Ophiuchus wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 1:10 pm
In the past people were very strongly against removing the inner-system transport system for valid reasons: trigger combat (e.g. see dilvish comment), in-system troop/outpost/colony ships. If those roles are not filled otherwise I rather suggest upping the base hull cost close to cheapest decoy hull (probably small hull).
IMHO you should not be forced to choose between building another in-system shipyard (taking four turns plus two for a hull) or move ships (fresh build+move at least taking three turns) in from somewhere else to be able to outpost another planet in the same system.
Why? I'll give you the trigger combat thing (see my reply to Dilvish' post above), but I don't see the need to retain the in-system troop/outpost/colony ships. As I said in my post above, although I use them, I only do so because not doing it would mean to play a less optimal game, but actually using them is more micromanagement than building the required "normal" troop/outpost/colony ships at my shipyards and sending them where I need them.
What I do now, when I e.g. want to colonize a new system (with more than one planet I can use): build outpost/colony ship, send it to the system, outpost/colonize a planet, in case of outpost ship build colony as next step, once I have the colony build outpost bases to outpost the other planets I want to colonize, once they are finished outpost the rest of the planets.
What I'd prefer to do: build the required number of outpost/colony ships in one batch, send them to the system, outpost/colonize all the planets. IMO a lot less headache, because I have less keeping track of things to do. Which isn't so much of an issue in early game, but once you expand and start doing colonization on a larger scale, this becomes very annoying. To the point where I wish the base hull wouldn't exist each time I reach that stage.
To me the existence of a hull that can be built without the need of a shipyard is basically some kind of cheat. Of course, as has been correctly pointed out, with shipyards being as cheap as they are now, removing that hull won't make much difference, if anything, it would only make things more micromanagy. But once the shipyard mess gets fixed (meaning, building up shipyard sites becomes expensive and spamming shipyards everywhere impossible), IMO there should be no hulls that you can build without a shipyard.
But we're getting off-topic here... if we want to continue this discussion, I should probably split off the relevant posts to a separate topic.