Colonizing with multiple ships

[Bigjoe5]

It might be interesting if, in the future, the player could select multiple colony ships of the same species, and use all of them to colonize a single planet. This might open more options for colonization, like "a few big, efficient colony ships" vs. "lots of smaller, less efficient, but more versatile colony ships." It could also be an interesting strategy to jump start just a few colonies in the early game (before hulls with multiple internal slots or colony parts with >1 capacity are available) with extra population, rather than colonizing a greater number of initially less productive colonies, which plays into the "expansion vs development" strategic tradeoff.

[EmP]

Jump start trick from MoO 3 an Sword of the stars. Why not! I'm not familiar with whole current FreeOrions set of ideas, can there be more than one race on same planet? If so, you don't have to limit your selfs with colonizers of same species.

I already feel like annoyance advertising own project but I'd share idea of landing colony ships on already colonized (and owned) planets for boosting population and industry.

[Geoff the Medio]

Bigjoe5: I think we were avoiding having colony ships be able to join existing colonies in order to prevent that ability form being a new micromanagement tool for moving population around.

Being able to colonize with multiple ships simultaneously would significantly reduce the strategic importance of making larger (and higher tech, more expensive, etc.) colony ships that let a new colony start with more population and be more productive faster.


EmP: Multi-species planets aren't allowed in FreeOrion.