a massively OP'd game-ruin'er.

[bvanevery]

The one true correct strategy for moving massive amounts of units around Planet, is the mag tube and pile upon pile of terraformers.  There is just no other way to move lots of units long distances in this game without driving yourself completely nuts.  You have to conquer by land.  If you think you're going to push vast numbers of fleets to distant shores on Huge maps or larger, you're going to hate life.  You're going to quit playing such games.  I speak from immeasurable experience.

Consequently in my mod, mag tubes are available rather early.  And it is expected that you'll be playing on a Huge map.  That's my design center.  Other units are slightly faster to make up for this, i.e. my foils move 5, my cruisers move 8.

If you really must wait until late game to win, I made gravships pretty darned fast.  You can viably finish off everyone just by flying gravships wherever you need them to be.  No orbital insertion required.

The R-Bolt gravship is pretty much the economical game ender.  Since it has that 25% advantage against indigenous life forms, it keeps the AI from stopping you cold with mindworm and spore launcher spam.  You'll actually get hits against the conventional units you intend.  Similarly, if you're not going to use a R-Bolt, the thing to add is the Empath Song ability.

[BFG]

I found it a somewhat fun challenge to see how many 24-unit carriers I could completely fill with hovertanks in some games I intentionally let run too long.  Like others have indicated, though, except for some niche early to mid game situations, I'm not sure I'd find a legitimate use for it in competitive games.

I prefer to avoid heavy modding (despite the fact many of the mods offered here make the game far better balanced than vanilla), so I typically enable it in the tech tree with Inertial Damping.  No, that tech doesn't make the most sense, but it's easy to introduce that way and the timing's about right.

[Geo]

I just had the thought of using the ability for a predefined colony pod (or just the colony foil). Not too overpowered and a bit useful in the early came.

[bvanevery]

But colony pods can't carry anything?  That's the basic problem, there's no such thing as military or other use + transport ability, except for Isles.

[Geo]

But colony pods can't carry anything?  That's the basic problem, there's no such thing as military or other use + transport ability, except for Isles.

IIRC, its a predefined unit. Therefore, the transport 'flag' can be enabled in the alpha file.

[bvanevery]

Transport isn't a flagged ability.  Transport is a module you put on a chassis.  Or you could have a colony module, or a gun, or a terraformer...