The transports used in trade are also used for moving population around. Unless there is going to be a future combat role for these ships (and I don't really feel like there should be), then I feel like the main player controlled role of shuffling around population is too small for a God-Emperor. It seems out of place with most of the other things I find myself doing. The decision to move one million snakemen to an island world in order to get more use out of it is definitely an important high level decision. The manual orders to load and unload the population are not.

As it is, you can't select the race you want to load, so the process gets annoying as you bring in multiple transports to pick up people until you get the race you want to move. If the system stays as it is, that part would need a new interface to allow for picking the species you want out of a list.

Instead, I propose that once the new planet management overview system is in place, that some method of ordering population moves be implemented from that screen, and that transports in the trading pool implement the move behind the scenes. Perhaps add a small monetary price, to reflect nominally independent captains being forced to do this unprofitable task?

Trade raiding has been mentioned as something going in eventually, and this could work with that by allowing that kind of raiding to intercept/capture a civilian population transport, allowing the captor to divert the population to one of his own worlds. This is the main possibility that we have with transports in tactical right now that we would lose out on.

Moving population manually with transport ships is not the optimal way to use them. Originally, transport ships went directly to the Trade Pool as soon as they were built, and you could never command them directly. The ability to take transports in and out of the Trade Pool and to load and unload population manually was added very recently (and is not full-featured) for a few reasons. First, I didn't like the feeling of building a ship that you never see, especially when the mechanics of the trade pool and auto-population-transport are mostly hidden in the current UI. If you can at least see the transport and notice that you can send it to Start Trading, I felt, you can get some sense of how the system works (though clearly the UI there needs to be improved).

Second, there are special cases in which transports need to be on the map. The Humans are supposed to start without a colony, and with population in transports that you need to be able to manually unload. The Phidi have flexible transports that can be armed, so they need to be able to recall them from the Trade Pool for use in combat, when desired. There will also be more things to do with transports in the future as the trade system is fleshed out.

It would probably be useful to have an options setting to "Send Transports to Trade Pool On Construction."

mharmless wrote:As it is, you can't select the race you want to load, so the process gets annoying as you bring in multiple transports to pick up people until you get the race you want to move. If the system stays as it is, that part would need a new interface to allow for picking the species you want out of a list.

Yes, as Arioch alludes in his post, the pre-beta builds only let you move colonists by shift-left clicking on either their icons in the planet pane, or the source planet. That semantic is still in the game -- and I discuss a little more about just how it works at the start of the Getting Started thread. The shift-left click commands are an awkward interface, but, they do currently give you control over which species type you're moving, and dispatching transports from the trade pool abstracts away a lot of the fiddly details. I think we probably need both systems in the game, and, in a technical sense, both are up and working right now. With the considerable caveat that all the UIs need fixing.

The planet production overview screen (currently posted on dev, in a rough form), also has a lot of potential to be used as a high-level population transport interface. Again, the hooks are already there, in the sense that you can move from planet to planet via a shift-left-click, but, they're in need of a lot of refining and elaboration before the UI will be as intuitive or user-friendly as we'd like.