What if the defenders used Centurion IIIs as well? Perhaps in concert with heavies.

It was actually a centurion MKII, but there's probably only about 1% chance of killing me while I kill and grab, unless I miss the cargo on the first run (which is immediately after the kill).

Attacking is so painfully easy, I've even done it in a Centaur MkII with a railgun.
Defending is so painfully hard that I simply warpkill the transport while it's still at Daltas Hold and take the cargo, or wait for Them to kill it and grab the cargo first.
CtC should be something more.
I propose the following remedies:
* Give the transports more armor
This way they'll be POSSIBLE to defend, instead of "Boomboomboom! It's gone, folks."
* Make them a ton bigger and make them carry more cargo.
Then there is an actual reason to defend the transport instead of simply blowing it up. If it carries 122cu and the total cargo holds of the defenders is 30, they'll think twice about letting the enemy get it.
* Nerf their turbo!
When they turbo, all their defenders cannot keep up while fighting. Especially the Collector guards.

Good to see they don't megawarp any more at least.
-:sigma.SB

P.S. Fix the repairgun, it's hard to repair transports when the repairgun doesn't work.

Solra: that's too drastic of a nerf, in my opinion. If you did that, attacking would be impossible. One problem that I see is that (okay, this is pre-update because I haven't had much time to play or CtC recently) is that the weight penalties don't hurt light fighters nearly as much as they do heavy fighters. If an attacker uses a light fighter to easily get in and blat the transport(s), the cargo that they grab doesn't hurt them much. If a medium or heavy fighter (the hog for instance) were to grab the cargo, the weight penalty is extremely noticeable. It takes a fully loaded hog probably 5000m to get to full speed - which means it's usually dead if a defending light fighter starts out under 1500m away. And now with the Centurion - the Cent will ALWAYS catch its prey on infiniboost because it's now faster than anything in the game.

Good suggestions...but not a bug.

[moved to Suggestions]

Cool your jets, Nya13. Repetative posting isn't the best way to get your point across, we heard you the first time.

I happen to agree with you, CtC does feel like a race and I think the transports could stand to be slowed down somewhat. At least the transport jumps in at the same time as all of its guardians, that's an improvement from before when it would jump in 30 seconds ahead of its escort and would be even easier to kill.

tested:

6 transporter runs each with:
Allways 4-5 defender with cent III; Valks; SVG; ...
Allways ONE attacker

If the attacker is any good, the defenders have no change

So this new racing model kills the teamwork, because you do not need it.
No fights, no chasing, no fun.

Suggestion:
seconded the other posters:

-Give the transport a lot more hull
-Make it slower and heavily guarded with Bots
-Perhaps slow down the attacker with all this ctc-cargo

Once again this problem is not with CtC. It has to do with the way ALL ships are balanced against each other, and is just the most obvious symptom of the larger problem. The problem has gotten better than it was before the first balance tweak, but more needs done, (obviously, or we wouldnt be having this discussion)

one step would be the ideas i proposed in this thread
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/8349

To highlight a couple of the points i make in the post above:

A. making higher turbo speed coupled directly with mugh higher energy drain would prevent a super fast ship from swooping in, killing, and fleeing.

B. reducing cargo capacity in the ultra fast fighters will force teamwork, 1 fighter, someone else to do the transporting. a solo run might still be possible with a more medium range ship such as a warthog, but such a ship would then be catchable by light, fast, defenders. Defenders would have to have a mix of ships, a couple of light defenders and at least one backup cargo carrier in a heavier ship.

One fix that definitely needs made to the convoys directly is that the transports need to move much slower. Give them a 5 second pause after a jump or warp that they use to re-gather thier bot escort, and chop thier turbo speed down, or eliminate the turbo on the transports alltogether, preventing them from being so able to get way out in front of all thier defenders.

I honestly think the ships are fine, everyone complains about the cent but any well placed shot by a defender in a heavy ship will rock its little armor (A rag full of flares is a one hit kill on cents) They need to just make it so you cant grab n go is all, making the ctc cargo considerably heavier would do that, as would making some kind of turbo drain around the transport that would effect attackers but not defenders, make the turbo drain have a limited range of course. Also, the transport is not always traveling at 200m/sec, from what ive seen it wont do that until it starts getting attacked, as I rolled with a transport doing 55 all the way to initros. Also, its quite possible to outrun a centurion with a bit of planning, all you have to do is get 3000m away, trust me, being a pirate I know the status on ability to run away hehe. The trick to catching a centurion is to plan your jumps better than they do, so you end up closer to wormholes. With a bit of experimentation you can have any ship movin about the systems quite fast.

tramshed, the problem is no defender can get into position to deliver a well placed shot.

All the cent has to do is sweep in, tag the transport, grab the cargo and he's gone, you can never catch him, because the centurion pilot can know the best routes to the wormholes as well.

Defenders not being able to aim doesnt seem like its the cents fault, although I do agree with something needing to be done, I REALLY dont think nerfing the ship they just denerfed as the solution. There are other ways to fix this issue than ruining a ship. Im sure once the devs get around to doin up the heavy ships too itll likely make it more interesting. I did have one idea though which could be interesting, how about instead of npcs porting the cargo, when a convoy is ready to leave a player enters that station, takes the convoy mission, and is given a special convoy ship and the cargo. That would force anyone who wished to destroy the transport to actually fight a person, and not just hit a bot and run. Except for the players doing it the rest of the convoy could stay the same, still announcing location and the likes. The only issue I see with this is UIT taking the convoy mission and then taking the cargo to the enemy, this could be solved though by making the convoy ship only able to dock at where its headed, and to make the cargo un-ejectable, so if some dirty UIT really does want to backstab, he has to die himself to do it.