Marine Training Update

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Bill Huntington
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Marine Training Update

Post by Bill Huntington » Fri, 8. Sep 17, 05:21

I've thought about marine training in my time in TC/AP. I've advocated training 10 marines to 4 x100 as an important goal. That's a long time in training!

There a number of tweaks to be made to get good marines a lot faster. You can start boarding operations a lot sooner by using average marines and increasing the number of marines to twenty. But the Terran ships are hard to board without a Mechanical score of 100 or very close to it.

First, you should know that that there's a penalty for training all three skills at the same time and for the long term. (Someone will correct me if it's just one of those.) Anyway, for fastest results, I just train for one skill and quick. Sometimes you want to shuffle marines from active duty to training so that's fine.

There are checks for each pod of five marines to successfully enter the target ship. They check for the Mechanical rating for that. Low Mechanical you might not get in. High Mechanical skill and you get in even with Hull Polarization for the CW races.

If your Engineering is below 100 percent, that results in hull damage to the target ship. I can live with hull damage and repair it. So Engineering has less priority for training. For hacking the core, the top two marines out of all of them are selected for their hacking scores. So Hacking gets the lowest priority for training. As long as two of your boarding team are high.

In TC you couldn't buy a Tyr; you had to board it. Now you can buy it in AP. But capping Terran ships is one of the high points in AP. So I keep a boarding crew busy in the early game while training marines for 100 in Mechanical and Fighting. In AP I think you need 15 marines now to take Terran ships. Not positive but I was surprised when I failed to board a few times with close to perfect crew of ten.

How do other pilots handle their Marine Training?
Bill in S.F., enjoying the game

Jimmy C
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Post by Jimmy C » Fri, 8. Sep 17, 07:57

I run missions just to capture ships.

When any marines reach 100 fight, I send them to training and replace them with marines from the captured ships.

It's a process that pays for itself to the point that I don't care how long it takes to finish training.

ajime
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Re: Marine Training Update

Post by ajime » Fri, 8. Sep 17, 10:18

Bill Huntington wrote:I've thought about marine training in my time in TC/AP. I've advocated training 10 marines to 4 x100 as an important goal. That's a long time in training!

There a number of tweaks to be made to get good marines a lot faster. You can start boarding operations a lot sooner by using average marines and increasing the number of marines to twenty. But the Terran ships are hard to board without a Mechanical score of 100 or very close to it.

First, you should know that that there's a penalty for training all three skills at the same time and for the long term. (Someone will correct me if it's just one of those.) Anyway, for fastest results, I just train for one skill and quick. Sometimes you want to shuffle marines from active duty to training so that's fine.

There are checks for each pod of five marines to successfully enter the target ship. They check for the Mechanical rating for that. Low Mechanical you might not get in. High Mechanical skill and you get in even with Hull Polarization for the CW races.

If your Engineering is below 100 percent, that results in hull damage to the target ship. I can live with hull damage and repair it. So Engineering has less priority for training. For hacking the core, the top two marines out of all of them are selected for their hacking scores. So Hacking gets the lowest priority for training. As long as two of your boarding team are high.

In TC you couldn't buy a Tyr; you had to board it. Now you can buy it in AP. But capping Terran ships is one of the high points in AP. So I keep a boarding crew busy in the early game while training marines for 100 in Mechanical and Fighting. In AP I think you need 15 marines now to take Terran ships. Not positive but I was surprised when I failed to board a few times with close to perfect crew of ten.

How do other pilots handle their Marine Training?
personally i have a training base in ocracoke 30km east of senators badlands gate.
I send them boarding ryu's everytime it appears when they get stuck on those roids. The base pretty much consist of two ryu's acting as marine supply base for the training cobra for the ops. once they reach 100 in fighting, 10 of them will be sent for full training in other aspects. Usually i train them to 3 star in everything before sending them to training cobra.
I had a bunch of laser towers and garrison in savage spur to guard the route to send those capped TLs to be sold off in paranid shipyard.

jlehtone
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Re: Marine Training Update

Post by jlehtone » Fri, 8. Sep 17, 17:04

ajime wrote:once they reach 100 in fighting, 10 of them will be sent for full training in other aspects. Usually i train them to 3 star in everything before sending them to training cobra.
Similar.

Whenever I see a 50+ fighter, I ask them to join. Borons are occasionally accepted with lesser credentials.

The greenhorns go to school. I'm lazy, so I choose "All", but "Quick". When they are three stars, they can ride the Cobra. Mainly ship returns. Occasional station defences. Only ATF/Terran/Xenon are red. Of the blue, only Pirates are on the menu.

The 100 point fighters enter the graduate school (different station) and stay there until all-100. The plan is to have five Siroccos, one per faction, and some reserve. Almost there.
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Honved
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Post by Honved » Fri, 8. Sep 17, 18:08

I tend to train all of my marines up to about 60-ish in Engineering, before sending them to get some combat experience. I can live with a little damage. but don't want it to get out of hand. If/when they get to really high fighting skills, I will generally send them back for extra Engineering training to maximum level.

A little over half of my marines get Mechanical training, as high as possible, the other half don't get any. As long as I've got 2 trained Mechanics per squad of 5, I'm happy. For most Commonwealth ships, 1 is often sufficient (assuming that one of the untrained marines has a couple of stray points in it), unless it has Hull Polarization or other issues. Any more than 2 in a squad provides no additional benefit, so why pay for all 5 when 3 is more than enough?

Less than half get Hacking training, because you only need 2 hackers at the end of the mission, out of all of the squads that you send.

That means almost 50% of my marines get only Engineering training, which saves a bundle on both cost and time for training. The few "solid gold" marines with 100 points in everything are rare and valuable, but I don't need a boarding party consisting entirely of "all 100" elites....certainly nice, but the bill isn't.

RAVEN.myst
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Post by RAVEN.myst » Fri, 8. Sep 17, 23:29

I rotate my marines. At any given point, I have marines in academy training and others gaining practical experience. At the military school I train about 2/3 of them to 100% in mechanical and 1/3 to 100% in hacking; once they reach that 100%, they then get tasked with learning how to minimise collateral damage and civilian casualties :P (by training engineering to 100%). Any time one of my marines in the field hits 100% in combat, he gets sent to school and replaced by a cadet. Bear in mind that I'm doing this as early as TP- and M6-based boarding, so before pods. My mix of marines in live-fire exercises tends to be comprised of: half the complement is my strongest sub-100% combats (improve odds and then get sent off to West Point quickest, as they top out soonest), the other half is my weakest fighters with the most to learn. Marines with 100% in two technical disciplines (mech/hack and engineering) are preferred, then once they max out their fighting they get sent back to become all-stars. Once I have some all-stars, my active boarding group/s include a portion of these acting as instructors and general "result improvers".

The above is WAY simplified, as I don't have a hard-and-fast method, I adapt my general approach to what I have on hand. Also, if I'm playing a playthrough where I emphasise boarding (such as role-playing a pirate), then I tend to have two boarding parties once I have enough skilled marines to warrant it: for sundry garden-variety boarding, the less experienced ones get used, while for valuable priority targets I call in my crack team - not to be confused with the spaceweed team.
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