My rant on boarding operations.

[Bobucles]

After thinking a bit about boarding in TC, there are some things that are great, and others which aren't. This is just to open the topic of discussion on boarding ships.

The biggest issue I see with boarding is that high quality marines are VERY difficult to get, VERY easy to lose, and have a VERY narrow utility. Marines do only one thing- they capture ships. If they aren't up to the task, they can't do anything else. Among the worst aspects of boarding is how easily marines can die without putting up a fight.
- Sneeze at a boarding pod, they die.
- Shield percentage get too high (very easy on a ship with low shields)? They ALL DIE.
- Some of them don't team up like they should? They split up and die.
- It takes considerable luck to get a marine inside a ship, considerable training for them to not fall in droves, and the default ships are not readily capable of providing reinforcements. Then it takes that same amount of luck multiplied against itself if you want to continue pressing a boarding attempt.

So what do players do? They reload. A lot. Marines are hit or miss in TC. While some casualties are to be expected, watching them all get blown away is frustrating. They can either do the job, or they can't. So here's a few ideas to get a discussion rolling:

1) marine injuries. Marines aren't just alive or dead. They can get injured on missions, and have to rest for some time before doing another mission. Veterans would be prone to non fatal injuries.
2) larger marine storage on ships. A frigate should have enough marines for an assault, while keeping a healthy reserve. Capturing some ships is very difficult because it requires transporting marines between ships while pressing the boarding.
3) More options for boarding. Capturing a ship should be the most difficult thing to do. Other options can include disabling engines/weapons, disabling jump drives, hacking navigation systems, forcing a self destruct, or forcing their cargo to eject. These options would pose less of a risk than assualting the command bridge.
4) Capital ship commanders should attempt to scuttle their ship before letting it fall to pirate hands. Marines would have the option of escaping or leaving a few behind to hack the core.
5) Prisoners! Assault a ship, take some slaves for personal use. Sell them for ransom or to pirates. Luxury craft such as casinos and hospitals could yield extravagant profits, while attracting the attention of powerful foes.
6) Stealing craft should definitely be far more damaging to racial reputation. Police should attempt to reclaim craft, and the military should attempt to reclaim capital ships. This is where hacking navigation systems may come in handy, to pull a ship away from local intervention. Lesser piracy (looting, disabling) will not be as damaging to reputation.
7) racial bonuses to help with various roles. Boron may be more technically capable, while Split like taking people alive, Teladi may specialize in looting, while Terrans like capturing intact. Races may have increased defenses against different types of attack, with Terrans obviously specializing in protecting their technology.

[Nanook]

1. A good idea, and could easily be implemented simply by a reduction in their skills. If they're 'injured', then they lose some skill and have to retrain, thus keeping them out of any subsequent assault for a while. Or you'd have the option of using 'injured', i.e., less capable, troops.

2. Most players would like this, however I think the last changes Egosoft made was to make it more difficult by requiring more marines. Your change would effectively reverse that. After all, it's essentially what we had before patch 2.5.

3. No, I think boarding ops are complicated enough as it is without adding more to it. Besides, some of them would require a major rewrite since they aren't currently implemented by other means, such as the disabling engines or hacking navigation.

4. No. Definitely not. It's hard enough to capture a ship as it is without having the added possibility of your rare and expensive high level marines simply going up in a big bang. It's basically what you ranted about in the first part of your post. Another way to kill them all off? I think not!

5. This is already possible with casinos, arenas and hospital ships. You can sometimes get a ware called 'passengers' or 'invalids'. All we need now is a way to convert these to slaves at a pirate base or rehab center.

6. Totally agree with the rep damage idea. In fact, it should be the same as if you blew up the ship. After all, you have killed everybody on board and removed the ship from their ownership. No real difference from destroying it.

7. A good idea, not sure how easy it would be to implement, though.

[Gazz]

6. Rep loss from capturing should be higher than from destroying because the race has to assume that you're using their ship against them.
If you were best buddies with that race, you'd buy the ship, not steal it. =P

7. Unlikely since the whole boarding procedure is hardcoded.
Changing the starting stats of marines would be pretty pointless because they'd all end up at the same 100%.

[AL'42]

Well according to another post on this page (TC and boarding), using a M7M and having the target ship chase you, then using flails and pods is idiot proof and not worthy of challenge. (not my opinion)

So it follows, either people are deliberately choosing tough and difficult ways to do captures or the target ships are tough, like Xenon, in which case one should expect casualties.

[jimlpearce]

[NUKLEAR-SLUG]

[jimlpearce]

[Rive]

[Nanook]

[dillpickle]

Two things I'd like to see changed are:

1: Response times. You can nearly, or in some cases totally remove the shields from a ship, and the captain is still asking if it was a mistake!! - 40 Hammer torpedoes is one hell of a mistake!!

2: Apologizing for 'friendly fire'. Doing 12Gj of shield damage, sending in the marines to forcibly steal a ship, and then being able to say sorry and fly off with little or no repercussions just isn't right..
(same goes for capping, you can shoot up a ship till it is left with 1% hull, apologize, and they go 'OK' and fly away quite happily!!) - stealing capital ships should incur hefty penalties (rep loss) and repercussions (military /police coming after you and your assets. (So you can't just jump across a Xenon sector to remove the problem.))

I have been playing with the DDTC mod recently, and one feature that I like is races sending bounty hunters after you if you shoot up their transport ships, something like this would be great for all acts of piracy / aggression to a race.

It's these to reasons why I like boarding Xenon ships, first off there's none of this 'we hope those 30 missiles you just fired at us were a mistake' rubbish, they just gun straight for you.
Secondly, there's no option to apologize (and they wouldn't listen if there was).

[AL'42]

[Rive]

[Bobucles]

[jimlpearce]

[Nanook]