Boarding... what am I doing wrong?

[radcapricorn]

So I'm piloting a Peregrine with 8 marines on board. I bring a Vulture with 13 marines. I order the Vulture to start boarding, select all its marines, start operation. They launch. Then, from my own ship, I open the interaction menu on target, click Board. The Peregrine is listed in ships, but I can't select its marines, nor can I update the operation. Even if I get up from the chair and order it via map, I still can't add its marines to the operation. What gives?

[Imperial Good]

Maybe one has to select both ships before ordering the boarding operation?

[Alan Phipps]

I recall a tragic/comic situation in X3 boarding ops when sending several waves of marines as operational reinforcements over time. If one of the earlier waves took the target while later waves were still landing, the later waves could end up fighting the earlier waves for the ship. Sometimes the latecomers failed to take the target from the successful marines and the ship then reverted to neutral/hostile despite the initial boarding success!

I don't know if X4 has safeguards against this situation.

[radcapricorn]

In this case the first wave haven't even reached the target yet. Because just after I launched it, another large freighter gave me and my target a lift for 30km

[pref]

So I'm piloting a Peregrine with 8 marines on board. I bring a Vulture with 13 marines. I order the Vulture to start boarding, select all its marines, start operation. They launch. Then, from my own ship, I open the interaction menu on target, click Board. The Peregrine is listed in ships, but I can't select its marines, nor can I update the operation. Even if I get up from the chair and order it via map, I still can't add its marines to the operation. What gives?

Think you have to include all the ships at start. Once it starts there is no possibility for change any more.

[Morleond]

Did you set your vulture as a subordinate to your ship? If you are in a wing or fleet when you start the boarding process all ships in your fleet will be included in the participating ships section at the top and all the marines will be available in the slider. The next boarding stage won't start until all pods are launched and sometimes the AI is stupid and won't launch the pods on their own so you have to look and see in the participating ships during phase one and see if there are any marines still on board. Teleport to any ships that still have Marines and fly close to the target ship. As long as you have damaged the target enough (destroyed the correct amount of turrets) they will launch. Once they are all landed phase 2 will start once you get the hull damage to whatever you set it as. (Medium is 50% hull)
Hope this helps

[darrund]

So I'm piloting a Peregrine with 8 marines on board. I bring a Vulture with 13 marines. I order the Vulture to start boarding, select all its marines, start operation. They launch. Then, from my own ship, I open the interaction menu on target, click Board. The Peregrine is listed in ships, but I can't select its marines, nor can I update the operation. Even if I get up from the chair and order it via map, I still can't add its marines to the operation. What gives?

Think you have to include all the ships at start. Once it starts there is no possibility for change any more.

That.
Also keep in mind that the boarding begins as soon as ALL the selected marines reach the target.If even 1 of them is delaying they will wait until he gets there (which might take forever in some cases)
But you need to select both ships at the beginning and this makes things even harder to coordinate.
I stopped using small ships for boarding just because of this coordination issues and I use a L Freighters with plenty of marines in it and the results are spectacularly better.

[zazie]

I don't have any boarding experience with >1 Marine in X4. But are there similar limits as in X3?
I remember that you could launch only that many Marines as "there were seats" on the target, meaning the maximal numbers of Marines. That made boarding of Xenon Capitals particularly difficult becaus you had to manage the right timing to launch your second wave of Marines.

Can you board a ship having a crew capacity of 8 with - let's say - 20 Marines?

[radcapricorn]

Oh wow, that is mighty weird. Thanks guys, I'll try again with all ships at once. Honestly, the behavior I encountered I can't then call anything but a bug: the UI adds the ship, displays the ship's marines, but doesn't let you move them, and the "Update" button is grayed out? Either it shouldn't be letting me do this at all, or it should work.

But are there similar limits as in X3?

I don't know if there are, but even if there are, I was way below. Like, I don't think I could've successfully boarded with all the 21 marines from both ships. I obviously don't have any experience in mass boardings either, and was just looking how it all worked, to see if it's even worth the hassle.

[pref]

I remember that you could launch only that many Marines as "there were seats" on the target, meaning the maximal numbers of Marines. That made boarding of Xenon Capitals particularly difficult becaus you had to manage the right timing to launch your second wave of Marines.

Can you board a ship having a crew capacity of 8 with - let's say - 20 Marines?

No, you can only launch a number of marines that ship capacity allows.
What matters is headcounts and skills only, so if you have them bail difficulty will be reduced to 0.

The whole thing works like each defender selects a random marine and does an attack according to it's combined skill value, which will be deducted from the marines 100+combined skill amount of HP. Each defender/attacker does this in rounds, and who survives wins.

The hull only affects time needed to breach the hull ime (difference of serious minutes).

There is no difficulty factor implemented based on ship class/type.

All this i checked under 1.5 or 1.6, no clue if 2.0 had any changes in this regard but saw none in patch notes.

[radcapricorn]

...and now I can't get me a big transport for a large amount of marines because of another issue, this time with shipyards. To answer my own question from the subject, no, I'm not doing anything wrong. The game does.

[Imperial Good]

I recall a tragic/comic situation in X3 boarding ops when sending several waves of marines as operational reinforcements over time. If one of the earlier waves took the target while later waves were still landing, the later waves could end up fighting the earlier waves for the ship. Sometimes the latecomers failed to take the target from the successful marines and the ship then reverted to neutral/hostile despite the initial boarding success!

I don't know if X4 has safeguards against this situation.

Yes it does. Since boarding outcome is entirely based on living crew. Once all crew are dead the ship is yours. The crew cannot magically resurrect since they are dead and removed from existence. Your crew might be able to fight itself if something broken happens (other safeguards fail), but that would just cause them to kill each other with the ship still being yours.

Boarding divides defenders and attackers into groups and in turn based RPG like fashion gets the groups to fight each other. In theory this means that even if you have 10-50 times the boarding strength you can still suffer losses if the enemy has even a few high skill crew.