Hard lessons in TP boarding

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VELLA
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Hard lessons in TP boarding

Post by VELLA » Sat, 30. Jul 11, 21:40

I finally made my move to capture a Yaki Ryu in Okracoke's Storm today. This is my first real boarding op, and was one of the most frustrating two hours I have had in a long time with much reloading and cursing going on! Yes I know many of you warned me about the foolishness of trying to board with a TP, but I thought I should find out myself the hard way.

So, I jumped in with my little piracy fleet consisting of a Centaur, two Scabards full of marines, and a Zephyrus carrying what was intended to be my shield supression wing consisting of three Perseus and an Asp armed with PBEs. I had already tested the waters to see what the reaction of other Yaki ships to attacking one of their TLs would be and they pretty much ignore it unless you happen to destroy the TL, only then they decide to get angry with you. Even the TL's own fighters don't turn red until you shoot them first, but as I was to find out while trying one of my unsucessful tactics, they DO shoot your marines!

Anyway, I manouvered the Centaur into the Ryu's blindspot and started to fry it with the IonDs when I came up with my first bright idea. I noticed that the Ryu comes to a halt while it dispatches and retrieves it's fighters in response to being attacked. OK, I though, I'll try to keep from provoking the fighters so that I can keep them alive and use them to keep the Ryu immobile when I send the marines in. I keep frying the Ryu until it's down to one shield, one HEPT, and two IBLs, then I send the Scabbards in while I keep the shields down with my HEPTs. They release the marines. This should be easy, the Ryu's not going anywhere! Nope, the Ryu's fighters start killing my marines while they are spacewalking and even start to wreck the Ryu as well in the crossfire. Fail, reload...

This time I fry the Ryu AND take care of the fighters before sending in the troops. The problem is that this time the Ryu is moving and getting all my marines onto it is proving a nightmare. I only manage to get one shipfull to make it and they all die fighting inside. Fail, reload...

OK, so I am going to have to pilot one of the TPs to position them effectively and get all my marines onboard the Ry at once. That means I must leave the Centaur and my fighter wing to keep the shields down on their own. Surely you can handle that job guys? Nope. While I could reliably keep 200MJ of shielding down with with just the Asp myself, you would think that 4 PBE equiped fighters and a Centaur would be up to it in the hands of the AI. A few fried marines later I realise this is not going to happen. The fighters seem to be more interested in practicing aerobatics than the task at hand, and the Centaur is having a hard job even keeping up with the Ryu whilst trying to evade the Ryu's one remaining HEPT like a screaming sissy. I reload, and in desperation I bring in my Vidar for shield suppession and I try once more. The Vidar goes to far the other way and in no time the Ryu is toast. Fail, reload...

OK so I realise I have a major problem. I can't trust the AI for either shield suppression or marine deployment, but I can't do both myself. Or can I? Again piloting a Scabbard I move into position and release the marines. In order to help keep the shields down I try to give the Ryu a nudge whenever I see the sheilds approaching 10%. This method turns out ot be pretty unreliable, and on a couple of occasions the Ryu is rammed repeatedly by the other Scabbard or one of the fighters until one of them pops. Sigh...

I go back to flying the Centaur for shield suppression while having the TPs follow me, then spamming the launch all marines hotkey when I hope they are in the best place (I am using Cycrow's Improved Boarding, I would have to conclude that TP boarding is literally imposible without hotkeys). I finally get lucky. All marines make the spacewalk, giving them a chance to fight through all the decks. In the end I get the Ryu with one shield in the freight bay and about 65% hull and lose 8 marines in the fighting.

It seems such a shame that TP boarding is so hard. Having to use an M7M to board even a non-military ship like a TL just seems wrong to me, and the TP ends up being a fairly useless class of ship beyond shuttling marines to and fro between training outposts, unless you keep one for doing the boring taxi missions. Alot of the limitations of TP boarding could be improved by having boarding hotkeys in the vanilla game, and also having the TP's carry more marines so that you wouldn't need to coax two or more of them into the sweet spot at the same time while you are also trying to keep the shields down and praying that the AI doesn't decide to go kamakaze.

I could maybe have taken the Ryu with only ten marines if they all had 5 stars in fighting (most of my marines had between 1 and 4), but to get marines with that sort of fighting skill you would have had to have sent them on lots of sucessful boarding ops to start with, so it's a catch 22.

I know alot of people will say 'get an M7M' but I still think that TP boarding should be a viable part of the game, at least for taking TL class ships.

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eldyranx3
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Re: Hard lessons in TP boarding

Post by eldyranx3 » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 00:14

VELLA wrote:I still think that TP boarding should be a viable part of the game, at least for taking TL class ships.
If only the dev's thought so. You probably need four TP's full of elite marine cutters just so at least twenty latch on and start cutting at the same time. Its almost as frustrating as spacewalking a M7M.

Greyhawk1
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Post by Greyhawk1 » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 01:40

The whole boarding thing is totally whacked.

If you need to continually reload to get anything like a remote chance of the slightest possibility of maybe having a small insignificant chance of possibly managing to get all your marines even close enough to the target to actually make it to cutting the hull as one unit...then the whole TP boarding thing is pointless to have.

Unless your marines get there as one then they are all dead. This alone makes the whole exercise a joke IMO.

Vim Razz
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Post by Vim Razz » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 02:44

Heh, not sure you want to hear this given your apparent mood atm, but honestly it sounds like you did a really awesome job! Good Work! Much better than I would have expected from your previous thread!

Spacewalking is rough, no lie. Pod boarding is fast, clean, reliable, and dependable. Spacewalking is dirty, smelly, sweatty, on often more than just a little bit ugly. Honestly, that's what makes it so fun.

After a few dozen pod boardings you pretty much know going in what's going to happen and what you're going to get. Spacewalks, on the other hand, are more like the proverbial snowflake: They never go down quite the same way twice.

You picked one of the hardest TL's to capture first, went in with a lot of the wrong gear (PBE's aren't so good for larger ships, due to the AI's colisiaon avoidance protocols -- next time try PAC or PRG if you want to go that route for shield spression. Or drones.), and yeah, you did a bunch or reloads, but you still made it work! That's no small thing.

Inspired largely by your thread, partly by Cdr Dave's vid series, and partly by the fact that my current game is right at that phase (my mid-game marine training pool matured thursday night! *~happy~dance!~*), I decided to record some boardings on this playthrough and post them so people new to the whole thing can see what it looks like and what the basic idea is.

So anyway, I recorded two fighter+TP M6 boardings thursday, and three fighter+2TP TL boardings last night, and now am in the process of learning how to stitch them together and upload them. Dunno how long it will take -- I've heard uploading to you-tube ~alone~ can take hours, and I'm still just trying to make v-dub work atm...

The TL's are my first big-ship boardings in 4-5 months (I've just come back after taking a break from the game), so I'm kind of rusty and it shows in the vids, but they still might be helpful if you're thinking of boarding more TL class ships in the future.

Which I would definiately encourage. Us vacuum jockeys are seriously outnumbered by the pod boarders around here. :P And having sucessfully spacewalked a Ryu, you're definitly one of us now. :D Well done!

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NUKLEAR-SLUG
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Post by NUKLEAR-SLUG » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 12:01

Well you made it far more difficult for yourself than you needed to. I've never understood people trying to steal a ship from the MIDDLE of an active formation and expecting it to go well.. Kill the escorts first! And then kill anything inside 50km that's even remotely threatening. You'll make your life much easier.

Also, as Vim says, PBE is not a good choice for shield suppression. PAC is far superior as it has the range to get some hits on before the fighter needs to break off. You don't need a whole bank, just a 3-4 will be quite adequate.

Lastly, yes it can be tricky to get your marines onto target so bring many. If I'm attempting to spacewalk board a large ship I'd typically bring 3-4 TP's full to make sure I throw enough troops at it to ensure I get enough on board to do the job. Don't assume that because you only need 20 you should only bring 20.

At the end of the day tho the whole point of the exercise was to capture your target and even tho you lost a few guys doing it your mission was ultimately successful so you did a good job.

If it was easy it would be boring. Savour the victory.

VELLA
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Post by VELLA » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 12:39

Well it's been a long time since a video game has had me jumping up and down in my seat and cursing but it was rewarding to finally see the Ryu beast tamed and under my control. I definately learned a few things. The Ryu is a relatively tough nut to crack for a TL due to it's speed. My Centaur could barely keep up when it made the occasional dash for escape at top speed. The Ryu also had two PBLs left over from the IonD assault mounted in the front turrets, making it inadvisable to be hanging around in front of it in a Scabbard for too long. The Ryu also has a powerful shield generator, making it tricky to keep it's shields below 12% while trying to coordinate lanching marines at the same time. The problem is made worse due to the fact that in order to remove most of the Ryu's teeth, all it's shields apart from one inevitably get fried as well.

Yeah, using PBE equipped fighters wasn't the smartest idea considering their short range and the AI's annoying collision aviodance routines. The result was the fighters not actually firing most of the time and also having the occasional collision with the Ryu. I think PRGs would be a safer bet and their fast projectile speed will hopefully limit hull damage. I think I also need more than four fighters. I have to catch myself from calculating what the AI can do with a certain ship/loadout by what I can do with it. I will have to maybe experiment with fighter drones as well.

Lastly the capabilities of my marines were fairly lacking. Most of them I had inhereted from the Terran plot and some of them only had 0 to 1 stars in fighting, meaning they would bleed to death from a paper cut. After reading the responses to my previous thead, I made sure all my marines were trained up to 4 stars in mechanical so that they would actually breach the hull. Now when I buy marines I am only buy ones with 3 stars in fighting and training the other skills. It is a false economy to buy a marine who has good mechanical skills but couldn't punch his way out of a paper bag, as he will just get wasted as soon as he gets through the hull.

And that really is the difficulty with TP boarding - getting enough marines on board means you have to use more than one TP, so even if you can get the shield suppression reliably taken care of the AI still has plently of chances to screw up while attemptng follow you in the second TP. Either it flys too far away due to it's collision avoidance routines and won't deploy it's marines the same time as yours, or it crashes into the mark and destroys it. Having two TPs both in a decent position to release their marines at the same time is pure fluke. This problem could be fixed by increasing the number of marines a TP carries, say to 20 or 25. I asked about this in scripts and modding, and apparently the number of marines in a TP is hard coded and cannot be changed without a patch. Like I said, having 10 elite marines might do the same job as 20 mediocre marines, but in order to get 10 elite marines you would have had to do plenty of boarding ops already.

Mind you, after going through all that, finally being able to do station building missions in my hard won prize is all that more sweet. :D

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Post by Bobucles » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 14:05

The biggest problem with space walking is that there aren't any weapons to disable a ship.

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eldyranx3
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Post by eldyranx3 » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 14:11

Bobucles wrote:The biggest problem with space walking is that there aren't any weapons to disable a ship.
Not true. There are four weapon systems that can be used to disable a ship: ID, IPG, IC, and ISR. Aside from the ID, you will destroy the target long before you disable it with the others.

fairywhipper
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Post by fairywhipper » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 14:33

Welcome to the fun world of boarding especially with spacewalking marines. heres an interesting tip: swarm missles(wasp or poltegist), drones.
Use drones to distract target guns and as shield suppression, then when marines/pods are within range fire swarm to distract guns. Most combat AI look at missles as most dangerous so go for those first then combat ships such as drones and marines last... giving you more hope that more marines survive... maybe. Boarding with anything is always hit and miss, pods can get shot down as well or hit something else like stations, rocks etc.but thats part of the fun, wait till you try big ships with cluster flak weapons...... have fun.

PS you want the weapons and equipement and as much hull as you can get! so stop trying to zap them...

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Post by Triaxx2 » Sun, 31. Jul 11, 17:46

I've got to say that as long as you engage properly, capturing in the middle of a formation isn't that difficult. I just the other day took a Cobra and it's two escorting Heavy Dragons. The only ship I had to destroy was the escorting bomber and that was the providence of a single Hornet.

That said, I did not use spacewalk boarding, but used a Gannet sitting quite a ways off to fire pods.

The biggest difficulty with spacewalking the Ryu isn't the speed. Nor even the guns. It's the shear size of the ship.

Want to catch it with relative ease? Slip into the blind spot and stay tight to it. Eventually it will begin trying to dive so it can launch a missile because it can't hit you with guns. That's the time to launch marines, from your M6, and from a TP. 15 marines can take it, but it's a bit annoying to do so.
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