Small Quality of Life Improvement Request

[zenopath]

Armed military ships that berth troops should be the last ships to unload their troops if they are in a fleet with unarmed transports carrying troops when unloading troops to a world. They should also immediately refill their troop type from any basic transport if they lose their cargo in an invasion (or just assign kills to the troops in transports first if they are of the same type anyways). When you move troops from ground to a fleet overhead, they should also fill any empty armed ships with berths first. Armed ships with troop berths should be "sticky" and reluctant to let go of their troops as they need them for combat. Would also be nice to know which ships are lacking crew (a green line under the red line for hp in strategic view)

The devs should probably implement this preferential behavior when (and if) they fix a rather glaring exploit (click on the spoiler below if you want to know about it)

Spoiler: show

Armed troop ships will refill their troops every time they get refitted, even if the refit cost is something incredibly minor like switching AC mod on and off on a single weapon... an easy way to cheaply create free troops if you unload them then refit every round.

[Arioch]

We've known about the issue with refitting troopships for a while, but it hasn't seemed like a priority to fix... if you're willing to take that ship and that planet out of commission for a turn and manually refit and unload every turn, then I'm not going to lose too much sleep if you get some low-cost troops out of it.

Assigning priority to troop loading is worth considering. I think troop transports need some kind of reinforcement system (perhaps similar to the trade pool) to reduce the micromanagement of replacing troops lost on the front lines, but I haven't figured out a good design for it yet.

[Arioch]

hoho... that was my 1337th post. I'm officially "leet."

[zenopath]

I get why worrying about exploits in a single-player game isn't really all that important. After all, if a player wants to cheat in a single-player game, who cares. The fact that you could spam troops round after round by emptying out carriers and using instant refit, potentially making dozens per turn anywhere you need more troops, it's only your own game that you are cheesing if you use the exploit.

That priority thing though would be nice though. I guess if I was coding it, I would just try to implement "first to load, last to unload" on armed troop carriers. I suppose the best way to it would be; When player clicks on down arrow (on the population window in planet view), if there is a troop in a basic trasport draw from there. When player clicks on up arrow on planet view, if there is an empty armed troop transport, send troop there." This behavior is reversed for civilians. After each planetary invasion where troops die, you can reshuffle where troops are, filling armed ships first, then assigning the rest to the basic transports. Having different troop types can make it confusing, but you can prohibit any reshuffle that would change troop types. Having tanks fill up your ships that should have space marines would actually be annoying, so if you have multiple troop types, you could still end up with empty armed ships and filled basic transports, if they had different troops involved.