A light bulb came on

The whole balance of a transport is that if you lose your transport you just lost 10 units. That's the balance. It's the only balance needed.

Unless you're talking about Rise of Nations esque each unit can turn into a boat to transport it across water. In which case the disadvantage is that your combat unit is now a non-combat unit, and is easily picked off by combat units. If every unit in PA turns into its own individual non-combat flying transport, then they'll just get pummelled by turrets and fighters. That's your balance.

Otherwise it's a non-issue, and making the cost (in terms of resources or micro) exorbitantly expensive just increases the opportunity cost of transports. You're better off with aerial fabbers, gunships/scout ball, bombers and fighters. And those can be redeployed again for a different mission.

Good. That's exactly what a transport should be. A magic box. That's what I understand when you say transport. If it's functional, who cares what it looks like.

Good

I'd rather have functionality over aesthetics.Yes, it sounds awesome. But awesome is stuff that works. If it doesn't work, it's not awesome, and the idea behind the principal doesn't matter.

(like infinite work machines - yes the principal is awesome, but it's impossible and so meaningless)

You could make a magic-box transport with landing pods. Each pod has a weapon that only fires if the pod is occupied, and the pod fires according to the type of weapon used by the occupant. Kind of how C&C Red Alert 3 handled MultiGunner IFVs. On pickup they vacuum units into them, on drop off they just eject them out of the sky.

Well all I'm hoping for along with many others is an easy way to transport large armies for surprise attacks or to reinforce outposts.

Will you also have a ferry command?

Condescending posts like you made shouldn't be posted. You know full well it's damn near impossible to search in forums like this. If it was why not post links TO those threads rather than being a jerk and telling them to go read it. Oh.. no? yeah it's not easy to just search forums to find the topics you're looking for, isn't it?

I must have missed that post.
Seems interesting. Very curious what's coming down the pipe from Uber now that it's a couple months later.

Sorry to drag this back up, but is there anybody who would rather have no multi-unit transports if they can't have ghetto gunships?

The SupCom transports looked great with the units hanging off the bottom, but it's not necessary for gameplay or believability purposes. The only gameplay difference it made (T1 bots being able to do drivebys) was an arguably bad unintended side-effect.

I would not be at all concerned if a multi-unit transport sucked all the units inside it and then flew off with no indication of what was inside. Like the naval transport in TA (but ideally without the tortuously-long loading sequence ).

Naturally I know anything about your source code and I'm just speak bubbles. Nevertheless, I bubble up

Attaching an unit to an other, isn't as simple as storing a value in the properties of the object (the Transport) that identifies the object being contained (the loaded unit - simply a number or an ID)? Now the loaded unit can be destroyed altogether from the map. When the Transport unloads the units, the program re-creates the object (the unit) on the map.

Only two values seem to be necessary for each unit being transported. ID and HP. That's it. What do you need more?

It looks like a simple task from here. But of course, I'm bubbling up.

I can totally understand about resource constraints on budget and how they need more people and don't really have the time to include multi-unit transports, the problem I'm having is if this stays as a 1 unit carrier, its seems like a grossly waste of recourses considering how PA gameplay is. Its based on big armies, units that explode quickly for fast gameplay, the amount of transports you would need to make it even worth while moving an army across a planet quickly would be ridiculous to say the least, then you have the balance issue which im sure is a nightmare because if you can only carry 1 unit at a time, which means you have to make them tank and take a lot of damage well, but then you cant have them too tanky or people will never be able to intercept the transports before they land. Then you have to think about the resources needed to build them, 1 per unit, is just imense and just simply quicker and easier to get an orbital fab to build a teleporter instead.

I just simply do not see anyone really using them which seems like a waste if they cant carry more than one unit. You don't have to code the transports to take all sorts of different unit combinations, just have it so transports can only carry 1 type of unit at any one time, and then a space restriction based on size of unit, bot vs tank, t1 vs t2. Otherwise I just really don't see it being that meaningful of a unit to be honest, not when you have a unit cannon and teleporters as well.

Perhaps some sort of fast All-terrain vehicle APC might be better. I can totally understand Neutrino's reasons absolutely, but if time is the biggest issue, perhaps leave that unit out for something else like the Megabot which I think would be more of a valid unit personally

With the shift of orbital to the early game essentially the Astraeus would work as a single transport unit.

Technically it could, though it's not cost effective. It also lacks the UI features to make moving a large army practical. Transports are not only a technical issue from the transporting elements, but to be practical they will need considerable UI effort to stream line their use as much as possible.

I look forward to you taking this back when you see the area command interface for loading/unloading transports in formation

I think a playtest is in order. You've got to test your integrity, there's bound to be some bugs now.

Aaaand now I have Ride of the Valkyries playing in my head for the rest of the evening. Great, thanks Neutrino

I think a teleport satellite would be easier to use. There's already a counter in the orbital layer for satellites. Imagine loading your army into the teleport buffer, moving the satellite and deploying. Or perhaps linking a gate to a satellite and moving it into position. Would make orbital assaults easier too I would think.

Ghetto gunships were a really lame gimmick. They only worked because a ground unit could not shoot anything in the air, not even another ground unit. In TA this idea would have been pointless.

Bulk cargo transport options are critical for this type of game. There's too many units to have the player stuck handling each transport one at a time. But is sad that even the single transports are going to use magic boxes. I can understand the multi-hook being a PITA to program properly, but a single clamp? That one didn't seem so tough.

This is what I've been bringing up time after time. lol.

Transports are going to be so freaking amazing with the amazing area commands.

Cannot wait to get my hands on then.

Area command will for sure help a lot, but the mechanic of producing as many transport units as the number of units to want to transport is not very exciting and (sorry) pretty much unrealistic, especially for an army.
a true transport unit able to transport a bunch of small units would be much more realistic. As allready mentionned, there's no requirement for really attaching transported units to the transport unit. They can just disappear when loading, and re-appear when unloading. I do not really see the difference with stargates. More over, this means the number of units to be produced, simulated, displayed will be multiplied by 2. And this also means we lose the ability to stop a big invasion by simply intercepting a few transport units. I understand there's a conception limitation, but it's really sad the current implementation is not able to manage more than 1 to 1 units.

I haven't taken it back yet Neutrino! =) no one even uses transports...With how easy it is to move units around in the teleporter this makes transports useless. I've played countless games & not once seen transports used...You can get a tele up pretty quickly compared to building a T2 air factory & then actually spamming enough transports to move an army across the map...