Heavy Transport ability

[Mart]

Just in the middle of designing an air transport unit, that would be actually useful and at the same time affordable. So I think, I may be able to make one like that and here comes a question:

What do you think of:
Heavy Transport ability

that is, as you know, in the original ruleset of alphax.txt disabled.

It came to my realisation, that I might be able to make it available (possibly)

[Chaos Theory]

Apparently, the AI goes nuts building these, and then not using them.

[Maniac]

Just FYI, you could also increase the number of units an air unit chassis can carry.

[Kirov]

I could never understand why this option is disabled. Seems quite useful but not too much, should certainly fit into Doctrine: Initiative, for instance.

Does someone if it's possible to keep movement points of air transports at 12 without increasing the raw number of MPs?

[Maniac]

Give them all kinds of movement point increasing special abilities, such fuel nanocells and antigrav.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
Apparently, the AI goes nuts building these, and then not using them.

I think it was my August 2003 CGN Challenge where I introduced a land based Heavy Transport, and you are right: the AI's built them, but just pushed them back and forth between cities....


D

[Mart]

Originally posted by Kirov
Does someone if it's possible to keep movement points of air transports at 12 without increasing the raw number of MPs?

This is the point of most problems with air transports.
While naval and land transports have -1 move point, for air transports it goes from 8 to 4, 50 % down.
While land transport can carry over land a unit using roads up to 3 tiles away, naval foil also 3 tiles, and cruiser 5 tiles, air transport with only 4 tiles/turn, plus inability for needlejet to load/unload outside bases or airbases makes such air transport not useful much. In some cases yes, but price is also high of such unit. I think 99% of cases would be better with using naval/land ones.

Some way of increasing transport range is grav struts and nanocells, as Maniac pointed. To give it more usability is to give it heavy transport ability, that would counterbalance its restriction of being only loaded/unloaded at bases. It is ofcourse for the case, when you do not modify alphax.txt. And lock its cost. Then such air transport may be attractive enough to be built by a human player.

There remains problem of AI, that will not use it, almost for sure, as transport. I checked that. AI may load scouts on it for example, but unit is not capable of leaving the base. However, there are some ways around, and I have one in mind now, that would allow a human player to use such unit as air transport, and AI might build it for other good purpose.

I should add, that it is possible to allow a human player from such a unit to either reverse-engineer the heavy transport ability or not. So here is my question. AI may not do it, but human players might have such possibility. And all of this without alphax.txt modification. So what do you think? If heavy ability is on, would it be unbalancing factor?

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actually, pre-defined units can have separately cargo number defined. No heavy transport needed, but still this is the way of making it available also for naval or land ones. Any thoughts?