Well, finally reached the point in my new game start where I could try out the new boarding.
I had long since loaded up on recruits, but after much searching I was lucky enough to find a 5/5/4 marine officer. Not long after, I came across a wandering Titurel which I decided to make my first target. IIRC, it had a starting BR 194, but I knew that with my all recruit crew I had to get that to 15 or below, so I set to work. First popped the engines and jump drive, then went after the guns. As an aside, that ship has SO many blind spots. Every shield generator can be destroyed while out of the view of any guns (for the set on the side, you can actually use the shield generator itself to block the guns view!). Whoever (in-universe) designed that ship should be fired. Anyways, with all the surface elements gone (including drone bay), I think that dropped the BR down to 50-60. So I started dinging the hull. It wasn't until around 15% hull that I got the BR to 15 (at 11% I hit BR12 and it wouldn't go lower than that). Good on that front, I launched my marines. To my relief, since I had destroyed everything, Yisha kept her opinions to herself. After several minutes, I had my new toy. Net result: No losses and 13 new veterans.
My second target was from an assasination mission. I had to reload several times because this one gave me a lot more problems, but none of them boarding related. First, the mission had a tendency to spawn the ship right next to a station so it died rapidy (often before I could even get there). When I finally got a good spawn, the sector had a patrolling Olmekron. I had to try a couple of times to get the Titurel stripped and escort destroyed fast enough that the Olmekron bearing down on us couldn't waste my (soon-to-be) new toy. Boarding itself went without a hitch. My new veterans gave me ~13 more attack points to play with so I decided to leave the capital shield generators this time. The Boarding Options script let me tell Yisha to only target weapons, which, since they were gone, left her nothing to do. Net result: Again no losses, and 6 new veterans.
I have to say, having now experienced it (both with and without the Boarding Options mod) I'm going to have to switch sides and say that the balancing is fine as is. On the other hand, I won't change my mind on the Yisha missions, they should be optional not effectively mandatory. And on that note:
Bernd wrote:Talking about the Yisha missions: Without these, the whole boarding would be fully automatic again and there would be no incentive for personal involvement once you have your 50 veterans and elites.
Why is that a problem? First of all, many things in the game work the same way. Once I set up a station, it makes money for me "with essentially no incentive for personal involvement." After I setup a trade run, my cargo ships will go about making money without my involvement. There are many things in the game that have a "setup" phase (eg. building station, trade orders) and a "wait for result" phase.
We already have to put in the effort to strip surface components/lower hull/etc to get BR low enough to succeed. But we get to
choose what to destroy to meet our own objectives. Then along comes Yisha who demands we destroy things completely at the whim of the RNG, irritating to say the least and it robs the process of any "Think". I would be fine if there were some reasonable penalty from skipping the missions (not the forced loss of crew regardless of strength). I would suggest a penalty to attack, something like the larger of 20 or 20%. This would force novices to do the missions as they couldn't possibly win otherwise, but also reduce the power of a full elite crew to ~200 which might be just barely enough for what I've seen on most freighters.
Also, you say that like getting a load of elites is easy. While getting a load a veterans isn't too hard, that only gives you an attack power of ~75, which still isn't enough to take even a freighter without significant preparation. While a full load of elites could take an undamaged freighter, have you considered how long it would take to get that crew? Considering that after each boarding a veteran only has a 2% chance of promotion, the mean time to create an elite is
50 captures (and even then, only around 60% will have been promoted, on average). If my experience above is indicative, it generally takes around 30min for a capture, so that's 25 hours of gameplay dedicated to boarding and training up their crew. Don't you think at that point the player kinda deserves to have an easy experience? And even with a full elite crew, their ~252 attack couldn't put a dent in the BR500 capital ships I see around without significant work...
Bernd wrote:one easy thing we could do ... would be to always make a "destroy drone launcher" the first mission that Yisha gives you if there are still more than X numbers of drones inside.
NO! The flip side of this is that, since these missions are effectively mandatory, it removes choice for a player who does understand the mechanic and decides to leave the drone bay (for faster repairs)
I think the biggest problem for novice players (who didn't cheat and look at the code like me) is the lack of feedback, specifically they don't know what their own forces attack power is.
While they can see the BR value they are fighting against, they have no idea how that is being compared to their own forces. Let me imagine you a story: Player A manages to finally snag a good (5 star) officer and buys his first load of recruits. Looking around for his first target, he see a lone freighter ripe for the picking. He sees in the info menu (assuming he even knew to look) that the BR is 190. He starts of by destroying the engines and jumpdrive and notices BR has dropped a bit. This gives him the idea that destroying surface elements should lower the BR. After stripping off all the weapons and shield generators the BR drops to 100. He notices along the way that hull damage also causes it do drop, so he manages to use that to bring BR to around 70. That's nearly a third of the original value, and besides, this is a measly freighter so even recruits shouldn't have much of a problem, right? So he starts the boarding. Result: Failure. Well, maybe 70 wasn't enough, so he tries 50. Failure. 40. Failure. Now he's getting frustrated... why should a rag-tag freighter be so difficult? 30? 20? He might succeed at this point (if the RNG favors him), assuming he stuck around, but he probably suffered significant losses and is angry about that. He probably wouldn't bother trying 10, because that's just ridiculous (5% of the original value!!), but little does he know that's about what he needs for a perfect success.
If he had known at the outset his attack power was ~25, he would have assumed at the outset that BR needed to be brought down to around that as well (equal numbers is generally most people's first assumption). It would have only taken a couple tries from there to figure out the rest. And knowing that he needed to bring the BR down
that far he would try destroying all kinds of things, eventually including the drone bay.
So what I suggest is something like the display in
Boarding Options mod, which shows both your attack power and the target's BR live while boarding is in progress (of course, it would be better to know the attack power
before boarding started). I understand, though, that is harder for you guys because you have to maintain the illusion of a cockpit (for those that care). For those of us that don't care, the text up in the corner that the mod shows is fine.