I've finally got around to playing as Phidi (200 stars, brutal, marathon). It's mid-game, everybody love me (except Gremak who I've declared war to before even meeting them), have a lot of influence, but no money.
What kind of merchant race don't have good trade fleet? Transports are expensive and require orbital infrastructure to be built. The "trade ship" has double capacity, but costs tree times more, being totally uneconomical (you can put shields or range extenders on them, but they wont do you any good in a trade pool). This is an interesting challenge (except the "trade ship" - useless and just aggravating), but seems totally out of the declared character. What am I missing here?

Trade ships are more cost-effective than transports if you go into the design and pull out the armor and reinforced bulkheads they're initially designed with. Phidi also have better racial income and a discount on Sociology research, which lets them easily get more productive markets. I routinely get obscene income via upgraded markets and lots of trade routes from those markets as the Phidi, while making friends with everybody and establishing trade routes with them.

Trade ship is very economical, IF you only design in what you need. Trade pool ships don't need anything but cargo bays and a nuclear reactor. The rest is nice though for a militarized transport. Its a nice flexible and useful design. Just build in what you need.

That said, some quick checking does indicate that the cost per cargo hold even for Phidi tradeships is inflated over other races' transports- 214 production and 73 metal for one tradeship stripped of armor and reinforced bulkheads, compared to 194 production and 68 metal for two transports for other races. I agree that a reduction of Phidi transport costs is probably in order- Phidi have mediocre military hulls with poor selection, but honestly should not be disadvantaged on transports.

Of course I've tried to remove "extra". Don't call your opponent stupid without checking first!
Here are my numbers - it's on "marathon" (everything is more expensive, but proportionally, I assume), after the "Subspace Networking" (less "wrenches"), without a shipyard, - Transport is 99/66, Trade Ship is 198/185 (same wrenches per cargo, but about 1.4 times more metal). To compare - Yoral Transport under same conditions is 73/51, and doesn't require extra for an orbital infrastructure (Space Station or Shipyard).
BTW, an empty System slot looks and feels very wrong. You could at least make it some sort of "combo", allowing a third cargo container there. Or come out with something useful being in the trade pool.

Standard costs without Subspace Networking are 131/44 for a Phidi transport, and 214/73 for a tradeship fitted for commerce duty, which is less than twice as much cost for both resources, so the tradeship is definitely more cost-effective.

nweismuller wrote:Standard costs without Subspace Networking are 131/44 for a Phidi transport, and 214/73 for a tradeship fitted for commerce duty, which is less than twice as much cost for both resources, so the tradeship is definitely more cost-effective.

The issue here though is that compared to other races, they're more expensive; for example the Imperials transport costs 97/34 on standard, and others are apparently similar. So yes, the Phidi tradeship is better than the Phidi transport, but even the tradeship (107/36.5 per hold slot) is worse than other races regular transport .

Oops, I did not realize that the armor is totally removable (not just replaceable as I thought). Will try to play with that. However, this removes the "insult", but not the "injury" - Phidi trade ships are still the worst among other species. The Mercenary Exchange can't fix that.

blazenclaw wrote:

nweismuller wrote:Standard costs without Subspace Networking are 131/44 for a Phidi transport, and 214/73 for a tradeship fitted for commerce duty, which is less than twice as much cost for both resources, so the tradeship is definitely more cost-effective.

The issue here though is that compared to other races, they're more expensive; for example the Imperials transport costs 97/34 on standard, and others are apparently similar. So yes, the Phidi tradeship is better than the Phidi transport, but even the tradeship (107/36.5 per hold slot) is worse than other races regular transport .

Yeah, that is true, as I noted earlier up the thread. And it really should not be.

BTW, the trade ship has cargo capacity of 15 - even less than two "regular" transports.

A possible fix would be to give the tradeship and the transport both an additional cargo bay. The construction issue is also related to the fact that phidi trasports can retreat like military vessels, Ie in 1 turn. I remember reading at some point that they were supposed to be able to be refitted into the other ships in the merchant *class* but it seems to not be implemented at this point.

bjg wrote:BTW, the trade ship has cargo capacity of 15 - even less than two "regular" transports.

No, that's precisely the same as two regular transports. The 50% bonus from Containment Fields makes it so that each regular transport transports 7.5 units of cargo, rounded to 8 for the first one, 15 total for the second, 23 total for the third, 30 for the fourth, and so on.

nweismuller wrote:

bjg wrote:BTW, the trade ship has cargo capacity of 15 - even less than two "regular" transports.

No, that's precisely the same as two regular transports. The 50% bonus from Containment Fields makes it so that each regular transport transports 7.5 units of cargo, rounded to 8 for the first one, 15 total for the second, 23 total for the third, 30 for the fourth, and so on.

Does the Transport carry 8? Does the Trade Ship carry 15? So effectively it's less than x2 - this is all I care about (as most of the players, I believe).

Here is an another insult added to the injury - it uses (the whole) Trade Ship to transport a single "colonist" even if there is a Transport available in the trade pool. It seems like the Phidi is just an another "half baked" part of the game.

bjg wrote:Does the Transport carry 8? Does the Trade Ship carry 15? So effectively it's less than x2 - this is all I care about (as most of the players, I believe).

The Transport does not carry 8, effectively. Check your total transport capacity when you research Containment Fields and do the math. The Transport carries 7.5, and two of them will carry 15.