Best way to capture capital ships?

[Vaeo]

Anya advice? tried my hand at pirating some big ones but got shot down pretty hastily by missile turrets. I've heard stories about people pulling this kind of feat off with starter ships. What's the best kit for this kind of thing?

[Vaeo]

BUMP. I had no success at this even when muhreens successfully boarded the vessel and had what I assumed is a stronger boarding power than enemy boarding resistance.

[Revenant342]

Blow all the turrets off first, it's a big help. Kill the engines, too. Also, lower hull reduces losses among marines during the breach phase, then the final assault phase is your attack vs. their defense, try to outnumber them significantly.

[otto_deluxe]

Blow all the turrets off first, it's a big help. Kill the engines, too. Also, lower hull reduces losses among marines during the breach phase, then the final assault phase is your attack vs. their defense, try to outnumber them significantly.

^ This.

Or do not bother, since many many ppl reported problems and ship-breaking bugs with capped ships at the time. You may find yourself capping a brick.

[vtecem]

Anya advice? tried my hand at pirating some big ones but got shot down pretty hastily by missile turrets. I've heard stories about people pulling this kind of feat off with starter ships. What's the best kit for this kind of thing?

One of the first things I destroy is the "tracking turret" which is the missile turret that fires the guided missiles...

After that blow up all the other turrets and shield gens, the crew should start bailing at some point and you can send in your marines.

[Vaeo]

TY for all the advice. Any hull suggestions? Medium or weak for the breach? I find myself quickly becoming overwhelmed by sector patrols, the missile turrets not withstanding.

Also. What WEAPONS do you guys use to strip ships before the patrols get ugly?

[midnkight]

Here are my tips.

I end up Capture two "Large" size ship last night with a "M" size ship with a Marine count of 14.

1) Scan all large ships. I haven't found any negative to doing this yet. If you have a Police Licences you are allowed to scan ship in that faction's sector anyhow.
The reason to scan ship is that #1 you can see the crew size and #2 you can see specific crew member's "*"level. I like to dock on capital/XL ship and try to hire 1"*" or greater marine or Service if you need them for other things. I found a 4* pilot this way.
1* + Marines give a larger bonus to attack ships vs recruit level.

2) Only attack in pirate space, any other sector will have the faction polices up your butt so fast you won't be able to capture anything fast enough. Even in isolated part of faction space. (Hewa's Twin IV was my hunting spot last night)

3) Only attack ship with low Marine size crew. And you can check the likely hood of being able to board a ship before committing.

4) As mention take out the turret and then engine. Also you have to bring the Hull down to at least 80%

Leave as much of the system intact as you can. Unlikely S/M size ship. Large/XL ship you have to pay to repair such things as hull damage, engine, shield and weapon system. Those can get pricey. I think it cost me 1 millon just to repair the damage on a freighter.

If you end up taking out the ship engine during the fight, you will have to wait until board crew on the ship repairs some of the damage so it can limp back to a station to be repaired. I always end up converting all my marines to a services crew and let them repair the ship slow.

Please note that before you sell the ship, remove your 1*+ marines. And strip ship with whatever you can before selling it. I find that i make more money by downgrading all parts and selling all the missile/drone/sat before selling the ship to the station.

I haven't captured any XL ship yet, but I expect I would need to size up to a Large ship with a Marine count in the 40+ or I got to have a fleet of transports as your wingman that is just outside of the action range until you are ready for the boarding action.

[Gabeux]

1. LOADOUT: Have about 20 Marines spread across your fleet. Having a squad (wing) of 3 frigates is perfect - grab abandoned ones - to mitigate damage from missiles. Your main ship could use a Torpedo Launcher or Dumbfire with Heavy Cluster to clear out surface targets as fast as possible. Only use Torps against Destroyers, however. Bolters or Shards will do for the weapons.
2. PICK A TARGET: Picking a target full of escorts can be dangerous and a waste of time. Plenty of lonely L miners, destroyers and traders out there. Don't be afraid of Destroyers, they are perfect practice to master CapShip murdering.
3. CONTROLS: Use HOME / END to switch surface targets - it will target individual external targets such as turrets, shields, engines.
4. SETUP: Stick to the back of the target. Scan it (it may provide Boarding bonuses having your target scanned, it used to in X:R and from my tests here it feels like it). If viable boarding target (Boarding Strength > Boarding Resistance), start: Right-Click/Press F on target and click Board - set it as you see fit (in short: Behavior - Disable Target, select max marines, Start Operation).
5. ENGAGE: Kill its engines. Kill any backwards-facing turret, if it exists.
6. DISABLE: Kill Tracking [Missile] Turrets first. Hide in the back section of the ship if your shields are down. Kill all turrets. Killing every surface component will help stopping your squad ships from shooting the target for no reason.
7. BOARDING: Protect your boarding pods from stray Defense Drone, Escort or Laser Tower fire.
8. WAIT/PROTECT/CEASE FIRE: Now all it takes is some waiting and making sure no one **** up by killing your target (with your marines in it). If your squad is shooting the ship for no reason after the target is already at ~75% hull: Select your ships in the map, right-click, remove all orders. Then order them to fly away. You can also use commands like "Wing: withdraw from combat" or "Wing: stop and cease fire" if you manage to bring those commands up.
9. ?????
10. PROFIT

This is by far the easiest game in the series for ship boarding, it feels a bit exploity to be honest. Completely valid targets are any L ship, given that they sell for okay money. Grabbing some Paranid Odysseus is my favorite at the moment.
If you have to put in too much effort/reloads to grab a ship, it's probably not worth your time - sometimes the time/effort used to cap 1 ship could be used to cap 3 elsewhere.
Note that if you have anti-capital loadouts in your squad, such as ships with Torpedo Launchers, you might want to keep them away most if not all the time. I had a ship fire 5 heavy torpedos on a disabled ship for absolutely no reason.

This is also the game with the best boarding mechanic in the series, IMO. Some stuff still needs to be ironed out, but having a dedicated UI for it that just works is great. I even got my boarding squad to capture me a destroyer once, while I was far away OOS. Thanks to Egosoft for making my favorite feature play nice.

PS: Midnknight brought up great points above:
A) If keeping the ship for yourself, turn the marines on the capped ship into crew so they repair faster.
B) When selling the ship, it may take longer, but stripping it on an EQD or Shipyard before selling gives you more money at the moment.

And I'd add:

C) You can use the "Keep Distance" behavior when you get experienced in boarding. I find it way better to just use my squad ships as "meat" shields, because they will keep trying to destroy surface elements and missing, damaging the hull to the point of destroying the ship eventually. So they are mostly Party Busses bringing Marines to the party, and once empty they become annoying.
D) You do not need to outright destroy the ships' engines, if you damage it to ~20% they will stop working. This will make everything easier, and won't take as long get the ship moving later (if you want to keep it for yourself).
E) Capturing Construction Vessels is a waste of time (and therefore a big waste of money), unless they are stacked in resources - which is rare. I capped one once and it had more than 140 defending crew inside it, literally took me 40 minutes to cap and 3 boarding attempts.
F) Getting attached to your marines and trying to move all the 20+ back to the fleet is a waste of time (and therefore money). Until Egosoft patches in a way for us to transfer crew quickly in bulk, after each Op I find easier to just buy new marines.
G) The Vulture Vanguard M freighter can carry 20 Marines + 1 Pilot. Having one or two of those filled with marines and a Mk3 Combat Engine can pretty much guarantee Boarding Stage III success most of the time. It'll pretty much dive-bomb boarding pods and move away, it's the perfect 'bulk' troop transporter.
H) Having ships with docked fighters/drones carrying Marines can waste your time and fail your operation. They may suddenly stop and decide to recall and land or launch all their docked stuff and take FOREVER to join the pod-launching party. E.g. don't have a Cerberus with a fighter/drones as subordinates with marines in it (unless flying it yourself, obviously).

[Vaeo]

1. LOADOUT: Have about 20 Marines spread across your fleet. Having a squad (wing) of 3 frigates is perfect - grab abandoned ones - to mitigate damage from missiles. Your main ship could use a Torpedo Launcher or Dumbfire with Heavy Cluster to clear out surface targets as fast as possible. Only use Torps against Destroyers, however. Bolters or Shards will do for the weapons.
2. PICK A TARGET: Picking a target full of escorts can be dangerous and a waste of time. Plenty of lonely L miners, destroyers and traders out there. Don't be afraid of Destroyers, they are perfect practice to master CapShip murdering.
3. CONTROLS: Use HOME / END to switch surface targets - it will target individual external targets such as turrets, shields, engines.
4. SETUP: Stick to the back of the target. Scan it (it may provide Boarding bonuses having your target scanned, it used to in X:R and from my tests here it feels like it). If viable boarding target (Boarding Strength > Boarding Resistance), start: Right-Click/Press F on target and click Board - set it as you see fit (in short: Behavior - Disable Target, select max marines, Start Operation).
5. ENGAGE: Kill its engines. Kill any backwards-facing turret, if it exists.
6. DISABLE: Kill Tracking [Missile] Turrets first. Hide in the back section of the ship if your shields are down. Kill all turrets. Killing every surface component will help stopping your squad ships from shooting the target for no reason.
7. BOARDING: Protect your boarding pods from stray Defense Drone, Escort or Laser Tower fire.
8. WAIT/PROTECT/CEASE FIRE: Now all it takes is some waiting and making sure no one **** up by killing your target (with your marines in it). If your squad is shooting the ship for no reason after the target is already at ~75% hull: Select your ships in the map, right-click, remove all orders. Then order them to fly away. You can also use commands like "Wing: withdraw from combat" or "Wing: stop and cease fire" if you manage to bring those commands up.
9. ?????
10. PROFIT

This is by far the easiest game in the series for ship boarding, it feels a bit exploity to be honest. Completely valid targets are any L ship, given that they sell for okay money. Grabbing some Paranid Odysseus is my favorite at the moment.
If you have to put in too much effort/reloads to grab a ship, it's probably not worth your time - sometimes the time/effort used to cap 1 ship could be used to cap 3 elsewhere.
Note that if you have anti-capital loadouts in your squad, such as ships with Torpedo Launchers, you might want to keep them away most if not all the time. I had a ship fire 5 heavy torpedos on a disabled ship for absolutely no reason.

This is also the game with the best boarding mechanic in the series, IMO. Some stuff still needs to be ironed out, but having a dedicated UI for it that just works is great. I even got my boarding squad to capture me a destroyer once, while I was far away OOS. Thanks to Egosoft for making my favorite feature play nice.

PS: Midnknight brought up great points above:
A) If keeping the ship for yourself, turn the marines on the capped ship into crew so they repair faster.
B) When selling the ship, it may take longer, but stripping it on an EQD or Shipyard before selling gives you more money at the moment.

And I'd add:

C) You can use the "Keep Distance" behavior when you get experienced in boarding. I find it way better to just use my squad ships as "meat" shields, because they will keep trying to destroy surface elements and missing, damaging the hull to the point of destroying the ship eventually. So they are mostly Party Busses bringing Marines to the party, and once empty they become annoying.
D) You do not need to outright destroy the ships' engines, if you damage it to ~20% they will stop working. This will make everything easier, and won't take as long get the ship moving later (if you want to keep it for yourself).

Lot of helpful advice here. But this raises other questions: missiles. Under consumables when building a ship I don't see a place to purchase torpedo or missiles or anything. Where do you buy ammunition for launchers in this game? Don't THINK I've seen an ammunition factory yet.

[Gabeux]

You need to have a Missile Launcher or a Torpedo Launcher in one of your ships' weapon hardpoints before ammunition appears on the consumables screen.
It's different than previous games.

[Phoynix]

Hire 3 people with the starting ship on a new game start, go find a military destroyer of your choosing...
Fly close in behind it and shoot the engines off, it cant shoot back the hull blocks the turrets, after your blown off the engines drain the shields and keep pumping that hull full of bullets...
It will take awhile but once it gets down to about 12% the crew start ejecting, if the hull gets down to 2% let it repair(it repairs itself) and shoot the engines off if they repair while you wait for it to repair to about 12-15% then shoot it down again to 2% untill there is only 3 crew left, then send your boarding party.

make 12 million or so 15 mins into game

[Vaeo]

I'm getting very confused about boarding. I routinely board a sentinel miner at about 50% hull strength, my boarding party has a strength of like 150 to their 50. How do the marines continue to lose when they get aboard?! This is after I've stripped the vessel of it's sub systems. I've reloaded several times having over 50% of their boarding defense. IE: 100 Boarding Defense against 150 boarding power. And their crew keeps wiping the floor with mine. I don't wanna damage the crap outta the hull, per se, because I want to rack up credits selling my captures.

[Gabeux]

Never had it happen, but I have a hunch that leaving the shields recover too much, or not scanning the ship can bring worse results. And having just a bit more boarding strength doesn't guarantee capture - there's probably some mechanic of losing marines/strength during the Stage II / Hull Breach.

[Vaeo]

What would shields have to do with anything (or hull for that matter) once they are already inside?! >< If the crew bails, isn't their boarding defense more or less cut way down? I've attempted this several times in the last hour. Successful boards at 20% hull. But the mission's keep failing.

[Phoynix]

Make sure you are up close so the droppods hit the hull all at the same time, I had one boarding fail and it was when I launched from a distance and it ended up sounded like their were multiple boarding attempts at the same time rather then going as a "team".

Also remember turrets are borked on captured ships, so always sell them.

What would shields have to do with anything (or hull for that matter) once they are already inside?! >< If the crew bails, isn't their boarding defense more or less cut way down? I've attempted this several times in the last hour. Successful boards at 20% hull. But the mission's keep failing.

[Vaeo]

Hire 3 people with the starting ship on a new game start, go find a military destroyer of your choosing...
Fly close in behind it and shoot the engines off, it cant shoot back the hull blocks the turrets, after your blown off the engines drain the shields and keep pumping that hull full of bullets...
It will take awhile but once it gets down to about 12% the crew start ejecting, if the hull gets down to 2% let it repair(it repairs itself) and shoot the engines off if they repair while you wait for it to repair to about 12-15% then shoot it down again to 2% untill there is only 3 crew left, then send your boarding party.

make 12 million or so 15 mins into game

Also what do you use weapon loadout wise to knock the hull down that fast?

[Gabeux]

What would shields have to do with anything (or hull for that matter) once they are already inside?! >< If the crew bails, isn't their boarding defense more or less cut way down? I've attempted this several times in the last hour. Successful boards at 20% hull. But the mission's keep failing.

On previous games, IIRC if the shields would go up too much certain phases would just fail horribly (or instantly), and I had one fail boarding on X4 which was the only one I let shields recharge in full.. so may be a little superstition. Not sure what could be going wrong on your end though, boarding is very straightforward and easy, especially compared to X3.
You can always provide a save and report a bug if it's too bizarre.

[Vaeo]

What would shields have to do with anything (or hull for that matter) once they are already inside?! >< If the crew bails, isn't their boarding defense more or less cut way down? I've attempted this several times in the last hour. Successful boards at 20% hull. But the mission's keep failing.

On previous games, IIRC if the shields would go up too much certain phases would just fail horribly (or instantly), and I had one fail boarding on X4 which was the only one I let shields recharge in full.. so may be a little superstition. Not sure what could be going wrong on your end though, boarding is very straightforward and easy, especially compared to X3.
You can always provide a save and report a bug if it's too bizarre.

Yeah. I just successfully capped a ship, but it got blown up making it to the highway, ODDLY, it was right in the middle of the highway and no matter how i maneuvered it for like 10 minutes in the blue stream it wouldn't boost away! Any idea why?

[Bidelain]

I'd like to comment on people saying the ship is a brick after you destroy the engines. I thought the same thing after capping an Ody. Just move crew to the ship, the engines will be repaired even after they are destroyed. I moved around 20 crew. Give it some time, then you can move it to a shipyard and repair the rest and/or outfit it to your liking.

[Gabeux]

L ships don't use highways and don't 'boost' on them. Check how big the lanes are and note it isn't supposed to fit a L ship. Your ship was probably killed by turning the highway into a mass driver with sentient projectiles.

Yeah. I just successfully capped a ship, but it got blown up making it to the highway, ODDLY, it was right in the middle of the highway and no matter how i maneuvered it for like 10 minutes in the blue stream it wouldn't boost away! Any idea why?