Imperial Loader Shuttle image - Rise of the Mandalorians mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption

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I dont know i just saw aats being deployed in a comic and wanted to share it with you.
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I found the y wing variant, its called BTL-S3 Courier variant. Looks like it was a y wing that lost firepower in exchange for transport capabilities, we could say its a dropship. Starwars.wikia.com

As for the atat ship transport,its an acclamator variant that has its hull modified to perfectly fit a heavy vehicle such as an ATAT for quick deployment
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Maybe that y-wing variation could deploy some types of infantry and heroes? Looks perfect for incursions.

as for the acclamator variant, I think its better than the ATAT barge, mostly because I hate it when I lose ATATs in glaactic conquest because they go in weak ships in space combat, something valuable such as AT-ATs could go in tougher ships such as that one. But unlike normal acclamators they do not have starfighters in their hangars, so its a dedicated heavy landing craft and siege support.

Fair enough, when loking at its size I see it would have to be downscaled a lot, so in that case the ATAT barge is a better option, at least as the landing method. Despite that, I am still worried about space battles, let me elaborate why: Most of the times when I'm preparinng an assault army there is not enough room in the planet to hold all the troops, so they automatically go to the space part. The issue lies on in that the AI puts those units at the start of the space battle instead of leaving them as reinforcements, and that happens both in attack and defense. So as they occupy part of the population you cannot call in reinforcements and usually you end up losing some of the transports even if you hide them in a map corner.

When you are attacking you can apply that strategy you mentioned, but in defense that strategy is pretty much imposible to do, and many times even the attacks don't go very well. So, is there a way to always put transports that are not meant to battle in space in the reinforcements menu isntead of them being deployed by default? Such as ground troops, vehicles and heroes without their own special ships. It would be a way to avoid pointless deaths and it would encourage people to play instead of autoresolving when sending fleets + armies in order to prevent losses. Could that actually be done?

Well, that can work for small galactic conquest maps, but in larger campaigns with a lot of planets it is hard to deal with it, you have so many things to do and to take care of, and usually if you attack you let that planet and the others behind totally exposed, so if you leave your ground troops there, they can easily be wiped out. You can also send the army ground units just after you send the fleet, but if the fleet somehow losses, the following fleet composed of only ground units transports it is doomed. Hence why if you find a way to fix this AI behaviour of deploying infantry and vheicle transports over star destroyers and other kind of starships it would be very appreciated. if not, well, we will have to deal with it as always we have been doing.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

I agree that the space vehicle for most units should not be shuttles or transports. Those units were typically used for deployment rather than galactic transport. I think it would be much more fitting to have heavier ships serving as transports in space, and then just using the deployment vehicles for the landing animations in ground combat. According to canon anyway, this makes much more sense.

Yes, indeed. It is unrealistic. EAW forces this choice on us because of the see-saw function of the game. In space (aside from 2D-ness) one can have numerically correct star wars battles (at least the smaller ones, and as we continue to optimize, bigger ones). But on land this is completely impossible. It begs a question that, while space combat may be an accurate representation of SW combat, land combat will always just be a representation of far larger land combat (ie. One battlefield representing an entire planet). In some sense this is true of space as well (Coruscant had planetary Shields and hundreds if not thousands of Golan platforms), but it is far less common.

Following this line of thought, having one infantry battalion (a really big one) from an acclamator does make sense (even if you lost the acclamator if the land unit perished) because that land unit is actually representative of a far larger military unit (aka, a whole battalion), the loss of which would definitely be comparable if not more than to an acclamator. In a sense, I am proposing something similar to what you said at the end there, but obviously making that infantry cost a lot more.

I think its better to make it simple and find ways to enrich the gameplay. If you find a way for the ai to avoid placing atat barges as a frontline ship at the beginning of battles it should do. However I think there might be a way to put units in ISDS and similar ships if available. What happens when you bring heroes without their own spaceship? Well, from what I remember they all join together in one ship, usually the largest.But when deployed in ground they have their own transport. Is there a way for normal ground units to do the same?

Farseer's point is well founded.... Bye bye army.

Ignore above ^ . Farseer's point is well founded regarding using hero xml.... Bye bye army if that one ship blows up. Additionally, you have to deal with removing the icons / selection glows. Also, you would have to always use the fleet jump in at once option - no scout ship.

Farseer, sorry for the ginormousness of this post but I want to know what you think. I tried to make it clear...

After some thought, I have devised a plan that may work.

1) I will remove most of the common land units as buildable options.
2) many large spaceships (ie. Acclamator-SSD) will now have deployable land companies formed of mixed units such as an ISD dropping 16 infantry, 8 AT-ST, and 1 ATAT (whatever, you get the idea). This essentially means that these spaceships are actually just super powerful transports.
3) to prevent the loss of the spaceship if the land forces are destroyed, each land company will include 1 non-targetable, non-selectable, invisible unit, rendering the "container" unit indestructible on land.
4) this means that such a combo space/land unit can still be lost in space tactical combat or in auto-resolved combats (space or land). This gives the defender a substantial advantage in auto-resolved land combat.
5) also, the issue with in land tactical combat is that you could get stuck with a full unit population even though you could have few actual combat units left.
6) an additional issue is that these company units will essentially be free, making lossless repetitive land combat a thing, leading to a substantial attacker advantage in tactical land combat.

So how to resolve these issues:

7) regarding #4 and the auto-resolved land combat home advantage, it could be considered an acceptable loss for the gain of a quick battle. This could be offset by making land facilities more expensive. Even so, auto-resolve values should be carefully balanced compared to vanilla.
8) regarding #5, regarding inability to bring in additional land reinforcements once maxed out, I can think of two solutions: A) one could increase, perhaps double the population cap. As machines have gotten better, performance should be ok. This allows attackers to get a lot of forces down on the field and make a big push. This would be far more representative of actual star wars land combat. Now, B) if that doesn't make a difference, we could make the invisible units selectable but non-mobile with their sole ability being suicide. Yes, the attacker would lose the ship, but its their decision, either that or attack again.
9) regarding #6, the ease of lossless repetitive attacks in tactical land combat, I don't have a problem with it in principle since the Galaxy is huge and losing thousands of troops is less than losing the troop complement of 1 ISD (out of >25,000 ISDs) the actual issue is with balance. I would simply counter this by making home advantage​ stronger by A) giving bounty to home side on every attacking unit destroyed. This makes repetitive attacks very inversely costly to the attacker by enriching the defender. Also B) greatly strengthening land structure stats as well as their garrisons (since land units could not be produced even though one could "land" starships on the planet and have the units on the surface should they desire.

To summarize: most/many captial ships are actually containers for mixed land companies that deployed in land combat for free against stronger defensive forces. This reduces the vanilla game's ridiculous need to micromanage land troops on the same level as fleets, while making space combat more realistic and wholistic. Ships are destroyed either in tactical space combat or by choice via auto-resolve and suicide. Hero units, along with some elite/unique units, will still be produceable individually.

To conclude, I think this would be a feasible overhaul, able to be balanced, only requiring xml adjustments. I have already tested this simply using acclamators and Stormtroopers with bikes for mixed companies and it seems to work, with some bugs I need to work out, obviously. What do you think?

Yeah, to a certain extent, I wasn't suggesting it as an idea for you to implement, more of something I was thinking of doing on my own, just wanted to know what you thought. It would be a lot of work. Yeah, I have been following you for a long time :P I think six or seven years. I have no desire to burden you with more stuff. But keep it up - you are doing awesome work and are an important member of the community for EAW!