3.0 - Boarding now broken?

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

The only thing that sounds tedious is reducing the hull to ~20%...
Especially with current ship commands.

I don't understand the problem here.

- The new Attack command tells all ships in your squad to attack with one single order, and non-combat ships don't need to be in your squad.
- The new Withdraw command tells ships to cease fire and retreat.

[Snafu_X3]

Destroying the drone bay seems to reduce the boarding resistance quite a bit. Boarding a titurel and blowing everything up on it and taking down it's hul to 10% reduce it's resistance to 12 and with 50 recruits and 5 star marine officer I lost 0 marines and 11 were promoted to veterans.

Not sure about that. In this save the (free) Rahanas starts with 62 BR. Taking out all turrets etc /except/ the drone bay reduces this to 50; taking out the drone bay takes it down to (IIRC) 48

No on-board hacking cos I'm not very good at that damn minigame!

Save here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/o4ntxg6

However, Lino has mentioned that boarding the free ships is bugged atm, so maybe this will change..

[pref]

2 points isn't too much. In return for that we get quick repair - seems to be worth it.

@Sparky: i have seen feedback about withdraw not being executed quickly enough to manage hull level precisely.

[Kaldo]

@Sparky: i have seen feedback about withdraw not being executed quickly enough to manage hull level precisely.

I can attest to this... I also heard that you can target specific subsystems with your ships but in my experience, they just continue shooting the ship hull anyways (tried to get my Taranises to shoot off the capital shield generator).

They also missed and hit the friendly station, placing me at -50 with the Republic of Cantera so... I guess we need to board ships by ourselves

[spankahontis]

It should be the reason WHY they have Marine Officers and Recruitment Officers?
It's a dangerous Universe out there, you have the credits? they have the muscle.

And yeah, Somali Pirates are taking these Mega Freighters, but sometimes they have Private Contractors guarding them.

Isn't that how Egosoft should approach this when capping a freighter?
It could be taking Candy from a Baby? Or it could be more than you bargained for without the right reconnaissance data from Beholder Drones, Hacking Defences etc. to know that they have Marines guarding that Freighters.

Surly allot better to have it that way? To be able to equipped a Freighter/Destroyer with Marines at a Shipyard like you would Missiles or Drones to boost up resistance.

I do hope in future releases they have Pirates boarding vessels at random.
Would make a really interesting addition.

But Freighters should be a Mix of Easy and Hard, some might cost cut on protection at their own risk, others protect their assets.
Destroyers however, these Ships should be guaranteed hard to take with a full complement of Marines.
I love the new system.. It simply needs re-balancing a little.

The concept of turning raw recruits into hardened Elites adds a whole new direction to the game which is always welcoming.

[ty_cho]

In this save the (free) Rahanas starts with 62 BR. Taking out all turrets etc /except/ the drone bay reduces this to 50; taking out the drone bay takes it down to (IIRC) 48

I can't really check the save right now, but does that "free" rahanas have any drones in the bay? I think the point is that the drones themselves inflate the BR value, not the bay.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

@Sparky: i have seen feedback about withdraw not being executed quickly enough to manage hull level precisely.

I can attest to this... I also heard that you can target specific subsystems with your ships but in my experience, they just continue shooting the ship hull anyways (tried to get my Taranises to shoot off the capital shield generator).

Odd, although I have seen my Balor take a bit of maneuvering to get out of range, it was stopping shooting straight after the order was issued even thought it was still in range to fire.

I shall have to check at the weekend! Thanks for the replies.

[Snafu_X3]

I can't really check the save right now, but does that "free" rahanas have any drones in the bay? I think the point is that the drones themselves inflate the BR value, not the bay.

Nope, no drones of any sort, I checked (which means that repairing will take an age )

There's a thread in the beta forum discussing how/whether drones should be taken into account, but in this case it makes no difference..

[Assailer]

Just posted on Beta when i realized this is not beta anymore

After all the scare about boarding in 3.0 i decided to try a Boann, very low defense value against my 20+ elite, 20+ veteran, 7 recruit marines and almost all 5 marine officer.

I took out the jump drive, and 4 drives, 2 lower turrents, then started boarding.

On purpose i didn't destroy anything on top of Boann, i wanted to leave some work to do for capture stages.

1st order:
take out capital shield, DONE.
2nd oder:
use hacker drone, DONE
3rd order:
take out the front shield generator located before drone bay.

As soon as it popped i got mission failed to my surprise... this must be a bug, i completed all requests fast and prompt.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

this must be a bug, i completed all requests fast and prompt.

Not necessarily for a few reasons, that seem (from available description) to have made your task harder than it needed to be:

1. You made no mention of damaging the hull, which lowers Boarding Resistance.

2. Egosoft said that we auto-win the Yisha part if we have killed all surface elements first. if we do that, it probably means less marines dieing after stage 1 and 2, which should mean a higher chance of winning after stage 3.

3. You apparently didn't take out the drone bay (docked drones and dronebay add to BR).


I am one of those that would like to see Egosoft make a change to the paired concept of docked drones being in the drone bay (and thus destroyable) and docked drones being able to affect boarding so well when marines land all over the ship. In other words, I don't think it is a perfect system. I am keen on it being judged fairly though.


Edit: Typo

[ty_cho]

I can't really check the save right now, but does that "free" rahanas have any drones in the bay? I think the point is that the drones themselves inflate the BR value, not the bay.

Nope, no drones of any sort, I checked (which means that repairing will take an age )

There's a thread in the beta forum discussing how/whether drones should be taken into account, but in this case it makes no difference..

That would explain why when you destroyed the bay, it only dropped by like 2 BR, since the bay was empty, it was only worth what other subsystems are worth. If it had been full of drones, then the BR would have been much higher to begin with. If that is the case, in the current mechanics, you are better off leaving an empty drone bay intact, so you can transfer drones right away for repairs.

Yea, as that thread and this one point out, drones really shouldn't be part of the calculation.....

[wwdragon]

Just posted on Beta when i realized this is not beta anymore

After all the scare about boarding in 3.0 i decided to try a Boann, very low defense value against my 20+ elite, 20+ veteran, 7 recruit marines and almost all 5 marine officer.

I took out the jump drive, and 4 drives, 2 lower turrents, then started boarding.

On purpose i didn't destroy anything on top of Boann, i wanted to leave some work to do for capture stages.

1st order:
take out capital shield, DONE.
2nd oder:
use hacker drone, DONE
3rd order:
take out the front shield generator located before drone bay.

As soon as it popped i got mission failed to my surprise... this must be a bug, i completed all requests fast and prompt.

That's because defense values for non-combat ships are ridiculously high to start with, right now.

[Snafu_X3]

Further to this, taking the (now fully disabled) Rahanas down to 50% hull took BR down to 25, so I could board it successfully with my full crew of rookies (BO 5/5/2)

11 rookies promoted to Veteran, no losses

[Kaldo]

Boarding is definitely not impossible, just harder. I'm actually fine with it - now you actually need to destroy the drone bay and as many surface elements as possible. You also have to lower the hull as much as possible, but that isn't a big issue any more since engineers can repair it up to 90 %. Having 50 marines also seem like a mandatory thing.

I haven't tested it too extensively though, I only boarded one Fedhelm so far - no losses.

[Kaldo]

Boarding is definitely not impossible, just harder. I'm actually fine with it - now you actually need to destroy the drone bay and as many surface elements as possible. You also have to lower the hull as much as possible, but that isn't a big issue any more since engineers can repair it up to 90 %. Having 50 marines also seem like a mandatory thing.

I haven't tested it too extensively though, I only boarded one Fedhelm so far - no losses.

[Meme Turtle]

Is it possible to attack and board a ship without reputation loss? According to the new video it is possible(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gATSfKtPL4w) if you do so far away from stations. However I tried to board a freighter in the middle of empty space and lost reputation.

[wwdragon]

Is it possible to attack and board a ship without reputation loss? According to the new video it is possible(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gATSfKtPL4w) if you do so far away from stations. However I tried to board a freighter in the middle of empty space and lost reputation.

Well Bernd said was in that video.
Maybe the ship you attacked was considered a police ship?
or maybe is a bug.

[ShienZu]

Check if you lost the reputation only with the ship you are trying to capture and not with the entire fraction?

[Meme Turtle]

Well, I ran a test. Boarded a lyranea freighter and traveled to an empty space. Then I perfidiously attacked and captured it. During the process my reputation with ship faction(as well as with argon faction) went down a lot, because it was sending constant reports about me, although this happened in an empty space region far away from any station or highway.

Are there any pirates who managed to secretly hijack some freighters? Looks like pirate warlord style of gameplay is lacking necessary features.

[Scoob]

Here's a weird one. While capturing a certain Rahanas (Container) - which had no crew - the ship turned GREEN and is listed as mine, yet I'm still being asked to destroy the Drone Bay. Well, I'm not doing that!

Landing on what is now MY ship, there's no Marine Officer visible to ask to come back on board.

I'm on the ship now - MY ship - yet I'm still loosing Marines!

I've snagged a save, but hopefully just a one-off considering the special status of this particular ship. Still, boarding this empty ship has already taken out 2/3rds of my Marines...with no Defence Officer to co-ordinate a defence, it should be easy. This suggests that Defence Officer skill does NOT affect boarding resistance levels.

Edit: I've reported this over in Tech Support here

Scoob.