Changing Colony Ship Hulls Without Killing People

I don't know of one, but consider the following.  If you change a constructor to a colony ship in deep space and colonize a planet, you have some small initial population even though you never loaded colonists.

I frequently use that if I send a constructor towards an anomaly or a border and inadvertently stumble upon (by scout, surveyor, or the constructor) a prize planet.  Instead of waiting for a colony ship (and perhaps letting an AI snap it up), I convert the constructor to a colony ship and grab the planet. 

A tougher decision is if one has a colony ship out in deep space and stumbles upon a mining anomaly.  If it is Red or Green, I generally convert the ship to a constructor and create a mining base.  (The other colors of anomalies are tougher calls.)  The rationale, I suppose, is that the mining base starts with a real big staff .... 

Conversely if you had a constructor and upgraded it to a colony ship that new colony ship would also have 1 colonist on it even though when the constructor was created and launched it did not subtract 1M from the planets pop. This results in 1M of pop from nothing. However it's nowhere near significant enough to worry about one way or the other considering that with the Breeder SA plus a few techs and wonders (Aphrodisiac) you can get your planets producing 1B+ of new pop *per turn*.

So while it does cost you 1M to do this kind of upgrade it's really not that big a deal as long as you don't forget to offload the other 249M first. Same thing applies to troop transports as well.

As far as the colony ship finding a mining resource I would tend to try and colonize a nearby planet and have that planet rush buy a starport and a tiny constructor with no engines to grab the resource if at all possible. If not then I suppose I wouldn't be all that bent out of shape about having to waste 250M of pop to grab a resource however don't forget to consider the upgrade time as well. If you're reasonably far from your own influence area the upgrade may actually take longer than the time it takes for the tiny constructor to get to the resource.

Actually, in my experience, no - but only in DL.

When bringing up the "Ship Details" screen in DL (by clicking on the little "i" icon), it's possible to scroll to other ships you own with the arrows below the picture. By clicking through ships, you can select ships at a planet and upgrade them without ever needing to launch. However, it's rather excessive effort for what, as Mumblefratz says, isn't really that big a deal - losing 1M population is tiny. So, unless it really bothers you to have your people "die" (I prefer to think that they're drafted to crew the constructor), there's no need. As far as I know, it's not possible in DA or TOA anyway.

On a related note, does it ever bother you that you can destroy a colony and render the surface an uninhabitable wasteland, and all the millions or billions of hard-working people down there just "disappear"? Is this occurrence publicized, or do the higher-ups keep everything hush-hush?

And while I can sort of understand how you fill up colony ships (the government says "OK, we're taking this many people offworld to start a new life, who wants on?), I think it would be hard to do the same thing with military transports. Aren't significant slices of the colony population too old/young/disabled to fight in a full-fledged ground war? Not to mention whatever the 22nd centuary equivalent is of "conscientions objectors". There would be a noticable gap between the colonize-able population and the recruit-able one, at least for Humans.

If you haven't noticed, the planetary populations are counted in billions while the military transport populations and planetary ground forces are counted in thousands. For each million of population you get one soldier, ie. only one millionth of a planets population are actually soldiers participating in wars, mirroring real life where only a fraction of a planets population would be part of the military. The realistic way to handle it would obviously be to handle soldiers and civilians separately with things like recruitment, soldier recruitment costs, upkeep and training, retirement, civilian casualties in wars etc. etc. but Galciv II is after all a game and not a real life simulator and Stardock chose to tie the civilian and military populations together for the sake of simplicity and keeping the game fun and straight forward. IMO the system is good and with a bit of imagination you can imagine all the parts I mentioned earlier being part of it, just not visible to the player. The only truly unrealistic part is that for each 1000 soldiers you lose, you also lose close to a billion of civilians. If you're attacked they can be counted as civilian casualties but if you're attacking someone there's no way you're bringin a billion civilians along as cannon fodder (actually, the Drengin might just do that). Still, I consider it a fair compromise for a simple system that works gamewise and still is a somewhat fair aproximation of real life logistics.

A sound strategy indeed. Do you know what it is that determines the starting population of a ship upgraded into a colony ship or transport? If you instantly upgrade your space miner into a standard colony ship like many do, it has a starting population of 100 million. In a recent game I however first upgraded the space miner into a faster miner, flew it out next to an uncolonized planet, upgraded the miner to the cheapest possible colony design (a design with same engines as the miner design) and now it only got a starting population of 1 million. There are numerous factors that may have caused it or even a combination of things:

- being outside of your influence area (if I'd have to guess, this would be my first pick)

- upgrading to a personal colony ship design rather than the standard design

- having upgraded the space miner once before upgrading to a colony ship

- not upgrading the ship within the first turn of the game

Has anyone tested this or otherwise have enough insight to make an educated guess?

It may have more to do with the population of the planet the ship was built on.

As far as I know if you upgrade *any* non pop carrying ship (i.e. any ship without either a colony module or a troop transport module) into *any* pop carrying ship (i.e. any ship with either or both a colony module or a troop transport module) then the pop carrying ship will be created with a pop of 1 (i.e. 1M).

However there are cases where you could actually do the upgrade while the ship is in orbit but still it will always be created with a pop of 1 onboard which would automatically be transferred to the planet since all pop carrying ships offload their "cargo" when in orbit. However if the ship got autolaunched then it would be filled automatically based on the population of the planet it orbited and you may not otherwise notice where the pop came from. This is what I think Moosetek is suggesting.

I've done the same thing but usually from planets that were maxed at 6B pop and in this case the colony ship would always be launced with the default 250 (i.e. 250M) colonists however if you look closely you'll see that the planets pop after the fact is 5.751B and that "extra" .001B = 1M came from the upgrade.

Heh, I wasn't really worried about it from the gaming perspective, just curious whether in the abstract it was possible not to have that one guy sacrifice himself to change the design.

So does anyone fly empty cargo hulls with massive engines as scouts then upgrade to colonizers whichever ones find planets?  Just curious.

Colonies have a negative cash flow until they reach a population level where the taxes offset expenses.

Thus, near-zero population colonies take longer to reach the "break-even" point, and the treasury is often limiting later in the colony rush phase.  For this reason, I use the instant conversion trick only for choice mine anomalies (red or green), and only rarely at that. 

Still, you make a valid point that one could get more engines and/or range with neither a colony module nor a constructor one.  That is, one could theoretically get a bit further and/or faster and then convert on the spot.  I have not done that, preferring to scout and be able to colonize with a full load of colonists.

That's really strange. Just to be sure I went back to the beginning of the game I was describing earlier and instantly upgraded the space miner into a colony ship. It sure got 100 mil. population instead of the 1 million I got when I upgraded it later in outer space. I'm playing DA 2.01 at the moment but I'm pretty sure it was the same way in DL as well, as this is a strategy I've been using for quite some time now. I'm currently in mission 10 in the DA campaign and it's the first time my space miner colony ship got 1m instead of the usual 100m. Perhaps it's something that only happens in the campaign missions? I'm still interested in knowing what it is that makes you lose the 100m starting population of the upgraded space miner. I guess I need to do some tests myself as no one else seems to even be familiar with the whole concept.

EDIT: I'm now done testing and am back with conclusive evidence. It appears that at least in the campaign missions all of your starting ships that you upgrade into colony ships will get a population of 100m as long as you don't upgrade them to anything else before turning them into colony ships. What kind of colony ship you upgrade to and how far away from your influence area you do it doesn't make any difference. This means that in the campaign missions it's a good idea to upgrade almost all of your starting ships into colony ships at some point as it will gain you a bunch of almost free population that will help turn your economy profitable. I hope this information is useful to someone. I know it's going to be to me. I only wish I knew this when I started my latest game as I really don't want to start over.

Re: population, I do build a colony ship for the purpose of equalizing population by shuffling colonists around (when I'm done shuffling it upgrades to a transport pretty cheaply) but in the time it takes to actually move people you're spilling red ink for a pretty good chunk of time.  I've relied on the AI's for extra cash by tech trading, but they also run out of money.

It might be a small map thing.  On a small map you either get yours or you get left behind.  The first few DL scenarios have very few habitable planets on them and they're crammed together (I didn't realize the planets were uncharacteristically close together until I saw how spread out things were on bigger maps.)

While I find using the instant-conversion trick on colonies to be a bad idea for the reasons you have said, I find it enormously useful with constructors. I have a number of "cargo hull scout" designs, and this is one of their primary purposes. It usually only costs a couple hundred bc to upgrade and the time saved is huge. This is one of the best ways I use to beat out the omniscient AI constructors to good resources (red, green, and I would also say yellow [morale]).

The blue ones also, especially late in the game if you have 69-70% influence.

An influence resource or two, fully loaded with mining modules, could mean an easy influence victory.

The "Expander", a cargo hull filled with engines and support, turned out to be very useful.  In addition to constructors and colony ships I was even using them to get my trade routes laid down faster in the Dreadlord scenario game with the huge map.

Thanks, y'all!

Cargo hulls also dramatically reduces the tech requirements for a viable anti-Dreadlord interceptor (speed 11 or better, attack of 1 or better, whatever support is needed, and maybe a scanner -- or the Eye, what a Wonder!)  In that next-to-last Dreadlord scenario I kept asking myself, "When can I finally build my interceptors?"  I realized I needed like Warp MkIII engines to really have a go at it, and in the previous scenario I had 7 planets and a bunch of allied AI's with powerful economies helping me tech up.

With the "Privateer" armed cargo hull I think I was intercepting Dreadlord non-combat shipping at like Impulse III.  I don't remember exactly, but it was way before Warp III.  I built them as a temporary stopgap when the Dreadlords showed up until I could build "real" interceptors, but against unarmed ships a cargo hull with a pea shooter and one hitpoint might as well be a fleet of battleships.

Cargo hulls make excellent scouts, too.  A big box that's all engines and scanners is way better than the plodding, half-blind stock scout model and not very expensive, especially on a parsecs-scanned-per-turn / cost ratio.

Anyone made a survey ship out of a cargo hauler yet?  Do hitpoint anomaly upgrades work on them?

ALL my survey ships are cargo holds, other than the flagship one starts with.

I just accept that the hit point bonuses one gets at some anomalies will be ~worthless.

How else in the early game can one get enough engines and life support modules into a hull to go and grab far and, potentially, to become emergency colonizers of constructors?

With that said, I do keep track of the flagship and often convert it to a warship much later, and all those gains help there.

However I don't agree that the hit point bonuses that your cargo hull survey ships get are worthless or even approximately so. Once you get even one of these anomalies and get the cargo hull up to 5 hp it becomes a viable attack ship particularly in the early part of the game where all you're fighting are tiny and small hull fighters. Putting one decent weapon on them (my preference is psionic beam, an early priority for me) is part of my first upgrade for all of my survey ships and can always be accomplished while keeping the survey module and increasing speed as you research both speed upgrades as well as a bit of miniaturization. Getting a 2nd HP anomaly effectively turns the ship into a Dreadnought compared to what anyone else can field that early.

Even without encountering a HP bonus anomaly such a ship will take out anything else out there in a single shot (except an armed starbase) and survive. Plus in the early stage of the game taking out someones *unarmed* starbases can be very helpful in making sure that you get the galaxies resources even if you didn't happen to find them first.

In DA I make a point of trading for the AI's miner's come March 1st. The AI doesn't seem to value these highly and I then upgrade all of these into unarmed Survey ships usually a speed of 8 or so even if all I have is Impulse II. Getting 9 extra survey ships out there early can make a huge difference in how much cash from anomalies you can get and that can translate into all sorts of good stuff no matter what style of game that you're playing.

Re: the miner - why March 1st?

I also agree on the usefulness of HP anomalies for either the flagship or cargo survey ships. The flagship often winds up as powerful as an actual dreadnought when upgraded into a warship, and I find armed cargo hulls good for all sorts of service - early game ships of the line, starbase and transport hunters, and 'proactive planetary defenders' (place them into orbit, then have them pop out when enemy ships approach to make an attack).

"Vanilla" DL doesn't have miners.  Does it have psionic beams?

With psionic beams you can pretty much take on anything up to and including Black Hole Eruptors. They are fairly expensive but you can get them so much earlier on the tech tree that there's nothing else that comes close.

On the cargo-survey HP matter, this seems a matter of playing style.  I only play DA Suicidal, and my style is most often to stay out of wars as long as I can.  Thus, an early game warship is of low value to me since, if I am in a war then, I have failed at the strategic level.

Also, since I prefer the larger galaxy sizes, and since anomalies periodically re-spawn in DA, the ships remain more valuable to me as harvesters all game long than as stop-gap semi-warships.

Note that staying out of early wars greatly increases the value of survey ships.  In AI-crowded galaxies, often all the other flagships are killed off well before mid-game, leaving my surveyers the only ones left - - only possible if I have stayed out of wars.

There are many ways to play the game and there is never only one possible way to do anything.

You are far better than I at managing and balancing research and production. 

In DA, at Suicidal, I have been unable to get to SCC, to research and build ships with enough power, and then get them into orbiting the SCC planet all quick enough to make the AIs "cower."  When I have tried that, I have either gone bankrupt or been attacked before I could get there.

The time I think I got closest, the colony rush by the AIs had already left me with what appeared to be an untenably small slice of the galactic pie.

SCC?