Transports launching half-full

Umm...How much population do you have on your planets? If they're so low that's it causing the transports and colony ships to not be fully loaded, I would let them repopulate.

You can go to your main options and toggle to automatically launch the transport/colony ships but that's it as far as I know. I don't think you can tell it to launch with a full load.

I don't beleive you can. If you really want to always launch full transports, it might be helpful to build fewer factories on those worlds, and replace them with more morale buildings. High morale equals high population growth. A morale of +75% or more gives you a population growth of +25%. A morale of 100% is the best as it will double your population growth.

Anyways, you should try to get a population capacity of something like 14 bil so your population can grow far past the point where your default troop transports will auto-launch at less than full capacity. You may wish to research a few levels of farming so you don't need to use so many tiles in the process.

The building pace is the key. Assuming you have a decent population growth rate, you should be able to launch a 1 billion troop transport every 6-8 turns. Anything faster than this will slowly deplete your planet - or maybe not so slowly   

One word; Fertility Clinics.
And, if you do get X-Worlds 05-F... the new gimmick in town - Demographic Capital.

I've been keen to emphasise population growth however I can, but higher-capacity transports can remove population far faster.

As near as I can tell, transports automatically launch fully-loaded as long as they're not causing the population to drop below 75%-80% of maximum. I don't know what the exact figure is but it's roughly that much. What this means therefore is that for planets with a smaller population, I need to build transports with less capacity or simply leave the transport-cranking to planets with bigger populations. Or, launch manually.

Launching manually should really be the way you should go, anyway.

Know what citizens do in their spare time? They pay taxes.

So, having a few million citizens sitting around in transports at rally points waiting for a call to arms is far from the most efficient way of doing things.

I leave all of my transports in orbit and the people on the ground (paying taxes) until they're needed, load up the soldiers and send them straight to the target.

Any dawdling is a waste of money.

That's totally two words, mang.

Or...you can max out your planet's population, and use transports to siphon off the extra. This will give you the 'best of both worlds', as it were.

Kay - five more words then... *people taxed must be happy too!* (count that as six instead).

Transports ships fully loaded and on their way do represent potential conquest, tax-payers do not fight for the cause and eventually, impact overall morale - me think.

Trick is to find the proper "overlapping" pop growth factor and timely ship building_launching pace and your troops will always be useful unless idled for too long which, in this case, i agree the process is wasting probable taxes. Yet, new planets taken from opponents would grow right back to then, continue paying some supplemental taxes, should they?

What I'm getting at is that when I'm fighting a war (at the moment I'm not at war - I've got two opponents on the map that are allied, the gits) I don't want to slow it down by manually launching transports. When I have a plan I just want to execute it and not worry about the details until the transport gets to its destination.

Having learned what I've learned, if I click the notification for a transport completion and I see that a planet is below a certain population figure then I know that in all likelihood the next transport won't launch with a full load, so I'll just pick something else to build and continue with my turn. I can also elect to let the next transport launch if I think it'll be about 90% full. Either way, it's far fewer clicks and keypresses to get things done.

As in, fill the transports, have a couple dozen of them sitting at a way point AND still have your planets full of people. You often build up a navy of fighting ships prior to a war you start, why now a couple fleets of troops transports? Zero-downtime war!

We have solved the problem of overcrowding. Once a planet is maxed out in how many people it can feed, we'll cryostatis them on ships that conveniently happen to have laser rifles on them next to the chambers. Then when war happens, these people will serve their empire right on the start of the war while their families on the planet will be joining them as they get on freshly made 'cryostasis' ships ~coughs~.

Kinda some theoretical pending planets in the making - planned for and ready to activate once needed by sending the resourceful troop assets in hideout somewhere, in fact!

Now, THAT's what i call tactical thoughts.

I was just going to say, I've started doing that not too long ago, and its worked wonders. This was epsecially useful against a game vs. the Terrans, when I was able to conquer their best worlds, before they got their military machine running full swing.