3.0 - Boarding now broken?

[Archaeosis]

Not being able to buy veteran and elite marines at all is very irritating.

Not being able to sell veterans and elites to profit from your 'training' of them also feels like a missed opportunity.

As much as it might be better to make the boarding system more difficult, I find it's just been made incredibly tiresome at the moment - unless you're a pirate who regularly attacks traders, you need to pour lots of work into finding and attacking Titurels (which can just about be captured with a lot of work against external components) before you can think of moving to bigger targets.

If any other friendly ship comes across you boarding a hostile target (which you now need to severely weaken to successfully board), they'll destroy it. Friendly capitals will easily destroy them, but sometimes fighters too. Your own ships can easily do it when you don't want them to. Stations will always destroy them. Now that the difference between winning a boarding attempt and losing one is so thin, and it takes so much time to do, and any friendly fighter can ruin everything, it just feels like work rather than anything fun.

It's not much fun feeling you have to destroy every single component each time, lest you lose the good marines you absolutely have to keep to have a chance with proper capitals. The capital shield generators in particular are terrible - XenonSlayer said Egosoft wanted to make their shields fall properly with the capital's shields at least, a fix that can't come soon enough.

Without boarding it takes an even more dispiriting amount of time to make money, and I don't really want to cheat in more elite marines. Here's hoping they at least put incredibly expensive veterans on vendors, and let you sell elites at a good price.

[wwdragon]

Initiating boarding was fine before (and realistic).

Hmmm....

If you didn’t take out turrets you lost boarding pods… if you took out the bottom turrets to create a blind spot, more pods reached the target (kinda)…

It would have been more realistic to include marine officers and troops on high value ships to fight through. Maybe some automated defense too but only on military/special ships.

Agreed

Also, only hiring rookie mercenaries is bizarre…

Now that I do disagree with. It would be convenient to be able to hire vets or even elites, but the gameplay mechanic is that you're a non-military person who happens to need some military staff. You've no experience, friends or reputation with the military, so why would vets or elites hire on with you? You'll have to train up your grunts first..

Depends on the money you are offering, I bet a space billionaire with a chain of stations across the accessible galaxy could hire elite mercs. Have an option for the bootstrapers and an option for the rich. Just make them expensive 1 mill a pop or something.

I agree that vets and elites should NOT have been removed!
There'll always be battles across the galaxy and a few survivors.

They were already quite expensive, already btw.

[Archaeosis]

I like to hope they'll change boarding resistances by some multiplier depending on your difficulty - normal a bit easier than it is now, hard a bit harder, and easy far easier. For now even on normal things seem seriously expensive and difficult, and it drains the fun out of what was one of the better features added with Rebirth.

[spankahontis]

Initiating boarding was fine before (and realistic).

Hmmm....

If you didn’t take out turrets you lost boarding pods… if you took out the bottom turrets to create a blind spot, more pods reached the target (kinda)…

It would have been more realistic to include marine officers and troops on high value ships to fight through. Maybe some automated defense too but only on military/special ships.

Agreed

Also, only hiring rookie mercenaries is bizarre…

Now that I do disagree with. It would be convenient to be able to hire vets or even elites, but the gameplay mechanic is that you're a non-military person who happens to need some military staff. You've no experience, friends or reputation with the military, so why would vets or elites hire on with you? You'll have to train up your grunts first..

Depends on the money you are offering, I bet a space billionaire with a chain of stations across the accessible galaxy could hire elite mercs. Have an option for the bootstrapers and an option for the rich. Just make them expensive 1 mill a pop or something.

I agree that vets and elites should NOT have been removed!
There'll always be battles across the galaxy and a few survivors.

They were already quite expensive, already btw.

Better Idea is to make Elites and Vets from your rookies and be allowed to sell them for mega bucks to a recruitment officer.

Maybe make it harder to buy them from R.O's 80% Chance they have Vets for sale?

[Aloid]

Initiating boarding was fine before (and realistic).

Hmmm....

If you didn’t take out turrets you lost boarding pods… if you took out the bottom turrets to create a blind spot, more pods reached the target (kinda)…

It would have been more realistic to include marine officers and troops on high value ships to fight through. Maybe some automated defense too but only on military/special ships.

Agreed

Also, only hiring rookie mercenaries is bizarre…

Now that I do disagree with. It would be convenient to be able to hire vets or even elites, but the gameplay mechanic is that you're a non-military person who happens to need some military staff. You've no experience, friends or reputation with the military, so why would vets or elites hire on with you? You'll have to train up your grunts first..

Mercenaries of all qualities have existed throughout history… you should be able to buy any quality you can afford. It may be true that mercs would only hire on with reputable leaders, but I imagine that is the quality of the Marine Officer they hire on with?
Selling them for profit doesn’t make sense… you don’t own them per se, you only hired them.

[JoeTheDestroyer]

I use this rule of thumb: Issue boarding when

(r*1 + v*2 + e*3)*mo_skill* K > BR

r: Nbr of recruits
v: Nbr of vets
e: Nbr of Elite
mo_skill: Boarding Exp of Marine Officer (4 stars = 4)
K is an experimental coefficient. For me, it's 0.13 at normal game difficulty.
BR = Boarding Resistance of target ship.

Close, but I had a look at the 3.0 code and you're a little off. The formula for attack power AT is:
AT = (R*0.5 + V*1.5 + E*5.0)*MO

Where:
R,V,E are the current number of Rookie, Veteran, and Elite marines
MO is a value between 0.01 and 1.01 representing your officer's skill. A 5 star officer is 1.01 while a 4 star is should be around 0.81.

I'll explain the mechanics also, but it feels a little spoilerish so I updated the boarding thread in the spoiler forum.

One thing worth noting here is that Yisha's missions are not optional anymore. You will suffer massive losses if you skip/fail them (15-25% per round, on top of the regular losses).

[wonkers]

First attempt at boarding since the 3.0 update, went for an easy target (light sul), already hostile towards me. All pods deployed and landed safely. Started to get objectives to destroy turret x,y,z then message from Yisha about 20 seconds into the boarding "Oh No! We lost an entire boarding party!" Now I have a 5 star marine boarding officer with a 50% recruits and 50% vets/elites ratio. They really should not be getting wiped out on something as small and easy as a light sul. Anyone else having this particular issue of boarding not making sense? I know the boarding mechanics have changed and I have read up on them, but an entire boarding party getting wiped in under a minute? I reloaded and attempted multiple times getting the same result give or take some time differences. Use no mods that should effected boarding scripts/stats, only a few texture mods for the skunk and npcs.

[mtiffany71]

Successful boarding 3.0 101:

Approach target.
Save game at 10km from target.
Take out jumpdrive.
Take out engines.
Take out all turrets and shield generators.
Take out drone launcher.
Take out capital shield generators.
Shoot down target ship's shields to 0%, shoot down hull until "Boarding resistance" is below 30.
Check to see that all turrets and shield generators are destroyed and that engines and jumpdrive are destroyed. Go back and kill anything that has been repaired.
Select target ship.
Begin boarding op.

[Kaldo]

Successful boarding 3.0 101:

Approach target.
Save game at 10km from target.
Take out jumpdrive.
Take out engines.
Take out all turrets and shield generators.
Take out drone launcher.
Take out capital shield generators.
Shoot down target ship's shields to 0%, shoot down hull until "Boarding resistance" is below 30.
Check to see that all turrets and shield generators are destroyed and that engines and jumpdrive are destroyed. Go back and kill anything that has been repaired.
Select target ship.
Begin boarding op.

... and I'm actually fine with this. Boarding was way too easy before, now you at least need to invest more time (and money, for the destroyed drones) - and there's a risk since you need to destroy hull as much as possible too. The only complaint I have is when I get the "Destroy capital field generators", that's just not fun, and it's impossible to use our own capital ships for bigger damage because they always miss and destroy the ship's hull instead.

[BlackRain]

I was frustrated at first because I couldn't figure out why I was failing but then I figured it out. Just destroy all the turrets and shield generators (no need to destroy capital shield generator unless you have to). Then get the hull of the ship way down, to like 20 or something. Destroying the drone launcher also gets the resistance way down. Once you figure out these things it is actually easy. I have now boarding 5 ships.

I also use the boarding mod, which let's me pick my targets for the most part.

[Scoob]

Here's the problem though, you could take out the various elements to lower the resistance level for an easy boarding. However, Yisha still insists you take out the things you've left - and have minimal effect on the resistance - such as cap ship shield generator etc. If you ignore this, you artificially loose a chunk of your marines, even though technically there is insufficient resistance to do that.

I think Yisha should ONLY ever force you to take out Engines and Jump Drives, then leave it at that unless resistance is still too high for your boarding crews abilities. This way the player can choose themselves what they wish to destroy. They may decide to take out ALL turrets etc. leaving the Drone Bay to facilitate faster repairs post-capture. Or they may leave a few turrets and take out the Bay early on for the large resistance reduction taking out the drones give. Player CHOICE being the critical part, rather than scripted fail states which suck. Bottom line is that she FORCES you to do things that technically you do not need to do, but you get an artificially applied "fail" state if you do not.

I've even had Yisha get stuck telling me to take out surface elements on a ship that I've already captured. It's green, owned by me & I have upkeep missions to crew it, yet my successful marines continue to take casualties as I ignore Yisha's incorrect orders.

Really, ES please TURN OFF Yisha's "guidance" other than for the initial Engines / JD destruction and only have her suggest other elements if Resistance is still too high.

To be clear, I LIKE the new Capture mechanic, however I HATE Yisha's forced and fake "guidance" and associated fail states.

Scoob.

[lubatomy]

@ wonkers: well you need to give more information.

what was the boarding resistance of the light sul as you boarded?

you say you had 25 rookies and 25 vets/experts, but how many vets and how many experts exactly?

note that the marines have different power levels now too.

rookies i think is 0.5
vets are like 1.5
experts are 5

So best case scenerio, you have 137.5 boarding strength before you add in bonus from marine officer (that assumes all experts and no vets)

note that there also appears to be a bug in the formula when commander skill gets accounted for:

Code: Select all

<set_value name="$attackstrength" exact="($attackstrength * ($commander.combinedskill + 1)) / 100" />

that line from boarding mission director file adds in commander skill. unfortunately it looks like some parenthesis are in the wrong spot. in the case of a marine strength of 50 and a marine officer with combined skill of 50, you get the following:

attackstrength = (50 * (50 + 1)) /100 = (50 * 51) / 100 = 25.5

so in that case your commander actually makes your marines less effective.

i think if they were looking to make the marine office add a flat bonus, then the line would look something like

Code: Select all

<set_value name="$attackstrength" exact="$attackstrength * (1 + ($commander.combinedskill / 100 ))" />

in that case you would get the following:

attack strength = 50 * (1 + (50 /100)) = 50 * 1.5 = 75

[BlackRain]

If you didn't know, I am pretty sure you can destroy everything on the ship before starting the boarding process.

[Snafu_X3]

Really, ES please TURN OFF Yisha's "guidance" other than for the initial Engines / JD destruction and only have her suggest other elements if Resistance is still too high.

Great idea!

I LIKE the new Capture mechanic, however I HATE Yisha's forced and fake "guidance" and associated fail states.

+ several million for this!

BTW, the easiest way to get around Yisha's odd suggestions as to how to lose marines, is don't carry a Trojan

The more tedious way is to destroy all surface elements before starting boarding (she appears to not select the capship shield gen anymore, at least in my 2 tests last night..)

[Cronos988]

Well, that is kind of the problem of piracy in games like X. In order to not make piracy devalue any other option of acquiring money and ships, you need to make it very, very hard. If you make it very, very hard, it's not fun anymore.

[wonkers]

Attempted boarding on neutral ships. Went as far as to land on the ship and do the hacking mini game before boarding. Still no success.... I have not tried to go as far and destroying EVERY single sub system on the ship and knocking it down to 20% health. If that is the case and what is needed now I ask what is the point? Boarding before was about making a hole in a target ship' s defenses so your boarding party could land without getting slaughtered. Your learned which side of a ship where least defended/weakest or had blind spots. I will agree that boarding before was too easy and I like the steps in this update of more planning before a strike. If I reduce the claimed prize to a flaming hulk held together by ductape and chewing gum, with all subsytems destroyed its scrap at that point. The cost to repair the ship if I was going to use it, I might as well buy it outright and save the trouble. If was selling it would the profit cover the costs of used ordinance and lost marines (mind you Im talking about ships in the L range not the XL.)

[Snafu_X3]

If I reduce the claimed prize to a flaming hulk held together by ductape and chewing gum, with all subsytems destroyed its scrap at that point. The cost to repair the ship if I was going to use it, I might as well buy it outright and save the trouble. If was selling it would the profit cover the costs of used ordinance and lost marines (mind you Im talking about ships in the L range not the XL.)

Since engineers repair all subsystems (eventually - quicker if you leave the zone) & repair hull to 90% now (dependent upon their skill level), I'm not sure your complaint is valid..

[lubatomy]

If I reduce the claimed prize to a flaming hulk held together by ductape and chewing gum, with all subsytems destroyed its scrap at that point. The cost to repair the ship if I was going to use it, I might as well buy it outright and save the trouble. If was selling it would the profit cover the costs of used ordinance and lost marines (mind you Im talking about ships in the L range not the XL.)

Since engineers repair all subsystems (eventually - quicker if you leave the zone) & repair hull to 90% now (dependent upon their skill level), I'm not sure your complaint is valid..

problem is I still think they made a typo in the strength calculation. right now as it stands, unless you have a 5/5/5 boarding officer, the officer hurts the strength of your marines. if you have a 5/5/5 boarding officer you get a 1% boost in attack strength. that is is. anything less and you would be better off boarding the target without the marine officer. Yes i think there is a bug in there unless they expect you to play mini games until you can find a boarding officer with 5 star boarding experience and then play mini games to get enough virtual seminars to raise the rest of his levels to 5 star before you start boarding. If that was the case then why have anything less than a 5/5/5 boarding officer exist in game and just raise the cost of hiring a boarding officer.

[Nikola515]

I was frustrated at first because I couldn't figure out why I was failing but then I figured it out. Just destroy all the turrets and shield generators (no need to destroy capital shield generator unless you have to). Then get the hull of the ship way down, to like 20 or something. Destroying the drone launcher also gets the resistance way down. Once you figure out these things it is actually easy. I have now boarding 5 ships.

I also use the boarding mod, which let's me pick my targets for the most part.

Actually I managed to destroy all surface elements on ship (Sucellus) also I had it's hull to 3% when I started to board and BR was 21 . My boarding officer was 5 stars and she had 50 rookies. I managed to captures ship with 0 losses and 41 rookies and 9 vets So it looks like if you destroy all surface elements there wont be 15 to 25% los (also I think boarding was little faster too)...I couldn't destroy Sucellus main canon but that didn't matter

[JoeTheDestroyer]

anything less and you would be better off boarding the target without the marine officer.

Nice catch, I missed that my first time through the code. With this, I agree with you the formula seems bugged.

I've updated my post in the spoiler thread to reflect this.

I may get around to making some mods to fix this (and change the Yisha mission mechanics). But I'm restarting my game from scratch, so it'll be awhile before I can do boarding related stuff...