Colony Fighters!

[Ed Kolis]

All right, here's an idea that probably won't work, but it came up when my brother complained that in every 4X game he's played, whenever you colonize a planet, the colony ship is destroyed... "Why can't they just push the houses out the door?" he says... so I thought about it for a minute and came up with an idea for a mod - Make colony components mountable only on fighters. Make a REALLY HUGE fighter that carries these components. Give this fighter -200 to hit and defense so no one's tempted to use it to attack people with. (Might make good chaff though...) Now, make a special component for colony ships that is a really big fighter bay.

Only problems I can see are fighters can't carry cargo so all colonies would start with zero population, but actually that's kind of realistic because 1M is a lot of people to start a colony with, and besides, you could always put some cargo bays on the mothership anyway... and also that fighters might not be able to be given the colonize command (I know it doesn't work for drones...)

[Arkcon]

Nice idea, I aways wanted the colonizer to stay in orbit. you could retrofit it later as planet defender.

[spoon]

You could make a ship hull (the Colonizer) that costs maybe 100,000 organics to build and give it these abilities:
- Colonize - (planet-type)
- cargo
- Reduced Maintenance (90% or so)
- bridge
- maybe some other stuff as needed (life support? crew quarters?)

Then make a hull type (the colony Mothership) that can build at 0 minerals, 0 rads, and 100,000 organics. This Mothership can then go from planet to planet making colonizers. (You can of course reduce the mothership build rate if you want it to take more than 1 turn to build a colonizer).

Haven't thought it all the way out - might be some way to abuse it, maybe with Organic Tech?

-Spoon

[Fyron]

You can set a mimimun new colony population amount in Settings.txt. All colonies will get that much population plus what is in the cargo bays. The default setting is 0.

[Phoenix-D]

Unfortunately certain abilities won't work on certain unit types. Fighters can't be colony ships. Neither can sats, drones, or mines.

Phoenix-D

[rdouglass]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
You can set a mimimun new colony population amount in Settings.txt. All colonies will get that much population plus what is in the cargo bays. The default setting is 0.

Yeah, but that kinda' sucks in a way 'cause it only puts your homeworld population in the cargo. Not very efficient if you're using slave races to populate and you're putting up domed colonies everywhere.

I just build a BC w/ a ShipYard and cargo bays with each of the 'breathables' I control. Then I just cruise around 'seeding' colonies. You can really fill up a system fast if you build colony ships with only one engine (you only need the 1 move point to 'throw them out the door'....)