I can't believe no one has reported this yet, but I'm honestly not sure what keywords to use to search for it, and as the search function doesn't return a respectable number of results anyway, for any query, I doubt I'd find it.

Anyway.

Running through a game on DL 1.5, I find something I don't recall seeing before. I can put a Troops Module and a Colony Module on the same ship.

I managed to bug that game out somehow while upgrading the ship design in question (probably due to having one in service and saving it with the same name), and I've just submitted the exception generated by SmartException.

But back to the subject at hand.

So I ran through a DA game and a TA game real quick, and the same is true for both of them. I can put Troop Modules, Adv Troop Modules, and Colony Modules on the same ship.

Thankfully, the combination of the modules does not seem to bug out the game. It colonizes planets properly and uses up the ship, and it invades planets properly and uses up the ship. In both cases all of the population on it is used, as it should be.

Admittedly, I still must have a colony module on the ship to be able to colonize a planet, and it's never worthwhile to add colony modules to a ship dedicated for invading purposes. However, this opens up the possibility of much larger colonizing populations as soon as one gets planetary invasion, so long as you can spare an extra 15 or 20 space (DA) for the troop/adv troop module. And from a cost perspective, it's a no-brainer.

In large+ games, this is probably useful. It might even be marginally useful in medium games. And it's something I can virtually guarantee you the AI is never going to use.

My apologies to anyone who's actually been using this strategy, but I personally would like to see it fixed. Particularly for DA/TA, it seems to kill the idea of the colony module having been reduced to 250M from DL's 500M.