[Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz]

SJ, I think SDDs on every colony ship would actually handicap the AIs. Human players would have the sense to only use SDDs when they encountered pirates.

Even then, I don't think SDDs on colony ships make sense from a game-theoretic point of view. If the ship/pop is lost anyhow what is the value of depriving a potential enemy of a potential colony?

I suspect that other than in the very early stages the benefit is less than the cost of a single SDD component - certainly not sufficient to cover the expense of installing SDDs on the other 95% of ships not encountering pirates.

Maybe a better solution is to only load minimal pop onto each colony ship and to have re-usable pop transports equipped with SDDs?

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Resistence is futile.