forum.freeciv.org

If there is land unit, which can transport other land units (let say Engineers or Train), you can pack these units into land transporter and then embark this full transporter on a ship.
This is overpowered because not only you have more units than nominal capacity, but also can disembark land transport units and then unload encapsulated units.
The latter one would be balanced if transport capacity take into account all units including encapsulated ones (thus you have for example 2x less assault units but ready to use in same turn).

Unfortunately, transport capacity is checked only for number of boarded units.
I propose to count all units included these nested.

So your bus suddenly uses less space on the ferry just because nobody's inside? Seems fishy to me.

I'd instead propose a cargo_size field for unit types, which would have one integer for each entry in the cargo field. Units of a certain unit class that can be transported would use up that many slots of the transport cap. (If omitted, it would default to all 1s.) That way, you could put your intermediate transport units into a separate unit class and have that unit class use up more space on your boat.
Also, this would allow more general things, such as a catapult using up more space than a diplomat.

Caedo wrote:So your bus suddenly uses less space on the ferry just because nobody's inside? Seems fishy to me.

Well, empty unit uses less ship tonnage

Of course method with class size would be great, it also fits well with my idea of the ship artillery.

Load factor is long overdue. I would apply it to each unit, but unit class would be a good start.