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Every major race has a large number of civilian ships active in its sectors. I ignored them for a long time. Over time I came to appreciate them a lot. In some scenarios you start with almost nothing. You can cap a civilian ship easier because they can't fight back. They usually have a low morale number which helps with that. The reputation loss isn't worse when you attack the civilians.

The Arena provides a good opportunity to train marines in their fighting skills. A Casino that is the big Transporter can be the same, though some Casinos are smaller ships like an Express. A Hospital Ship can be the same big Transporter. Hospital Service is usually a smaller ship.

It's interesting that the civilian population of a sector changes over time. As a matter of fact, if you start with a saved game and enter a sector you haven't visited in a while, you'll get a different population of ships every time you reload. If I'm looking to attack a certain ship and find it a sector, I'll put the ship up in one of the little windows, right or left. Then it'll be there when I jump in.

Any pilot have other experiences with the civilian ships?

Hi Bill. My experience is that the civilian passenger shuttles, tour ships and prisoner transports can be a pain if and when they clog up player facility/complex docks and won't leave.

If needed through lack of other NPC dock options, my solution is to build somewhere else for them to go to in the sectors where I have important real estate. A spare player-owned trading station is ideal and can act as a local cash and ware bank/retail outlet too. I then move the NPC ships on with periodic but short changes to the facility/complex relations to races.

Civilian ships never have any rare ship variants but they are good for getting M3 ships early when going M5 starting scenarios since they do not shoot back and the Hospital/Arena/Cruise/Casino TLs are great for boarding and selling. The capped TP/TL ships also have a lot of passengers to convert into slaves for Pirate/Yaki ware delivery missions. Killing civilians also gives easy fight rank.

The only thing that really feels wrong is that civilians use disarmed military ships, rather than civilian designs. Basically it's a universe where everyone drives around in ex-military Jeeps and Hummers.

I'd love to see at least 2-3 purely civilian spaceship designs: a family-oriented "Space SUV", the young single's inevitable sleek little red "sports-ship", and/or the space redneck's "Pickup-ship".

After all, people are just people in the X universe, even if they're freaky space aliens.

Honved wrote:I'd love to see at least 2-3 purely civilian spaceship designs: a family-oriented "Space SUV", the young single's inevitable sleek little red "sports-ship", and/or the space redneck's "Pickup-ship".

After all, people are just people in the X universe, even if they're freaky space aliens.

This would be cool. I imagine there might be mods which allow for the possibility of this. It would be neat to encounter a much wider variety of CV ships with either unique features or unique designs, or both.

Last night I came to the realization that I am terrible at spacewalk boarding, even on civilian ships. Tried capturing a CV Elephant for several hours last night with a group of 8 marines who are 4 stars in almost everything and failed repeatedly. Then I later tried a Terran Ice Miner (MMBS - not a CV ship, I know) and failed equally. I went back to hunting for civilian ships after that and found a CV Mammoth in Argon space. Another failure, despite my repeated save-scumming.

So I gave up on spacewalk boarding and went back to the drawing board. Decided instead on building up my Split reputation so I can buy a Cobra M7M and just load it up with marines and boarding pods. Hopefully this method is more effective.

You can fail a board op in more than one way.

Why 8 Marines? You can send 21 into a TL, can't you? That should help in some failures.

jlehtone wrote:You can fail a board op in more than one way.

Why 8 Marines? You can send 21 into a TL, can't you? That should help in some failures.

Only 8 because I was using my Springblossom. Through reading a bunch of different threads about people capturing CV ships (and even some faction ships) with only a handful of well trained marines, I came to the understanding that it was difficult but not impossible. In hindsight now I realize that a lot of those threads were from many, many years ago and likely the chances of success have been revamped with patches since that time. There were some threads I found describing capturing with as few as 5-6 marines (and those users usually stated how easy they felt it was--too easy!). Perhaps that's not as easy as it used to be. My marines would almost always get through the first two decks but not once did they progress further regardless of which ship I used or how many reloads I did, so I'm assuming there just weren't enough of them on board and probably also too many casualties on previous decks.

I decided to use the Springblossom mostly because of its speed-- once you get the shields down it's pretty easy to be able to maneuver yourself into a good position for the spacewalk boarding itself. I thought that would be difficult, or require a lot of extra "set up" with a slower TP-class vessel. Perhaps I'm mistaken on that though.

At this point I'm only one reputation rank away from being able to buy the Split Cobra, so after a few more station missions I should have my M7M up and running. The funds are ready and waiting, and marines are training around the clock in preparation for some serious boarding exercises.

modernrocko wrote:

jlehtone wrote:You can fail a board op in more than one way.

Why 8 Marines? You can send 21 into a TL, can't you? That should help in some failures.

Only 8 because I was using my Springblossom. Through reading a bunch of different threads about people capturing CV ships (and even some faction ships) with only a handful of well trained marines, I came to the understanding that it was difficult but not impossible. In hindsight now I realize that a lot of those threads were from many, many years ago and likely the chances of success have been revamped with patches since that time. There were some threads I found describing capturing with as few as 5-6 marines (and those users usually stated how easy they felt it was--too easy!). Perhaps that's not as easy as it used to be. My marines would almost always get through the first two decks but not once did they progress further regardless of which ship I used or how many reloads I did, so I'm assuming there just weren't enough of them on board and probably also too many casualties on previous decks.

I decided to use the Springblossom mostly because of its speed-- once you get the shields down it's pretty easy to be able to maneuver yourself into a good position for the spacewalk boarding itself. I thought that would be difficult, or require a lot of extra "set up" with a slower TP-class vessel. Perhaps I'm mistaken on that though.

At this point I'm only one reputation rank away from being able to buy the Split Cobra, so after a few more station missions I should have my M7M up and running. The funds are ready and waiting, and marines are training around the clock in preparation for some serious boarding exercises.

my first cobra was hijacked with spacewalk assault with with 2 TP in argon M148.

My first attempts at spacewalk boarding were frustrating, at the very least. I managed to isolate an M7M in a pirate sector without escorts, and with almost no remaining missiles. Got my TP in position slightly ahead of it, and the marines scattered in all directions EXCEPT that of the M7M. Tried again, and again, and again. After roughly a dozen reloads, I finally got most of them onto the hull. They failed to breach it, despite a couple of 4 star Mechanical skill members in the group. Another half-dozen tries, and landed almost all of the marines on the target. Failed to breach the hull. After 4 tries and failure at breaching, I finally jumped in a ship with a scanner and spotted Hull Polarization. Time to find a better target.

Eventually I did find and board an M7M the hard way, but between the first and the more successful second target, it must have taken me well over 50 attempts.

Using an M7M with Boarding pods against another M7M was pretty much "fire and forget". I knocked down the shields with an M6, plus a half-dozen fighter drones as a distraction (its Flail missiles tore up the drones, rather than my boarding pods), and my M7M successfully launched its pods on target. The hull was breached without problems, decks cleared with light casualties, and the computer system successfully hacked. Almost too easy on the first try.

To space walk board a TL requires 4x marines with 80 Mechanical skill and your team of 8 marines to have a combined Fight skill of 710 and a total Hacking of 62. You just need to make sure you Ion Disrupter off any anti boarding equipment first.

With boarding military M7Ms you just need to get them with attrition and keep your distance in an M6 and shoot down the heavy missiles from the M8 escort and the ship itself. Once it switches to flail spam start running away with turbo booster and when they start hitting jump to the next sector, refuel and come back for round 2 when your shields are back to a good percent. It will eventually exhaust itself and you can clear out the escort starting with the M8s followed by the M3s. Rest is standard proceedure for 8 marines with 710 total Fight skill, 4x55 mechanical and 2x26 Hacking. Again use Ion Disrupters for anti boarding equipment. Only reloads you will need is to roll if it keeps the Jump Drive and shields.

Alternatively you could stay IS & chain-shot incoming missiles with Mosquitos or IDs (pref. from turrets) until <target> runs out of munitions. Only then do you launch marines..