Troop transport module costs

[nakorkren (OP)]

Right now troop transport modules costs are as summarized below. Generally the progression between sizes seems reasonable, and as you'd expect the capacity/cost ratio goes up with larger sized modules. However, even if you build the largest sized drop bays, you're looking at a cost of 32k BP to be able to build just the drop modules to transport 1M troops to an enemy world. That's a huge amount of capacity to build through a shipyard, and still a pretty incredible lift for even the entire economy of a largeish planet. In 2055 my capital has only 21k MP per year. Now granted I've moved a significant chunk of factories to colonies, but still ~half are on Earth.

Once you factor in engines and some decent armor, you're looking at ~12k BP per 100k of troops transported, so 120k BP for 1M troops you can drop on a hostile NPC capital world while under STO fire. It strikes me as pretty steep. I'm going to be building drop ships for ~10+ years, and that's accounting for building some components via industry rather than at the shipyard. In hindsight I should've started building Very Large Troop Transport Drop Bays at a low rate from the start of the game, such that I was ready to build them into ships in a shipyard once I found a tempting NPC homeworld. That's certainly what I'll do next time. That said, are troop drop bay modules unreasonably expensive, or did I just wait too long to start building them?

Troop Transport Bay   Size   Capacity    Cost
Very Small                    100          100       3
Small                           250          250       6
Standard                      1,000     1,000    20
Large                           5,000     5,000    80
Very Large                   25,000   25,000  320
         
         
Troop Transport Drop Bay   Size           Capacity   Cost
Very Small                         120             100             8
Small                                300             250             15
Standard                           1,200        1,000          50
Large                                6,000        5,000          200
Very Large                        30,000       25,000        800

[Andrew]

If you did not start building lots of troop ships on day 1 you waited too long. I build Fuel harvesters and Troop transports constantly, everything else I think about.
Having said that troop bays are expensive.
Even more as there is a strong arguement that you need drop modules and heavy armour on each troop ship so you can drop in the face of STO fire, as neutralising the planatery defense's of a homeworld does a lot of collateral damage.

[nuclearslurpee]

I would say that the cost of troop transport modules should be assessed in relation to other options. Particularly, we have the option of making an opposed landing through withering STO fire, which indeed requires a large number of heavily armored dropships. However, we also have the option of eliminating STOs with orbital fire, either long-range beam weapons or missile bombardment. Each approach has its own advantages, but the result in either case will be significant collateral damage both to lootable infrastructure and the environment for colonization. In principle, landing ground forces avoids these downsides, so it does make sense that the dropship approach would be more costly.

I do think the current cost of dropship modules is a bit larger than it needs to be compared to the regular modules (which in turn seem fairly priced, midway along the freighter/colony ship scale). The cost of the drop modules could be dropped to perhaps a 50% increase over the cost of regular bays without much issue. Dropships are still expensive due to the large amount of armor needed, but this would make building a large fleet of them somewhat less demanding of a task.

That being said, costs aside the primary requirement is indeed time, one should be building up a large fleet of invasion ships from the beginning of the game on a TN start, and as soon as one has reasonable engine and armor technology plus shipyard space/sizes on a conventional start. Like ground forces themselves, building up these logistics is meant to reward long-term planning, and a mindset of building things "when needed" in reaction to the game circumstance is not really going to be a successful approach here, as usual in Aurora.

[nakorkren (OP)]

Nuclear as usual has provided a reminder that the reason to land troops into the teeth of STO is to avoid flattening the valuable population/infrastructure on the planet trying to destroy the STOs, so you're paying time/minerals/forethought up front in exchange for extra resources captured intact later.

100% agree you should be building troop transport capacity from early on. In this case I had plenty of troop transport capacity, actually already approaching 1M tons of simultaneous lift capacity. The problem was that none of it was drop capable, because this is the first time I've run into a planet with really, really favorable terrain for the defenders, so much so that I was utterly wrecking the place trying to hit the STO. Next time I'll probably just start building drop-capable troop transport modules from the start and hold those as a "rainy day" head start on ship building if/when I discover I'm facing an enemy homeworld with forested rift mountains or some such. Since you can't prebuild armor and your engine tech significantly improves with time, that's probably a better option than building the ships early outright, as long as you build up to large-enough commercial shipyards along the way.

As nuclear said, it does still feel like the drop modules are a bit overpriced. It's gamey to change it now that I've run into a pinch where I want to hurry up and invade a homeworld. In my next game I'll consider DB editing to lower the cost of drop modules from the baseline 2.5x as expensive as normal modules to maybe 2 or 1.75, so there's still a substantial cost increase but a little less so. We'll see... I try to run non-modified when ever possible, so may just suck it up and do as I suggested above.

[nuclearslurpee]

As nuclear said, it does still feel like the drop modules are a bit overpriced. It's gamey to change it now that I've run into a pinch where I want to hurry up and invade a homeworld. In my next game I'll consider DB editing to lower the cost of drop modules from the baseline 2.5x as expensive as normal modules to maybe 2 or 1.75, so there's still a substantial cost increase but a little less so. We'll see... I try to run non-modified when ever possible, so may just suck it up and do as I suggested above.

In all honesty, we could even go so far as to reduce the drop bay costs to a mere +20% over normal, basically in line with the +20% tonnage. It might sound questionable to make drop capability so easily accessible at first glance, but the reality is that drop bays are pretty much useless without the dozen layers of armor needed to weather STO fire (thus dropships remain very expensive), and there's really no other use case for those bays - the +20% size increase makes them inferior for normal troop transport duties by itself, since a "light" transport would then either be slower or need more engines thus increasing the cost.

I'm not advocating for this, of course - I think +50% cost over the normal bays is a better mark than the marginal +20%, mainly to preserve strategic balance versus orbital bombardment, but it is a useful point to consider.

[Jorgen_CAB]

It was some time ago I did a proper invasion but I'm sure I built dedicated bombardment cruisers with laser cannons of 12cm and 15cm guns. These were plenty enough to destroy STO without too much colateral damage but I can be wrong. It is when you attack the planet with weapons that do too much inaccurate damage that you will create allot of damage to the planet.

I just park these ships above the planet and blast away, retreating when shields get low and rince repeat. Since these ships are very specialized I only keep them around when needed. So, after a planet is conquered these ships get dismanteled. Most of the components are stored and I can just reasemble them when I need them again both cheaply and fast.

That means I could make due with regular transport ships for invading larger planets.

I only ever used dropship transports to take smaller colonies and outposts.