Why use Colony Ship?

[Renegade 13]

The point of having a colony ship may be to avoid confusion among new players. I can see a bunch of new players designing their ships and saying "WTF? Where's the colony ship? How am I supposed to colonize without any colony ships?". That's the only real reason I guess for them existing.

That said, I still use colony ships to colonize

[dogscoff]

It's also handy to have the colony ship image and template for mods that want to make them distinctly different from the unmodded game.

[Makinus]

It´s a union thing

[Hunpecked]

Alneyan writes:

"I have been told one wily AI in TDM builds Light Cruisers with Colony modules and weapons..."

I've seen the TDM Pyrochette, Tessellate, and Aquilaeians build armed colony ships from warship hulls. The AI colony ships usually operate alone, so they're easy prey for a true warship of equal size/tech.

Against the AIs I build the cheapest possible unarmed colony ships; the additional cost of weapons and/or supplies can make what should be a one-turn ship into a two-turn build. Also, I don't like sending my expensive weapons on a one-way trip; I'd rather put them on a reusable escort for the colony ship.

[geoschmo]

BASESHIPS?!?!

The largest I've ever put a colony comp on was a battleship. And I only used a BB because I wanted a colony ship that could colonize any planet type. Obviously this was late in the game when I could afford to throw away some resources to lessen the micromanagment a bit.

I did try role playing a hive race once that put colony modules in every ship. Didn't leave a lot of room for weapons though. My early ships were pretty much all set to ram.

[Parasite]

It is sad that it took me so long to realize you could use a transport for this. I had to be shown in a PBW game.

Play PBW, Learn new things!

I now use transports almost always. That way if I build one or two more ships than there are planets to colonize, they can me retrofitted to real transports. I found that was better than making ringworlds just to use up your extra ships.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Let me make some thing clear: I was talking about *stock* SEIV.

If you've got a Sphereworld, and you put a mere 4M pop on it for starters, growing your population to a size that makes the sphereworld worth its while takes a looooong time. If, on the other hand, you build a Baseship with just C&C comps, engines, a colony module and then only cargo bays, that ship can carry quite a sizable amount of population to the Sphereworld, which means that you can begin to truly harness the sheer power of the Sphereworld much, much earlier.

Of course, you could say that a bare-bones colonizer coupled with several large transports can achieve the same results, but this will still take more time. You can do the same with a colony baseship and a fleet of large transports. I mean, if you've got the economy required to support the construction of a Sphereworld, no doubt you can spare plenty of resources to build a Baseship colonizer instead of a CL or DD colonizer.

[douglas]

A single large transport can hold almost as much population as a baseship colonizer, moves faster, and doesn't get used up after the first population drop. In one PBW game, I've got a ringworld barely half a dozen turns after colonization, colonized by a light cruiser, that's already over 10 billion population just from a single large transport repeatedly dropping population on it. Using a baseship colonizer would have required more construction time, more time to fill it up with population, and more time to actually get there and colonize, all just to save a single trip by the large transport. Baseship colonizers are in general counterproductive. Meanwhile, I love being able to emergency build monoliths in 1 turn with that +100% population bonus . Pretty soon I'll start shipping excess population OFF of that ringworld to the rest of my dozen or so ringworlds, including TWO triple mollies .

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

On the other hand, if you've already got a sphereworld and have built a new one right next to it, and the original one has several billion pop living on it, you can build a Baseship in an acceptable amount of time and use it to essentially get an extra trip with the large transport without the transport actually ferrying that population. If you couple that singe large transport with the baseship, however, you double the amount of pop you have after colonizing, and need a turn less to get the same amount of pop on the sphereworld..... I'm not making any sense at all am I?

Also, a colony baseship actually carries quite a lot more pop than a large transport. Large transports weigh in at 900kT in total, while the Baseship can count on more then 1200kT in gross cargo space, not counting the colony module, engines, and Master Computer. You're using Master Computers of course, since you've got the tech and economy to build a Sphereworld.....

[douglas]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
an acceptable amount of time

The definition of that is what really matters here. It is very easy to build a light cruiser colony ship in one turn at high tech. A baseship colony ship filled with cargo bays costs over 20000 minerals and is quite impossible to build in less than two turns, and that's if you're building it on a planet with almost 10 billion population and emergency building. If you're building it at a sphereworld, you're wasting valuable facility-building time; if you're building it at a huge planet, the only other possibility, you've been lax in moving population to sphereworlds to get the maximum bonus from it. You could argue that build time doesn't matter since you can start in advance and have it ready for when the sphereworld is constructed, but that still doesn't change the fact that you could build a light cruiser colony ship AND another large transport in about the same amount of time and for about the same cost as the baseship, and you'd get to keep the transport.