Marine Tips (Boarding Guide)
DrBullwinkle
How to Board:
The basics are easy; the devil is in the details.
- Lower the target's shields below 3-5%.
- Begin a Boarding Operation (more on that in a moment).
- Keep the target's shields low until the marines have cut through the hull and entered the ship.
- Watch your marines on the Property menu, or just listen to them as they advance through the decks.
- If too many marines die during the op, then you may be able to send reinforcements (timing is tricky).
- If your marines overcome the target's defenses, then you will capture the ship.
What Ship Classes Can Start a Boarding Op?- M6 and TP can do spacewalk boarding. (Piracy Menu)
- M7M (and special M6M's such as AP's Acinonyx) can do pod boarding. (Additional Commands Menu, I think.)
Rule Number 1:
If your marines are lightly trained, then use more of them.
Fighting Skill: The game totals the skill of all of your marines, then "rolls the dice" to see who lives and who dies. This "dice roll" happens on each deck. Greater total fighting skill increases the odds of more of your marines surviving to the next level.
Mechanical and Hacking Skills: The game totals the skill of your two best marines in each skill, then uses those totals for similar dice rolls.
Engineering skill affects the odds (of each marine) causing damage to the hull.
The maximum number of marines for each op is one greater than the number that the ship can hold. If you are boarding a corvette or TM, then you can use 7 marines on the op (TC or 9 in AP). You can use 21 marines on larger ships.
Terran and ATF ships are more difficult to board. You will need more highly trained marines to capture these ships.
Xenon ships are the most difficult to board.
Rule Number 2: If 20 marines are not enough, then use more.
Even with marines trained to 100 in all skills (including fighting), you will sometimes need more than a single ship-load for a successful boarding op. Try 30 or 40 "SEALs" trained to 4x100, for example, for Xenon capital ships.
Other factors that affect boarding difficulty are enemy marines on board the target ship, Internal Sentry Lasers, Hull Polarization, and Advanced Firewall. All of these make it tougher to get enough marines to the hacking stage. (Yes, even a firewall can kill your marines. I suppose they take too long hacking and are discovered by what remains of the target ship's crew.
)
Obviously, you will want to practice on easier targets before going after Terran or Xenon ships. TLs are a good choice for practice (and for training your marines in fighting skill).
Yaki Ryus are a great choice. Not only are they plentiful and reasonably easy to board, but they are a decent ship if you decide to keep one rather than selling them all. Ryus are fast and have large hangars. They are almost as nice as an Elephant for a small carrier.
Rule Number 3:
It is easier to board a TL or a frigate (M7) than it is to board a corvette (M6) or military transport (TM).
It may seem odd, but it is often easier to board a frigate than it is to board a corvette. It is due to the way the dice roll is calculated. (This is especially true in TC. AP improves the balance so that corvettes and TMs are not so difficult to board.)
Rule Number 4: Boarding an M7M is easier than you think.
The trick is to get the M7M to shoot all of its torpedoes before you begin boarding. Shoot at the M7M to get it to attack your ship, then evade or destroy its torpedoes. Repeat until the M7M is depleted. Then it is a big, slow, undefended ship which will be (relatively) easy to board.
Tip: If you can find a Sirokos then they are the easiest to board of all ships, because they have no torpedoes. They are also the best ships for boarding ops because they can hold 30 marines.
You may or may not find Sirokoses (Siroki?) patrolling the sectors near the OTAS HQ. You can purchase a Sirokos at OTAS HQ after reaching max Argon rank (AP) or max OTAS rank (TC).
Rule Number 5:
Would *you* try to board an enemy military ship, armed only with a rifle or side-arm and protected only by a space suit? I don't think so!
Boarding by spacewalk is very difficult, for a number of reasons. Maybe extremely difficult.
Some folks have mastered the art. However, using a Missile Frigate (M7M) (with boarding pods) is much easier.
An alternative to spacewalk boarding is Cycrow's
Improved Boarding or
Improved Boarding (Bullwinkle's Hacked Version). Both versions include a hotkey to launch marines instead of wading through the menus. That alone can help quite a bit.
The hacked version also includes several features that work around the collision avoidance issues that make vanilla spacewalking so frustrating. The result is more reliable spacewalk boarding.
Improved Boarding also offers the alternative of boarding by teleporter, which is much more reliable than spacewalking. It is still challenging, because you have to stay within 1 km of your target (and keep its shields down) for almost a minute for the teleporter to work.
Rule Number 6: Some targets are easier if you are not in the M7M
Some targets (such as M2's with flak) are easier to board when you do the shield suppression (in an M6 or M7) while you command your M7M remotely. Keep the M7M out of weapons range of your target (10-15km; sometimes more).
The reason that this works is that the target's turrets will prioritize
you, rather than the incoming boarding pods.
An M7 with Ion Shard Railguns (ISR) is ideal for shield suppression. ISR's are the best pirate weapon in the game -- they suppress heavy shields while draining the target's laser energy (so that it cannot kill as many of your boarding pods).
Deimos is the best pirate M7. It has the strongest shields of any M7 and can mount ISR, PBE, and EBCG in the main guns; making it the most versatile hunter/boarder/killer in the game.
Training Marines
Training marines is not difficult later in the game, when you have a lot of credits. Early in the game, it takes *forever* to get your first few marines trained. Luckily, you do not need heavily trained marines for easy targets. All you need is a sufficient number of properly trained marines. ("Sufficient number" and "properly trained" varies somewhat by race and size of ship.) Give them one round of Advanced All Skills training, then take them out for boarding ops until they gain 100 fight skill. Then send them back to training to turn them into "SEALs" (4x100 skill). You will want these elite marines for more difficult boarding ops in the future.
If you are inclined to cheat on your first 5 (or 20), then Cycrow's
Cheat Package allows you to adjust the skills of one or all of your marines.
Or hire highly trained marines at the
Quantico Special Marine Base.
Summing up:
1)
Send enough marines on the boarding op. Sometimes more than a single ship-load.
2) Larger ships are easier to board than small ships. Including M7M's.
3) Terrans, ATF, and Xenon are harder to board. Internal defenses also make the job tougher.
4) You do not need highly trained marines to capture easy targets (such as TLs). Save elite training for the marines who have proven themselves in combat (by surviving until they reach 100 fight skill).
5) If all else fails, Improved Boarding and the Cheat Package will help.
Hope that helps!
Questions and Answers
Katastrophi wrote:I understand that I will need more than 21 marines to board and capture the Xenon Q ... However, I haven't quite understood how using more marines works.
You must launch marines in "waves" (in this context, "wave" means something close to "group"). The exact timing requires experimentation. Start with launching the second wave as soon as the first wave is through the hull and fighting on deck 1.
I'm thinking Quality > Quantity when it comes to marines?
Yes, that is true up to a point. 21 marines, trained to 100 in all skills, is a very strong squad. They will be able to board and capture most non-Terran/ATF/Xenon ships.
However, you can compensate for lower-fight training by using more marines. Sometimes you need multiple boarding parties; timed correctly.
SpFiota wrote:I decided to go for an Osaka... flails don't just go straight at the target... They circle around and attack from the rear... while the Osaka's REAR guns are distracted by missiles, the front guns are free to blast my pods away... If I'm lucky maybe one out of four pods gets through...
Boarding just isn't fun.
Wow... I think
boarding is the most fun thing that I have ever done in any space sim.
Yes, it is challenging... but that is what makes it so satisfying when you master it.
In your case, I have some suggestions:
- 1) Start with an easier target. Terran, ATF, and Xenon ships are the most difficult to board. Master your technique (and fight-train your marines) on easier targets before trying one of the more difficult targets in the game (Terran Osaka M2).
2) Try suppressing shields in an M7 with ISR's while you command your M7M to launch pods remotely.
3) For an Osaka, you may need more than 20 marines. Use two M7M's or a Sirokos for the more challenging targets.
Targets such as Osaka are intended to be more challenging, so that boarding will continue to be fun long after you have mastered boarding easier targets, such as TL's.
Kaplah!
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