Recruiting the Troops

A small, thing, but would seem to save a bunch of unnecessary mousing & clicking:
When you launch a transport, the default troop load is half capacity (500). Now, I'm a guy, so for me a power tool has only two practical settings: "Off" and "full power." Likewise, it will be rare that I ever send out a transport with less than full capacity of 1,000. But now, each time you launch, you have to mouse on over to the window and click five times on the +100 or else grab the slider and pull it up. Wouldn't it be better to make 1,000 the default, so you only have to click "Launch" 99% of the time? I don't want to have to work so hard invading planetery system ...
10,685 views 5 replies
Reply #1 Top
Actually, on GC1, it was possible to "auto-launch" your ships (each planet had a toggle to turn auto-launch on or off). Then the transport or colony ship load was the lesser of 1/4 the planet population or a full ship load. I am hoping they will do the same when they get to Beta 4.

Also, I think I remember loading colony ships when the planet population was less than the ship capacity and then the default was half the population rather than half the ship's capacity.
Reply #2 Top
With GC1, colony ships could carry a very large number of people. So starting it off at 100% would have left you with no one on the planet. The auto-launch with 1/4 was very useful for spacing those unhappy people automatically.

For troop carriers, you'd generally want to load it full if you could. Unless the planet just didn't have enough for the transport.

As GC2 allows us to design our own colonizers and our own transports, it would probably be more useful to have the slider start at the 100% full side.
Reply #3 Top
I could have sworn I posted to this thread yesterday, but I don't see my post. Anyway, I was saying something similar to Star Pilot - I almost always filled transports but not colony ships, since early in the game filling colony ships drained the population of the sending planet too much.
Reply #4 Top
I think it would be useful to be able to set a default filling percentage, but it should be different for transports and colony ships. Meanwhile, to avoid clicking too often, the scroll wheel can be used to adjust the percentage.
Reply #5 Top
Now, I'm a guy, so for me a power tool has only two practical settings: "Off" and "full power."


Damn right! I always send the transports either completely full, or with 1 guy (0 is not allowed to launch I believe). I only send them empty when I plan to fill up on "troops" somewhere else.