Troop loading speeds and concurrent activity

[chrislocke2000 (OP)]

(Note this is 4.92 so if something has already changed please ignore!)

So yesterday I decided to board and capture one of the precursor habitats (the 25mil ton ones). Having already failed with a battalion of marines I attacked with a small fleet of three assault ships. Each assault ships carries troop transport bays for 5 companies, 5 shuttles with a company drop pod each and 10 cargo handling systems. I had previously attacked using just one assault ship.

In the previous attack the marines loading without a gripe and happily sped off to doom. This time round it took over 36 hours for the marines to load and plenty of them got pretty upset about sitting on their shuttles for a day waiting to launch.

I assume that the way loading is calculated the game treats each loading action as happening in turn such that it takes three times as long for three ships in a single TG to load troops compared to if the three ships were placed into individual TGs and then given the order to load. Whilst relatively easy to work around it's a bit more clicking so I was going to suggest that total load times for a TG be based on the average load time for each individual ship in the TG - subject to the minimum time of the slowest loading ship in the TG. This would then reflect slightly better the idea of marines being loaded concurrently rather than waiting in turn.

Finally the extension to this would be to reflect that loading 5 shuttles each with a company should be a lot faster than loading one large drop ships with all five companies - queue Starship Troopers montage of them all running onto their little drop ships!!!!

[Thiosk]

I too have been loading individual units.  However, I noted that if you send an HQ-- you can check the load subordinate units if hq selected box, and they seem to move as a single unit.  Also, in the new version, there is a load all units button.  don't know if that s new or not.  It probably* moves everyone quickly.

The only other thing I can say is research advanced cargo handling-- that should speed things up.