Destruction of Ships with Troop Pods -- Necessary?

[Rydra]

Hi there,

as for now, whenever you invade a Planet with a Troop Ship, the ship itself is destroyed in the process. I wonder: why? Wouldn't it be more logical and "realistic" that those Troops "jump" over the planet, so you can safely build ships with weapons + troops + etc... instead of forcing you to build ships for just troops?

Then, the ship remains with an empty slot which could be replenished at base.

What do you think?

[Dilvish]

There was some prior discussion of that here and a related discussion re reusable outpost ships here

So I think the design concensus has been to prefer consumables, but others could be experimented with. Filling an 'EMPTY_REUSABLE_TROOP_POD' so that it becomes a 'FULL_REUSABLE_TROOP_POD' could be handled via scripting, but it would take some recoding of the the invasion C++ code to pay attention to whether a troop pod was reusable or not and simply empty those if they were. And mixing reusable and nonreusable would be a potential confusing mistake for a player.

[MatGB]

If you're going to make the change (and I don't care TBH, either is good for me) then making all reusable seems to make the most sense to me.

I'd say they can only refill at planets you've held for some time though, it's already a bit daft that you can conquer one planet in system and immediately spam out base hulls with troop pods to take the rest, maybe only implement it once Happiness is in use and only happy planets with drydocks, or the ability to build that hull, can refill?

[Geoff the Medio]

Making troop ships consumable helps balance conquest with colonization, and avoid the micromangement involved in keeping track of which ships are "empty" and shuttling them back for refills (at planets that would from the above posts apparently be quite particular, unlike fuel refills in supply range that is intentionally make much easier than getting to a particular planet).