Strategic Combat

Never tried that but it should work if the transport has pre-set orders to drop troops before combat.

Yeah, its all in your Strategies, mate. Give it a strategy that, by default, has the "drop troops on enemy planets" set to TRUE or modify a strat for that and make sure all your troop transports have that strat.

You might also need to have at least one weapon on the troop transport. Unarmed ships tend to run away, unless you've tweaked the strategies to tell them not to.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

I use the ship strategy "Capture Planet" as the default strategy for my ship transports. When combined into fleets, I put them into a Task Force where the Attack Strategy is set to Capture Planet.

The only problem with that approach is I've had a few invasion fleets turn around while my relatively weak Troop Transports go in to drop the troops. More than one invasion has resulted in troops on the ground, and my Transport in flames.....

Sounds like a problem I've had before. If there are ANY defenses then the fleets will glass the planet faster than it takes to land troops. The only way around I found was to go tactical, have a task force neutralize the opposition, then withdraw and bring in the transport. It takes a little micromanagement on a slow speed.

Get the ships into a task force with a troop ship set as leader. Use a TF strategy that specifies dropping troops and staying in formation. That will keep your escorts in position to defend the transports. Barricade seems to be a good formation to use; the leader ship is set up behind a small spearhead of escorts that can be equipped with lots of PD for defending against planetary missiles; they also will be the first ships in range of the planet, so initial defensive shots will be against them and not against the troop ship.

Generally, though, against a well defended planet, I'm just happy to have the troop ship survive long enough to jettison its troops on the planet. If the troop ship survives the entire, it's gravy.