Geoff the Medio wrote:I'd keep the colony ship as a standard method of colonizing, but add the building as an unlockable alternative...
Why? The mechanic is obviously flawed (at least for the kind of game we try to make), I fail to see the appeal of colony ships (in their current form).
IIRC there are two main arguments that have been made in their favor:
1) They make colonization risky, you have to ensure protection for your colony ships if they have to pass through potentially dangerous areas to get to their target planet. Requiring supply connection that can potentially be blocked isn't really the same.
2) At the start of the game, when each new colony is a major endeavour (and thus happens accordingly rarely), requiring the player to have to select and enqueue the right building on top of what he has to do now (build a ship, send it to the target planet, press the "Colonize" button) actually makes the whole process a bit more tedious instead of simplifying things (because at that stage, when you only have one species and your home world, the whole micromanagement problems of the later game aren't an issue yet).
ad 1): That also applies to the outpost ships in my suggestion (that's one reason why I'm not sold on the idea of being able to build a colony building on an supply connected empty planet). You still have to send a ship there that can be attacked and has to be protected.
And you have to maintain supply connection if you want to turn that outpost into a colony.
ad 2): True, there's a point here, two things that come to mind regarding this issue:
1) It's just a few more clicks for an operation that, as has been pointed out, doesn't happen very frequently at that stage. So I see that only as a very minor annoyance, certainly something negligible compared to the headache colonizing becomes later on. Optimizing the number of clicks for a certain action/operation makes sense for something you have to do very often/frequently, in that case even one or two more clicks can make a really
huge difference. Which, in our case here, actually becomes an issue once you reach a stage when you start with more large scale colonizing, but by then the issues caused by the colony ship method far outweigh the bit additional hassle of having to enqueue the colony building (otherwise we wouldn't have this discussion).
2) And even
if we think the additional action of having to enqueue the colony building is that annoying, I'd rather put in a bit automation here: Implement the possibility to create the outpost and enqueue the colony building in one step. That would result in the exact same amount of work for the player as with the colony ship method, with the important difference that the player gets to choose the right species at the time the outpost is settled on the planet, not when the colony ship gets enqueued.
Having played other 4X space games I can tell from experience that the other way round, the way the current suggested patches are working, has its own issues. Just press the "Colonize" button of an empty planet and letting the code automatically selecting the "best" colony ship isn't as simple and straightforward as it might seem at a first glance, as you yourself have been pointing out in earlier posts. Determining the best species is probably the easiest thing (and even that isn't as simple as it might seem), but then, if there are several colony ships available with the desired species, which to pick? The one which will arrive at the target planet fastest? The nearest (not necessarily the same!)? The one with the highest capacity? Player preferences
will be different regarding these decisions, not to speak of the impact of the current strategic situation.
There might be another colony ship for the desired species being completed just a few turns later, that is far nearer to the target planet and would be there much faster. To make things worse, after the completion of the second colony ship I order colonization of a planet that needs the same species, but is very near to my first colony ship (which is now traveling all across my empire to the first target planet). Now two colony ships are travelling all around the galaxy to reach their target planets, while each one could be at their targets much faster if their targets were swapped (if only the second ship would have been available a few turns earlier). I'm not making things up here, that
has happened to me, several times. All it takes is an empire big enough, too much colonizing going on at once, too much colony ships to keep track of and just relying on an automated procedure.
I might build different kind of colony ships for different requirements. Extra fast to reach a strategically important planet far away from the shipyards of the required species; armed and armoured ones for colonization in danger/war zones; etc. Once I do that, I can't use the automation at all, because it's prone to pick the wrong ships.
I might want to escort specific colony ships, which brings us to a discussion that already came up in another thread: What to do if the colony ship the automatic procedure selected is in a fleet? Split it off, or order the entire fleet to the target planet? In that discussion both preferences have already been expressed, and there isn't a right answer to that question anyway, because it depends on the situation. What to do if a fleet contains several colony ships?
I guess I could find even more problems, but I think you get the point. I see a plethora of problems and issues with the current colony ship approach (even with the proposed patches, they can only alleviate the mess to a certain degree), and no real advantage. So I'm really interested what you think are the distinct advantages of colony ships that makes it worth to keep them