3.0 - Boarding now broken?

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Assailer
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Post by Assailer »

astreus wrote:Typically for Rebirth.
....

Yes some work, but not less fun as just playing.
It's a new aspect. ....
Well put. I think this pretty much sums it up how i see the current state of boarding, and quite frankly it saddens me.

I have tried 'hacking' this way just to verify how much marines i need in order to succeed with that Taranis. 50 elite was not enough unless i totally stripped the ship and damage hull to 50ish %. On top of this, if you try boaring in a busy zone, you will fail to take out capital shield before they nuke your Skunk bottoms...

Of course it's way easier to add 500M to your account and buy those ships... that would be the point to uninstall the game as well.

Ultimately, you want the player to enjoy the game not to curse/reload/troll/hack.
JoeTheDestroyer
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Post by JoeTheDestroyer »

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.
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Post by wwdragon »

JoeTheDestroyer wrote: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:
You just contradicted yourself.
If it requires a mod to make it not suck, then it needs changed!
JoeTheDestroyer wrote:
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.
Agreed.
No reason I should have to listen to yisha barking orders.

Ideally we should just be able to choose what to shoot or hack on the ship to help advance each stage and remove penalty. :wink:
Editing posts since long before I remember.
JoeTheDestroyer
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Post by JoeTheDestroyer »

wwdragon wrote:
JoeTheDestroyer wrote:(both with and without the Boarding Options mod)
You just contradicted yourself.
If it requires a mod to make it not suck, then it needs changed!
No, as I said I tried it both ways (first capture was without mod, second was with). Without the mod, you just need to destroy all components to keep Yisha quiet.

Besides, I said I was fine with the balance, i.e. how hard it is. I didn't find it overly difficult after I knew what to do. My remaining complaints are about annoyances, not difficulty.
wwdragon wrote: Ideally we should just be able to choose what to shoot or hack on the ship to help advance each stage and remove penalty. :wink:
That would be my preference as well...
Aloid
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Post by Aloid »

Seems like a game option to “turn off directed boarding” would help resolve the issue of helping novice players know what to do. Turning it off lets you simply board when you feel like it.

I feel the boarding mechanic should have been resolved with defensive marines… simple and understandable. Maybe some extra help from automated systems on military ships or anti-boarding drones that launch to attack pods in flight.
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LV
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Post by LV »

I must admit i've been lurking marine threads just out of interest

The expansion of taking out systems is the right way to go for me as although people always want to reap the rewards of easy boarding/mastering any gameplay mechanic, if i was writing it i would also want to add more to make the player work for his money.

The balance is keeping it mindful instead of mundane.

In fact the real next step in my book is to stop with the shooting of shipoints now and start actually looking at having AI ships stock marines that can fight back, give the player their stats so a raid can still be planned

Marines once boarded and security systems are down should be having a statfest against the targets marines. The more military the ship, the higher their marine compliment.

Bastard to code though

Now someone's going to come along and tell me it already does that :)
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Scoob
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Post by Scoob »

Olterin wrote: with regards to the Yisha missions - what I think might be the problem is a problem of perception. Currently, they are a "you do this or you lose, hard" kind of deal that happens as long as there's at least one surface element left (*). If they were instead more balanced around a neutral ground and based on the "actual conditions on the ground", I don't think they'd be getting as much ire as they are. More specifically, they should be indicative of how well your boarding party is doing and what odds they are up against - if your boarding crew is already overwhelming the internal defenses ("random" value: 50% stronger attacker than defender), Yisha and Ren would hardly have to intervene, and if by chance they get the option to, deciding to not act shouldn't cost more than one or two marines. However, if your boarding crew is overwhelmed by internal defenses, Yisha should be throwing assisting tasks at the player at every opportunity.

Basically, it comes down to what others posted: why should we be forced to take out certain surface elements we decided were valuable enough to be left alone if our boarding crew can win with no or minimal losses even without intervention?

Edit: we seriously need EMP weapons that disable elements, not destroy them, but are costly and don't penetrate shields.

(*) I still got hacking sub-objectives with all elements destroyed. It just stopped after the first hack without any losses. Bug? Intended? It makes little sense either way :|
Yes. If the objectives given by Yisha were truly of value, then I'd be happy to do her bidding. As I said in my posts, a player with an inexperienced team would likely need to take out everything and trash the hull to stand a chance. This is GOOD. However, a player with more experience who's sporting a CRACK team, should have the option to pick and choose IF their team still has as good success chance.

At the end of the day, many of us with mature games likely just capture for FUN much of the time, getting satisfaction from taking our enemies stuff. Personally, I could easily buy any Freighter I might need - I actually do quite often now - but equally it's fun to take targets of opportunity like the odd Titurel. I've BOUGHT my Arawn and Omlekron because I'd struggle to take one with my team - even if I was prepared to suffer the rep hit with my allies - but I'd fully accept having to totally trash the ship for even a crack crew to have a good probability of success.

There're two issues here really. One is the perceived difficulty level, but that's often down to how good your team is (Marine Officers and Marines) and how well equipped your are (missiles, drones, Mk2 weapons etc.) plus of course tactics. Yisha has the potential to be the GREAT help here by giving pertinent objectives during capture. However, if the player has already largely neutered the ship, choosing to leave certain components intact, then as long as the overall probability looks good for the team, then Yisha should stay silent. Or at worse provide suggestions that don't have absolute fail states for ignoring them. I.e. no automatic 30% marine loss, but a statistically correct calculated attrition.

Just my view on how this might work,.

In summary, make Yisha's instructions relevant to the situation in hand. This will give a much more immersive experience, help new/less experienced players as well as give veteran players more leeway to board how they want to. Alternately, ignoring her should lead to calculated attrition not a scripted 20-30% loss.

This is a GOOD discussion, nice to see Bernd on the topic :)

@LV - agree re: Marines on ships...these are dangerous times after all.

Scoob.
Assailer
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Post by Assailer »

Do you have marines on your trade ships? No. The why on E you need a raid party to capture Rahanas.
Mylo-s
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boarding is a joke

Post by Mylo-s »

this needs rebalancing

I have just attempted to board "unclaimed" Rahanas in Drippy Accent. The ship is empty, there is no crew on it. And it failed.
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Post by Sparky Sparkycorp »

IIRC, Egosoft have already confirmed that boarding of an abandoned ships is not meant to the same as boarding an operational ship so it should be a separate issue to the question of boarding difficulty. If you could bug-report it, they will probably try and fix it.
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Re: boarding is a joke

Post by lubatomy »

Mylo-s wrote:this needs rebalancing

I have just attempted to board "unclaimed" Rahanas in Drippy Accent. The ship is empty, there is no crew on it. And it failed.
already fixed in beta that i saw
w.evans
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Post by w.evans »

Now, I feel silly. Was trying to get a discussion started over at the scripts and modding forum on how boarding ought to maybe be rebalanced, and was wondering why no one was piping in (figured that my walls of text were boring, or maybe everyone was happy with it) -- only to find a discussion on the very topic here!

Will have to buckle down and read. 11 pages is a lot to absorb.
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NZ-Wanderer
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Post by NZ-Wanderer »

Oppps, maybe I should have told you about this one, anyway cetter late than never w.evans :lol:
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Post by w.evans »

@NZ-Wanderer shhh! Reading! :P

no prob.
Bernd
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Post by Bernd »

FYI: I just posted this on facebook on this topic:

http://youtu.be/gATSfKtPL4w

One of the most popular activities in X Rebirth explained - Boarding. With the right crew and a careful choice of your target you can get very expensive cap ships. But you have to slowly work your way up from weak (cheap) ships to gradually more expensive ships to give your crew members enough time to gain experience. Only a crew of mainly Veteran and Elite marines will stand a chance against the very strong carrier or destroyer ships.

What I did not post is the actual strength of the three tiers of marines. Marines are 0.5 Veterans 1.5 and Elite are 5. Maybe this helps you guys a bit to estimate your own strength.

We are discussing to give the player a better idea of his own strength but I am not a fan of simply showing him a total score that can be directly compared to the strength of the target ship, but the goal would be that an experienced player has a clue of his strength.

Obviously there is always also some randomness at work and of course the influence of the missions you play, but the base strength of your marines added up and your marine commander are the most important factors.

Looking forward on your opinions...

-Bernd
---
-Bernd Lehahn, bernd@egosoft.com
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Post by Scoob »

Hi Bernd,

Rather than using an absolute number for Resistance and, when added, the players Marines strength, why not use more "wordy" terms such as "Strong", "Weak", "Poor" so something else that covers a range of values. In tern a Marine & Officer group could be "Rookies", "Graduates", "Experienced", "Veteran" etc. so the "rank" if you will applying to the total group score with the Marine Officer.

This way a "Rookie" squad of Marines might be able to take a "Weak" ship, but if the "Rookies" are only just that rank and the "Weak" ship is actually just a couple of points off the next rank up, it'll mix things up a bit. Obviously a fairly strong ship would become weak if you blow up enough stuff before hand :)

Not a very fleshed out idea I admit, but just seeing a set of numbers isn't so immersive in my view. I think hiding the raw numbers with something more interesting would add to the experience.

Additionally, I'm still generally fine with the player having to seriously nerf the target ship if their Marines are weak. Though I still would LOVE an option to tell Yisha that *I* will handle boarding operations and select targets. Maybe this is something having a more experienced Marine Officer could allow us to do? I.e. Yisha helps out for the first few boarding attempts, but after that we have an option to shut her up.

One final thing, it would be good if a more experienced Marine Officer was able to provide extra features. For example:

i) Intel - the officer can assess potential losses against a certain target.

ii) Retreat: the officer, due to their prior boarding experience, always keeps and escape route open. So, a "retreat" command, will preserve any Marine ranks gained, but allow the player to affectively abort if things start going down hill. Possibly a Marine Officer who knows the tide has turned will do this automatically if their rank is high enough.

I'd like the player to get attached to their Marines Officers, so they maybe only gain these special skills through pure experience, not based on their initial level - which may already be high.

On that note, how about being able to see a LIST of our Marines somewhere with names and stats such as number of boarding missions etc. All little things that enhance the experience.

Just some random post Pizza ideas :)

Scoob.
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Post by exogenesis »

Bernd wrote: ...
What I did not post is the actual strength of the three tiers of marines. Marines are 0.5 Veterans 1.5 and Elite are 5. Maybe this helps you guys a bit to estimate your own strength.

We are discussing to give the player a better idea of his own strength but I am not a fan of simply showing him a total score that can be directly compared to the strength of the target ship, but the goal would be that an experienced player has a clue of his strength.
...

-Bernd
That's quite a differenece between marines,
& explains why I still lose no marines of 50 elites & 4+ experience officer,
if I follow Yisha's instructions.

Appears I can easily board e.g. a Balor at 160+ 'strength' with no losses,
without any overt effort on my part.

Is it intended that anything *could* be boarded (e.g. Fulmekron) at max boarding strength,
or are some ships never going to be boardable (obviously not Xenon I etc)
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Post by NZ-Wanderer »

Scoob wrote:Though I still would LOVE an option to tell Yisha that *I* will handle boarding operations and select targets. Maybe this is something having a more experienced Marine Officer could allow us to do? I.e. Yisha helps out for the first few boarding attempts, but after that we have an option to shut her up.
No NO, get Yisha OUT of the equation all together, I really do NOT need my co-pilot telling me to destroy external parts of a ship AFTER my marines etc are already on board (It's just plain crazy)...
Let me destroy what "I" think is necessary BEFORE my marines board the ship, maybe I just want to take out the jump drive, engines and all turrets under the ship then launch my marines from under the ship so they don't get hit from the upper turrets. :)
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Post by Scoob »

That'd be my preference NZ, just trying to suggest a compromise as I suspect Bernd is against the idea of removing Yisha's "contribution" to boarding all together :)

Scoob.
ShienZu
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Post by ShienZu »

i really enjoy the new boarding system.

close to 40 hours into the campaign I lost 36 marines total, 30 of which were lost capturing a Heavy Sul stationed at the gate to DeVries. I got that one with drone bay intact.

So after a long capture spree of different variety of ships I am running with a crew of 28 elites and 22 vets and a 5-5-5 boarding officer (partially trained myself). I can comfortably capture ships with boarding resistance of 130, usually with both drone launcher and the cap shield generators intact.

What I notice is the more turrets you leave intact when starting boarding, the bigger the chance you have to keep the drone bay, as Yisha randomly selects a target to destroy out of active components.

Also, targeting software Mk2 is very useful at destroying components quickly and easily.

Got extremelly lucky yesterday with a "Kill enemy agent" mission in OL - capped a Fulmekron. Destroyed every component and brought the hull down to around 20% before deplying the crew. Very happy with the outcome.

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