What do you use transport ships for?

[Grandpa Kim]

Undertakr said:

No matter what anyone says, two things win this game, expansion and minerals.

Quite right, so why are you building those expensive and slow build colonizers? They cost you more in minerals (orgs and rads too) and take at least one turn more to build. So while you build 4 of your colonizers, I build at least 6... or 4 and two small transports. Amazing how many people you can move with two lousy transports. At any rate, within two years I have 50% more colonies than you. I'm ahead of you in expansion and mineral production.

Kim

[Sinapus]

I use them for population transports, general cargo transfers, carrying spare units here and there, tankers (gave supply storage the cargo ability), and repair/space yard ships (did the same thing to those components as well... Oh, and mine and satellite layers.

[Fyron]

I like building colony ships that can be built in 1 turn in the later stages of the game. A colony ship with Ion Engine IIIs and a Solar Sail III moves 8 costs around 4650 (or so) minerals, which can easily be built at any planet with HI, 120% construction aptidude, SY III and a decent amount of population. Medium or Large Transports can bring in the population after the colony is established, so why bother having huge, expensive colony ships?

[Grandpa Kim]

My late game colony ship has one quantum engine and a solar sail III. Moves speed 7 and is actually cheaper than Fyron's Ion model. It also frees up space for additional cargo components or whatever you like.

Kim

[Fyron]

Kim, I never said I had the optimum model. I am too lazy to figure out what that is. My model works fine for me (and is faster than yours anyways). The 1 turn build time is all I care about.

[Undertakr]

quote:

Quite right, so why are you building those expensive and slow build colonizers? ...within two years I have 50% more colonies than you. I'm ahead of you in expansion and mineral production.

Kim

Possibly, not necessarily because the planets I get will have a building bonus due to population, so if you base your theory on just starting planets, you are correct, you may out produce me, but with all of my building bonuses, I'll probably be out producing you because it'll take less time for me to build shipyards on the new planets.

I do like the idea someone posted about 1 engine on the smaller ships, I hadn't thought of that, that's quite a good idea.

- Takr

[Grandpa Kim]

Fyron, Undertakr, that's what I like about this game: so many ways to do the same thing and its almost impossible to figure out which is best. But here's a question for Undertakr: How much population do you need on each of your 10 planets to match production on my 15 planets each with less than 100 million population? Make it two: What population do you need to reduce planetary ship yard build time to less than 5 turns?

Back to the original question. When it comes to transports, I will use different hulls and configurations depending not only on usage, but tech level, pop growth rate, warp point position, economy etc, ad nauseum. I am only now beginning to develop some standard designs, certainly not all. About the only one I've used for a long time is a pop transport made from the small transport hull. And it can (and does) double as a transport for anything.
MaCready, I use transport hulls to transport anything. Now, 50% of the space must be used for some sort of cargo bay. That includes the cargo bay, satellite bay, mine layer, drone launcher, fighter bay and the colony components. Many mods have a small amount of cargo capacity in other components, notably the supply storage. This allows you to use transports as refuellers.

Kim