Boarding New Ships Bug?

[Hawkseyez]

Tried to board one of the new builders from the ZYA faction. was 43 on their ship with 10 marine vets and i dumped 200 reg marines 3 times for almost 600 total, and when was done the ship was down to only 38. something seems off about this. someone maybe want to check it out, idk. just reporting. never threw that many at a ship and had so few deaths on the ship part. thanks

[Alan Phipps]

If you think it is a bug then a Tech Sp report with a link to a vanilla save showing the issue reliably about to happen would be the way to get dev attention.

[Hawkseyez]

If you think it is a bug then a Tech Sp report with a link to a vanilla save showing the issue reliably about to happen would be the way to get dev attention.

thank you for reply. i don't know if it's a bug. was posting to see if anyone else had tried it or seen this. don't want to waste the Devs time, just seems off. was waiting on more replies. fact not many have, prolly means i was just unlucky i guess. /shrugs. thx again. i'll delete it. cheers.

[Grouch Potato]

I've successfully taken a couple of Elephants from the Free Families, this would've been about 3 weeks ago, with a Cobra so I had max 25 marines each Elephant and I never noticed anything off.

[Hawkseyez]

I've successfully taken a couple of Elephants from the Free Families, this would've been about 3 weeks ago, with a Cobra so I had max 25 marines each Elephant and I never noticed anything off.

interesting. idk what happened and im not a rookie. never seen 600 of mine die and only 6 of theirs. maybe a few of the vets were much higher skilled then. /shrugs. thanks for reply.

[caraota]

I've successfully taken a couple of Elephants from the Free Families, this would've been about 3 weeks ago, with a Cobra so I had max 25 marines each Elephant and I never noticed anything off.

interesting. idk what happened and im not a rookie. never seen 600 of mine die and only 6 of theirs. maybe a few of the vets were much higher skilled then. /shrugs. thanks for reply.

is it possible that the service crew also had good boarding skills too?

My experience is not as extreme as yours but I’ve definitely thrown 1K+ recruit marines to capture an Asgard that is half its crew (Three fly-by with erlking plus a single shuyaku pass)… I have also seen those Elephant crew put up a good resistance even tough my boarding strength ratio was 3:1 (3K attack to 1K resistance) plus I had like 40 more marines than target’s defending crew…. (since you are more experienced than me you surely know this but anyways) that’s why I got used to check the skills of the whole crew by setting the “display skill for role” from “current role” to “Marines” just to find out that sometimes the services crew also has good boarding skills with almost a star

[Alan Phipps]

I do recall dev j.harshaw who coded a lot of this skills stuff saying something along the lines of: 'Skills other than morale are not used when employed out of the role that the skill serves.'

I think he also said that the target ship's Captain's skills (ie piloting and morale) can influence boarding and bailing outcomes for their ship.

[BitByte]

Tried to board one of the new builders from the ZYA faction. was 43 on their ship with 10 marine vets and i dumped 200 reg marines 3 times for almost 600 total, and when was done the ship was down to only 38. something seems off about this. someone maybe want to check it out, idk. just reporting. never threw that many at a ship and had so few deaths on the ship part. thanks

Can you clarify - you tried 3 times and each time you used 200 marines or 1 boarding and 600 marines?
And reg marines - you mean recruits? Did they have any marine skill and morale?

Recruits can really get killed by service crew and veteran marines are also tough (especially Split ones).
As recruits have less "energy points" than veterans and game randomly selects groups of marines / service crew which will fight against each other.
In forum there's more detailed explanation how boarding calculation goes and how it's randomized.

[caraota]

I do recall dev j.harshaw who coded a lot of this skills stuff saying something along the lines of: 'Skills other than morale are not used when employed out of the role that the skill serves.'

I think he also said that the target ship's Captain's skills (ie piloting and morale) can influence boarding and bailing outcomes for their ship.

I will look up for some info about the boarding system. Thank you

[Imperial Good]

Low skilled marines are pretty much worthless in combat. Additionally I think NPC split crew stat distribution generally has higher boarding skill than other factions. A ZYA construction ship is probably one of the more difficult ships to take with marines.

I suggest training your marines on easier targets such as L traders in neutral space. After a few successful missions your losses should start to go down as they get some skill.

A lot of bordering is RNG. So it is entirely possible that despite overwhelming odds you can suffer horrendous losses.

Mechanically more marines does not mean more damage. Both parties have their marines broken into attack teams which are then paired off against each other. Any extra attack teams, such as due to one side having significantly more marines or a bad dice roll, will not engage in combat until a paired off attack team is wiped out for it to replace. This can result in an attack team with a lot of skilled marines wiping out a lot of attack teams with few unskilled marines, 1 attack team at a time. Overwhelming numbers does not give you a damage bonus in combat, and only lets you replace any losses to your attack team count to hopefully wear down and inflict casualties on the enemy attack teams.

Some service crew will also join attack teams. These usually perform like worse recruit marines, however if there are enough of them they could still wear down your recruit marine attack teams allowing the enemy marine attack teams to kill them.

[BitByte]

When I made lots of boarding operations against FAF Rattlesnakes I learned that educate your marines to 2 stars (marine + morale) or just barely above. Don't even bother use elites or high skilled (3+ stars) veterans.
Reason? You will loose no matter what marines when fighting against FAF (and split in general) and 2 stars marines are more or less like cannon food - cheap and quite easily replacable. And still they are already quite good in combat.

If you use 3+ (veterans and especially elites) the skill points your crew gains from boarding is low and if you think how much 3+ stars marine cost if you would buy her/him from "open market". Training is long (yes marine skill can be educated in Terraforming but skill no) and requires effort.

[Maebius]

Sometimes you run into a ship that has high skill combat crew and you start throwing rookies at them.
They wipe the floor with them, while also getting more skill with each kill, making the next attempt even harder using rookies

It happens.