Idea: Play Around With Weapon and Armor Costs

[bvanevery]

Can't you put the Drop Pod ability on the Missile chassis?

I believe I can do that if I predefine some missile units.  I might get sucked into having to predefine all missile units, because otherwise, missiles aren't allowed to have abilities.  This is assuming there isn't some code in the game that forcibly suppresses abilities, even with manually predefined units.

The real problem is making a unit that can do an orbital insertion, earlier in the game than this ability is otherwise granted.  I don't think this is basically possible in a .txt mod.

If I were to grant orbital insertion with Orbital Spaceflight, then every unit with drop pods would be able to do it.  That's not desirable in midgame.

In my mod, both planes and ships can have drop pods, so I'm already familiar with various orbital insertion tactics.  With ships it may sound dumb, but they can land on a coast, then scoot into the water.  I think of them as semi-amphibious attack craft.  It's the future, why not flying ships?

[Geo]

Can't you put the Drop Pod ability on the Missile chassis?

The real problem is making a unit that can do an orbital insertion, earlier in the game than this ability is otherwise granted.  I don't think this is basically possible in a .txt mod.

Something should be possible with the predefined units. Of course retro-engineering comes lurking around the corner then.
An idea that just popped up in my mind would be (a) unit(s) found through pods. Those are in the beginning of the game supposed to be more advanced units then the colonists are capable of constructing shortly after Planetfall.

It certainly is a way outside the box thinking idea to include 'drop ships', but personally I'd solve to have a land&sea unit by having 'hovercraft' through changing foils to a (slow) air unit.
Not sure if this would work though. Air units might not be targetable by artillery.

[Anon Zytose]

I have another strange idea on how to get a missile to fly a little farther. What if you gave a land transport unit both drop pods and a carrier deck? Could such a unit carry missiles with it when making an airdrop? It might not be to the level of anywhere on the planet before orbital insertion, but it would still be a step up from their normal range.

[bvanevery]

You can do a carrier with drop pods in my mod right now.  You're not going to need it for my missiles, because mine have movement of 66.  Only in the most specific of circumstances, or on a map larger than Giant, would you ever need to orbital drop a Carrier in order to fire missiles.

Carrier with drop pods is intended to let you orbital drop a Carrier fleet and immediately do something useful with it.  I haven't yet seen need to make such a dire imposition upon an enemy though.  In my current AAR I'm overrunning the enemy with hovertanks, that arrived by a simple convoy of conventional boats.  Not much need to do more than that yet, because the eastern half of the Usurper empire is quite a sprawl.  Once I polish that off, I suspect swallowing the western half won't be a big deal, one way or another.  I just popped all of my Artifacts and I've got other tech advantages.  The Usurpers are going to be dead long before the orbital insertion phase of the game.

Changing existing predefined units around could have bad consequences.  Some of those slots have hardwired capabilities attached to them, like the PSI units I think.  Well, I could be wrong about that.  The more important consequence is the AI not knowing what to do with a ship that's now a missile and etc.  For my purposes though, there's simply no such thing as an "orbital insertion" flag.

[Geo]

Changing existing predefined units around could have bad consequences.  Some of those slots have hardwired capabilities attached to them, like the PSI units I think.  Well, I could be wrong about that.

Alot of those slots are indeed hardwired for in what situation they can appear, but not to this or that specific unit/ability, or even weapon.
In the past I tried out placing native Planet Busters on the native unit slots. The result was a massive cratering of Planet's surface, lots of message popups of this or that faction dealing with native life, and little progress in the way of colonising the land. Unsurprisingly, the 'best' results were made by turning the Locusts into Planet Busters.

If only I could've made it textwise that an asteroid bombardment was happening instead of Planet doing nasty stuff.

[bvanevery]

    

[Geo]

Exactly!