Why are transports expended after an invasion?

IIRC the explanation is that the Transport modules themselves are landing shuttles, which are detached and expended during the invasion. In any case, it's a balance choice--if you kept used transports and could win by a wide enough margin to not lose more than a few troops, you could simply load them all back up and move on to the next planet, capturing many worlds with little investment.

But not using transports after a succesful invasion makes no strategic sense. I understand Kryo's point about the balancing issue it presents, but I still think they should be reusable. Similiarly to our island hopping strategy used agianst the Japanese in WW2.

Also, do you have to train new troops to fill out the newly created transports? Or do you just place the current troops onto newly built transports?

Troops are just population.. so loading 1000 ppl onto a transport just drops planet pop by 1k.
I try to think of the transports as like drop pods -- they drop down and probably take some damage in landing/battle
the "inefficiency" in reusing a transport is pretty much ignored if you check the relative cost of the cargo ship+ two engines vs the cost of 1 or two troop modules, and we all know how crazy upgrade prices are...

maybe the landing troops get such a big advantage against the planet's population because the planet's population are too busy destroying the transport than to fight back

that would explain why you could just draft some random population from a planet and they somehow become an elite invasion force..

Actually I believe troops are expressed in terms of millions. Loading 2000 troops onto a transport drops a planet's population by 2 billion. Planet populations, for reference, expressed in billions. ie, 18.235 billion. And the remainder of the battle become the invaded planet's new population. Apparently everyone's a soldier.

This makes it basically impossible to conquer your enemies unless your planet populations are very high and you also have a large industrial capacity.

Or you've got 120% soldiering bonus. I've had games where 1,000 troops can conquer 10b pop planets in traditional warfare.

Apparently everyone's a soldier.

Precisely. For those of you keeping track, this is following the MOO1 model which makes no distinction between civilian and military (Like MOO2 did). Or, the 5 billion people on each planet is the military AND the taxpaying population at the same time... and the real civilian population is much higher. Take your pick I guess. Personally I don't object to either model on principle as long as it makes for a good game.

NOTE: GROUP YOUR TRANSPORTS INTO A FLEET TO INVADE WITH A LARGER FORCE... hope everyone figured this out.

It's worth noting that if you bring a large enough force (i.e. 2 transports with 1,000 troops each = 2,000 troops) and there are only 400 casualties on your side, one transport will still be in orbit after the fight. Has anyone checked to see if those other 600 remaining soldiers are left on the planet?

Also, not sure how the computer decides which transport to keep around if you win. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the number of casualties. I've brought a transport with 5,000 and a transport with 1,000 that the big transport would survive if I took less than 1,000 casualties. Just not sure if this is guaranteed behavior.

From the above example, I would expect that if I brought 2 transports with 5,000 troops each that I would lose one of those big transports if I took ANY losses. So maybe bringing smaller, cheaper transports mixed in is a guaranteed way to avoid losing your expensive ones, if you are anticipating an easy fight on the ground and don't need your maximum fieldable number of troops. Hopefully someone who's played around with it more can comment?

Similiarly

"Our"? You were there, I take it? What was MacArthur really like?

It's worth noting that if you bring a large enough force (i.e. 2 transports with 1,000 troops each = 2,000 troops) and there are only 400 casualties on your side, one transport will still be in orbit after the fight. Has anyone checked to see if those other 600 remaining soldiers are left on the planet?

Ah, that's useful. I didn't know that. I had assumed transports were consumed anyway, and I didn't feel like losing an extra transport and stranding my troops on the planet if I accidentally invaded a much smaller force, so I just kept sending individual invasions, 2000 troops at a time. With conventional warfare, it didn't seem like there was a disadvantage. Now I know.

And knowing is half the battle!

i kindof agree that transports should be reusable. Perhaps with a refit cost to re-launch.

In moo2 they weren't reusable... and we all love moo2, right? right??????

The troops become the security force on the newly conquered planet.

Probably to counter a cheese tactic involving leaving just enough room on your battleships for a troop module.

I made that mistake once. Blew a beautiful 1500bc battlebarge thanks to its troop module. I ended up screaming for a good two minutes "where the hell did my ship go?!??!?!"

I think the transport ships is asembled in space and when they invade they cannot lift again from the surface. So they are disembled. For financial reasons. These ships are big for holding 2 million soldiers.

okay guys, here is a new theory:
The transport module contains guns and ammos for the soldiers. This might also explain why the invasion force gets such a big advantage over the defenders.

It happened in MoO2. Say you landed 2 transports onto a planet, each carrying 4 soldiers (or groups of) and 3 of those groups died. You would have 5 left. 1 would stay planetside while the other 4 were left in orbit to move on. Same with Galciv 2. You invade with 8000 troops (4 Advanced Troop Modules on one ship, each module holding 1000 troops) and you lost 2000 in the attack. That means that 2000 are left planet side while the other transport remains in orbit loaded with troops.

The only difference being that in MoO2 there was, as previously said, a distinction between military and civilian population. Galciv 2does not have this, the troops that stay on the planet are just added back into the population. The reasoning for this and the loss of the transport is that both the troops and the transport stay planet side. I mean, come on, you have just overrun an enitre population, you are not going to pack your bags and move on, leaving the people to their own devices.

You are going to leave troops there, you are going to have them enforce your rule and make sure that everyone stays in line. Normally the best way to do so would to have a command and control structure planet side. What better than the ship you came in? It has the facilities to over see the troops and deployment while being relatively sabotage free, as you brought it with you and have complete control over it as opposed to the possibly 'booby trapped' or 'bugged' structures already planet side (It happens alot real world wise in such situations).

In defeat they are simply destroyed.

Well the population listed on any planet is just the taxpaying population, and presumably anyone loyal enough to join the military is loyal enough to pay taxes as well, so having soliers come out of the population total makes perfect sense to me.

I've got it!

It's like in Starship Troopers, only soldiers have the right to vote!

Thank you Heinlein!

Can you imagine the Dread Lords with re-useable transports?

It seems to me that since you can add the troop modules to any ship with the requisite amount of free space, the ship shouldn't necessarily be sacraficed every time. Of course I realize that, as someone mentioned earlier in this post, that the concept of invading, picking right back up... 'rinse and repeat' does raise certain game balance issues. Having pondered this for a couple of hours, here are some suggestions:

this would probably work as a simple stand alone fix.

1) An invasion should zero out the ships moves, regardless of how many the ship might have had going in. This would prevent multiple invasions on one turn. To be honest, while this won't stop the transport from moving on the following turn, if you still have enough soldiers to invade again the next turn you are probably far enough along that you have the wherewithal to buy one from the shipyard anyways.

2) the transporting ship should take damage that reflects (percentage-wise) the amount of troops you lost, i.e. if you landed with 1k troops and lost 250 your ship will be at 75% total hitpoints. Of course this system would mean that a cargo-hull based transport, having only one hit point, would be destroyed every time. So only user-created transports would be re-usable, which seems fair, since those are the ones players have poured money and time into making.



however if you still feel that this could be used to imbalance the game, you could implement one or two of these as well.

1) after the battle the ship doesn' t reappear in the conquered planets orbit, but in the build ship queue with 1-5 weeks til completion (once again relative to the number of troops lost). If there is no spaceport, or it was destroyed during bombardment, you would be out of luck. Which sort of makes sense, given that a large ship would need the starport to assist it on liftoff.

2) when the battle was over the transport is there, but appears just as a blank hull of the appropriate type, which can then be upgraded for no charge to its pre-invasion form. the upgrade would take a number of weeks relative to (again) the number of casualties sustained in the attack.