What use is boarding strength?

[Nanook]

I personally find so-called 'boarding strength' to be very misleading. It does not accurately portray actual strength vs resistance. I've boarded hundreds, if not more, ships in my many hours and games, and I've had failures and near failures many times when my strength is supposedly many times the target's. One of the main problem is the game not taking into account the service crew strength when calculating the resistance of a target's crew. I've had like 20 veteran marines nearly wiped out by a service crew of less than 100, with supposed boarding strength of 0 (that's ZERO).

My advice is to just avoid looking at B.S. (accurate acronym ) completely and rely on scans of the actual crew. With a little experience, a player can get a pretty good idea of how easy or tough an op will be. As GCU Grey Area said, monitor the progress with the boarding screen and you'll see what's happening.

[jlehtone]

why even show the player these numbers in the first place?

That part of "sensors" is what annoys me in Star Trek (and most games). You know what the opponent has. In my favourite fantasy the opponent loses shields, structural integrity, and explodes, only because you shot at him and your sensors verified that this is what did happen, but in reality the opponent's shields did not even budge, and all you saw was what he chose your sensors to tell you.

What you see in X4 is way closer to "reality" than my dream.

[BitByte]

Marines skill level (stars) will give better picture when you choose your target. At least that is the one what I'm looking when perform boarding operations.
If in defence side is 20 marines whom are 3 stars veterans then it's pretty clear if you send 60 recruits that it will end to massacre of your boarding team.
You may won the battle but there will be huge losses.

Also when you educate your boarding marines make sure you also improve their morale. During boarding they gain very little amount of morale so good way to improve it is put them work as service crew to ship which you just captured.

During the boarding operation even the points don't tell much but what they tell is how much your team marine experience improved. When each full star is equal as 20 skill points but it's still possilbe you have 1 star recruit but boarding skill points shows 21-25. When marines are fresh (recruits) they gain much more skill per fight than what they do when they are high level veterans or elites. This is reason why I prefer to mix boarding teams with recruits/fresh members and higher skill level veterans. If recruit team of 121 marines (amount what fits to Heron E) can get 400+ points from win, 2 stars veterans may receive 200+ points. 4+ stars elites from 10+ (or can stay under 10 points).
This means 5 stars elites don't gain much experience so they are really valuable personel and loosing them in battle needs really be worth of the loss.
92 high level (near 4 stars) and 4+ stars elites can wipe out Inca sentinel very quickly even it would be near full (30 marines + 100+ service crew). So if you have hurry then very skilled team is what you want use. In my long-term game it wasn't uncommon that fight was over even there was still 90+ service crew left when I used high level veterans + low level elites.

Against Split I started use tactic that I send 2+ (but not full 3) stars veterans because no matter what there always came casulties. When you have terraforming started and martial arts training ability enabled getting 2 stars veterans is so cheap that they can be used as "cannon food".

When boarding to big ships I preferred send full team (as much as crew capacity is). Reason for that is that no matter what they gain experience from the boarding. Of course it backfires in the point that many marines might not do anything during the fight (depending how RNG rolls). Even now when I'm playing new game as I'm quite fresh with marines I send full pack to SCA Heron E when boarding. I have so far been able to get some 3 stars veterans but field training is ongoing. I have around 450 marines which I rotate and get them experience. In most of cases I need play long time with target ships so make most if not all of the crew to bail until I let my marines move to 2nd stage.
Thanks to 7.x new system I can already send the marines to attach pods to target ship and continue bombing it to make crew bail and I don't need to be worried local forces would come and blow up the ship (and my marines) to dust.

[stooper88]

As a relatively new X4 player, I definitely identify with other players' frustrations and qualms about boarding. I do feel lucky to have all the collected wisdom and experience from these and other forums. However, I did try to learn and experiment with boarding firsthand myself before searching and studying what the internet had to offer. And yeah, I can say a lot of my initial boarding experience was baffling and exasperating based on my own intuition, assumptions, and expectations. But as I read more about the actual mechanics and motivations, I suppose I can sort of follow what the developers were trying to accomplish and how it relates to my gameplay.

In response to the topic, my answer is boarding strength provides a quick and rough comparison of the combined "power" of my boarding team before and after an operation. That's all it's good for, for comparing my team before battle against itself after the battle, not for comparing against the defenders or predicting the boarding attempt odds of success or anything else. If/when a boarding attempt succeeds, I check the surviving marines in the crew tab of the captured ship. If the impact from casualties was less than that from promoted survivors, then the boarding strength number goes up and I'm happy. Otherwise it goes down and I'm sad. As I'm on a quest to grind out marines, I don't even really care about the captured ships. That said, I always find these discussions very interesting.

In a way it's all down to the early mini-rounds of combat (or the crew bailing pre-measures you make before boarding) as to whether the high value defenders are removed before or early in the operation. Seeing an instant significant drop in the defensive strength of the target, or the disappearance of high value marines from its crew, are the indicators here.

Likewise, seeing an instant significant drop in your attack strength, or loss of high value marines from your operational force, while still early in the operation are indicators that the fight is not likely to go well.

I agree that the opening rounds of boarding combat are absolutely crucial as every "MVP" loss on a given side adds to a cumulative advantage for the other side for all subsequent rounds. My best *zero loss* boarding operations almost always play out as an avalanche of successive victories ending with a quick and decisive triumph. In contrast, whenever my boarding team has the numeric advantage but lacks momentum in eliminating defenders, the cumulative damage that my marines absorb during the repeated mini-battles guarantees that my team will take losses, even amongst (and almost always especially within) my highest ranked, most irreplaceable marines. At best, the team will succeed but quite poorly with 20% or greater casualties. It's really depressing when the battle chatter starts with comms mentioning heavy resistance, falling back, or being too risky to proceed. It's usually a sign that it will be a hard-fought battle of attrition whether fittingly or not.

I personally find so-called 'boarding strength' to be very misleading. It does not accurately portray actual strength vs resistance. I've boarded hundreds, if not more, ships in my many hours and games, and I've had failures and near failures many times when my strength is supposedly many times the target's. One of the main problem is the game not taking into account the service crew strength when calculating the resistance of a target's crew. I've had like 20 veteran marines nearly wiped out by a service crew of less than 100, with supposed boarding strength of 0 (that's ZERO).

My advice is to just avoid looking at B.S. (accurate acronym ) completely and rely on scans of the actual crew. With a little experience, a player can get a pretty good idea of how easy or tough an op will be. As GCU Grey Area said, monitor the progress with the boarding screen and you'll see what's happening.

Although my experience is very limited in comparison, I definitely concur and can vouch for witnessing the same sad situations. I've had teams of dozens of high-level veterans (3+ star) suffer immense losses from hordes of supposedly helpless service crew. And yet, on one such occasion I was so outraged that I reloaded and reboarded with a full team of recruits, expecting them all to fail but, in doing so, weaken the defending crew enough to allow my follow-up veteran force to seize the triumph without any losses. But instead of crumbling apart, the ragtag recruits not only succeeded, but with fewer losses!!!! The boarding mechanics can be so maddening and infuriating. There've been other threads that explained how/why the outcomes can vary so wildly. But, while I understand why these things happen, it's still very difficult to accept them as-is when they do.

Case in point, regarding the helpless hordes of service crew, it's important to note that service crew that possess boarding skill are not so helpless. Although not all service crew in a defending party will moonlight as amateur marines, enough can exist to create a very significant impact (not reflected in defending strength and boarding risk assessments). Combined with all the other wacky boarding mechanics, it's no wonder why boarding causes so much grief.

This Phoenix has 17 marines, but surely there'll be no problem once they're eliminated and only the 4 service crew remain.


Oops, those 4 "service crew" are weekend warriors and will kill half your veterans before you can finally take control of their ship. What they lack in military training, they make up for in fighting spirit.


Well how about the opposite situation? This Heron only has 3 marines but 38 service crew. It should be a cakewalk right? Not quite. If only, the service crew weren't also packing heat... They seem to be as highly trained as the 2 marine recruits, maybe even more powerful given their high morale.
https://i.imgur.com/USPuYAY.png

[jlehtone]

Oops, those 4 "service crew" are weekend warriors and will kill half your veterans before you can finally take control of their ship.

I'm quite sure that the devs have stated that the contribution of service crew to melee is 0, no matter what hobbies they have had.

[Alan Phipps]

In a previous 2021 post on this sort of topic, jlehtone wrote: "The defense strength of Service Crew against boarding is next to nothing. Are they nothing because they are in engineering duty today, or because crew in that duty rarely have boarding skill?"

Imperial Good replied: "Service crew have a penalty for defence against boarding operations. Most will not even partake in the battle, and instead will just die once the marines and service crew that did partake lose." I would assume that some code-diving was involved prior to that reply.

I also have a feeling that a skilled captain of the ship can make some sort of contribution to its defence, but I could be wrong.

There's some more attributed feedback in this 2023 thread.

[stooper88]

There's some more attributed feedback in this 2023 thread.

I read through that thread and initially had a similar impression that all service crew are ineffective in combat. However, I think there's an important distinction to be made between all and some. The quote below appears in the same thread.

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.

I don't know how much the mechanics have changed since the 2023 thread was started. But in 7.10, I've personally witnessed multiple occasions where ZERO marines were left on the target ship (verified by pausing and inspecting the crew details), yet massive casualties were still being inflicted on my 3+ star veterans by large groups of remaining service crew. So whatever their contribution is, it's greater than zero and is not dependent on having any marine defenders still present to deal "killing blows" to attackers. In other words, as much as I'd love to be wrong, service crews can still kill boarding marines all on their own.

It's also why I posted the link to the boarding ops mechanics in [7.10] X4 In-Depth FAQ By Kitten Mittens. I confess, I'm not clear on the source of the information in that FAQ, so I can't attest to its authority and reliability. But its depth and breadth of detail strongly suggests that the author has some basis for the FAQ contents, not to mention that it's being actively maintained. The key point I take from the FAQ is that service crew with boarding skills are different than those without in that their boarding ability *IS* evaluated under a "potentialskill" mechanic. Most service crew will not have any boarding skill, which lends itself to the common perception of service crew being fully inconsequential. But if one considers that the "potentialskill" mentioned in the FAQ may be real, then it could account for the aggravation that service crews have been reported to inflict.

To further reiterate:

One of the main problem is the game not taking into account the service crew strength when calculating the resistance of a target's crew. I've had like 20 veteran marines nearly wiped out by a service crew of less than 100, with supposed boarding strength of 0 (that's ZERO).

This matches my own experience whereby the defending strength was reportedly zero and no actual marines were left defending the ship. And yet my well trained, battle hardened marines were falling in droves to the "unreasonably valiant" (based on the opinions being given in this forum) service crews.

[jlehtone]

That Kitten Mittens' text looks believable.

Lets assume that average service crew has above two stars (or whatever makes 50) in morale and no boarding skill.
That is 0.2*50+0.8*0 = 10 potentialskill.
Engineers health is thus 110 and max damage 11. With even distribution, the average damage is then 5.5.
Perfect marine has health 200 and max damage 101. No idea how skewed their attacks are, but say "80".

Even the best marines have to strike normal crew-member twice in order to kill.
If 36 engineers each can hit the Elite marine, the marine will die.
Add one star of boarding, 20, and engineers skill increases to 26, health to 126, max damage to 27, and average to 13.5.

So yes, enough regular Joes are a threat. The thing that is actually for the marines is that the brawl is not all vs all; it is in smaller teams.

---

All this leaves questions: What is included in the "boarding strength"? Does it contain the potentialskill?
Was the mechanic originally different (with engineers genuine 0s)? If yes, does the BS follow the new system?

[BitByte]

So yes, enough regular Joes are a threat.

Don't forget that Service Crew can forget cleaning equipment to middle of corridor and rushing marine flips over on wet floor and "accidentially" dies -> SC killed the marine

[Alan Phipps]

Like nature, marines abhor a vacuum (eg when they trip over its power cable and shoot themselves by accident).

[azaghal]

To be honest... I wonder if all that would be needed to make the number a bit more useful would be to apply weights to relevant stats that come into combat when using those totals. I wonder if a mod would be able to access the full stats on both attacking and defending side, dump this into debug log, and then from there perhaps someone with enough math skills could extrapolate what the formula would be. If a 5-star marine can kill 50 rookies, then the rookie strength would get divided by 50. And yes - I understand that the actual combat calculation is more involved based on what has been described, but at least even some kind of more realistic approximate would be nice.

[Imperial Good]

So whatever their contribution is, it's greater than zero and is not dependent on having any marine defenders still present to deal "killing blows" to attackers. In other words, as much as I'd love to be wrong, service crews can still kill boarding marines all on their own.

The service crew need skill to reliably deal 1 or more damage. The issue is that most NPC service crew have as good as 0 boarding skill so will roll basically 0s or 1s for damage, as opposed to the 15s that perfect marines will pretty much always roll.

There are likely a few exceptions as mentioned by that guide. Specifically some factions like VIG might have service crew with actual boarding skills (not just ~0 skill) due to racial stat bias. I think the TER Asgard service crews might also have well above 0 boarding skill to try and make capturing one non-trivial.

Xenon ships are also special since they will magic full health 5 star marine defence crews on every boarding attempt, so wearing them down is impossible and at best you stand a 50:50 chance of winning if you use only perfect marines.

[stooper88]

The service crew need skill to reliably deal 1 or more damage. The issue is that most NPC service crew have as good as 0 boarding skill so will roll basically 0s or 1s for damage, as opposed to the 15s that perfect marines will pretty much always roll.

Yes, I alluded to this earlier when I explicitly mentioned the distinction between service crew *WITH* boarding skill versus those *WITHOUT* as well as posted screenshots highlighting example boarding skill instances among would be hapless service crews. To be extra clear, I'm referring to actual boarding skill stars as displayed in the UI, not "0 skills" or inferred skills or otherwise undetectable skills. If the formulas in the Kitten Mittens FAQ have any truth to them, then a large part of service crews' battle efficacy can be attributed to those covert boarding skills. However, I'm still not convinced that those stars explain everything, which I'll cover in more detail below.

There are likely a few exceptions as mentioned by that guide. Specifically some factions like VIG might have service crew with actual boarding skills (not just ~0 skill) due to racial stat bias. I think the TER Asgard service crews might also have well above 0 boarding skill to try and make capturing one non-trivial.

All of the exceptions regarding faction biases would nonetheless manifest themselves in the same manner as above. In other words, as VIG and SPLIT naturally tend to frequently produce veteran marines with higher boarding skill ratings than other races, any similar bias with their service crews would be clearly visible in those boarding crews' skills. In turn, they would (or at least should?) be subject to the same boarding mechanics as all other races and factions. There would just be a greater number of instances of these "enhanced" service crews among those races. In any case, these exceptions would be easily ruled out by simple examination, as I'll also go into more detail below. So, I'm inclined to dismiss any boarding wonkiness as being due to such exceptions.

Xenon ships are also special since they will magic full health 5 star marine defence crews on every boarding attempt, so wearing them down is impossible and at best you stand a 50:50 chance of winning if you use only perfect marines.

This is somewhat tangential to the topic but the Xenon H (only Xenon ship I'm aware of being able to board) has been stated as being the "equivalent of" twenty-six 3 star marines and one 2 star marine. What makes the capture challenging is being limited to 16 marines for boarding as opposed to 26. So the player's assault team must compensate by being assembled from elite 4 star or greater marines, which in and of itself is a FAR, FAR more difficult task than capturing the H itself.

All that said.... I was not expecting to be posting on the forum today. I just spent several hours banging my head with a boarding attempt, trying fruitlessly to understand wtf was going on. It's become more and more dismaying how immersion shattering the boarding mechanics are. I figured I'd just suck it up and keep quiet to myself. But this is now forcing me speak out.

To begin, my intention was to capture an SCA Heron to which end I loaded a Shuyaku with 134 marines. Of these, only 121 could board the Heron, but these cumulatively amounted to a boarding strength of 5058. In contrast, the target ship had 92 defenders collectively with a defense rating of 165. Yes, we all know the boarding strength is a worthless number and we all know that the mighty RNG holds all the keys so there's no point to whining, moaning, and grumbling about boarding anymore. But, simply put, none of these explanations make sense for what I'm about to show.


To be extra thorough, the boarding party consisted of 4 elites, 92 veterans, and 25 recruits. Why did I even bother adding the recruits? Because, in my idiocy, I'm deliberately training marines to capture an H, and why not? Of the 25 recruits, 21 had a one star rating. Only 4 had a 0.6 star rating. The overwhelming bulk of the assault team was a full two stars or much higher.
The Boarding Team

On the other side, the defenders had FOUR one star marines (3 veterans + 1 "recruit"), two 0.6 star recruits, and two 0.3 star recruits. The remaining 84 defenders were service crew comprised of 20 able crewmen and 64 apprentices. Of the 20 able crewmen, exactly SIX possesed any boarding skills at all, THREE each of 0.6 and 0.3 stars. None of the other service crew possessed any boarding skills whatsoever, much less a full star.
The Defending Crew

So, as visitors to this forum are so frequently reminded to do, I compared the actual stats of my boarding team against the actual stats of the defending crew. On paper, my 4 worst marines, each having only 0.6 star combined ratings (weighted boarding + morale), should be able to hold up against 80 of the 84 defenders. The remaining 4 defenders, being mere one-star marines, would be the only threats to my 4 worst boarders. But surely the remaining 117 marines in the boarding group should take care of them, no?

Well... I need to take into account number of teams and corresponding team size! After all, RNG might grant the defenders teams of 4 and create teams of only 2 for the attacking side. Even so, if service crew are as absurdly inferior as they're reported to be, then a stacked team of 4 service crew should still have little odds of defeating a "crippled" team of 2 marines. Consider that 78 of the 84 defending service crew had zero boarding skill. What are the odds that any randomly selected four could actually take down a marine? Moreover, what are the odds of such happening repeatedly?

This would be the equivalent of defenders rolling consecutive "natural 20s" again and again whilst attacking marines rolled "natural 1s" constantly. The RNG is bunk. Sure, things would start seemingly fine, I suppose, considering each consecutive defeat of a defender would come in a slow trickle. But inevitably, the core of the defending team would be eliminated and their boarding resistance would fall into the low double digits, or even single digits. Time to break out the champagne and celebrate right? Nope, more like it's time to die. Time for my boarding attempts to stall and then spiral into a pit of absurdity.





1a. We're taking heavy losses.
After reducing the number of defenders from 92 to 76, the boarding resistance has fallen from 165 to 9. We killed the real marines. It must be just those feral service crew that are left. They don't count as "real" marines but they don't count as "zero" either. Anyway, like clockwork, the first attacker casualties start to occur -- they were really laying out the vacuums this time as they took out 4 marines in a devastating surprise counterattack. But it's only 4 recruits, so it must've been those four 0.6 star wimps from earlier. We should be smooth sailing from here on out as the rest of our forces are TOUGH.

1b. They say it's too risky to engage.
OOPS! Those feral service crews took out an elite marine!! Well at least we took one of them out during that turn. The defender count dropped from 76 to 75, but the boarding resistance remained unchanged at 9. So it seems we only took out one of their worthless, normal "0" skill cleaners, ugh! For sure, we'll finish them all off after this without any further losses.

1c. They still say it's too risky to engage.
Down to 44 defenders now and boarding resistance down to 6, but they killed 3 more marines. These service crews can only "deal 1 dmg" but are killing even more marines? Good grief, they must be leaving it all out today: vacuums, mops, brooms, dustpans, and even squeegees. Those poor fallen marines had no chance.

1d. I'm calling it. Abort! Get back to your pods!
And it doesn't end. Another marine downed by the militant cleaners. Must be a scale plate racial modifier at play. How foolish I was... Sound the retreat, this is hopeless!



Well, many will probably be thinking I'm being hysterical (believe me, I was laughing hysterically). Many will say, this was just one example case and RNG can cause wild things to happen from time to time, but usually things work the way they're explained. Perhaps also, there were still too many surviving defenders, albeit they were service crews. Perhaps I should consider, despite the low reported boarding resistance, those "0" skill defenders were legitimately strong enough to inflict 10% casualties on that marine force.

But I didn't try just once. I tried over and over and over. Either the boarding mechanics are bugged, or they don't at all align to the explanations which have been given. I'm personally indifferent to the details, whether in implementation or in "artistic" vision. But they should *NOT* shatter the immersion, at least not to such a flagrant degree.

2a. We're taking heavy losses (like you knew we would).
In another, likewise aggravating boarding attempt, the defending forces had been reduced to 16 defenders with a boarding resistance of TWO (2). Up until this point, the boarding casualties were limited to 6 recruits, but as shown above, it was only a matter of time until the defenders killed an ELITE

2b. Dr Not Feelgood
To add further insult to injury, these motley "service" crue didn't stop there. Some way or another, they kill off 3 more marine recruits in the next round, while suffering only one loss themselves, which itself accounted for 0 change in boarding resistance.

2c. Service Employees International Union
The defending service crew must be "organized" because it's more of the same in the next round. Another boarding team casualty, but none of the remaining 110 marines managed to take down even a single "cleaner". These guys have boarding resistance of 2 versus a boarding attack strength of "4775".

2d. The killer cleaners
We should double check. These CAN'T all be service crew, that would be impossible. But lo and behold, a quick scan of who the 15 defending crew might be confirms that it's the killer cleaners and not a single marine left. Let's look closer at these guys. There are 3 able crewmen in the group and they have 0.3 stars boarding skill each. But wow are they fired up. The rowdiest one has 3.6 stars morale, so that would produce a potentialskill of (0.8 * 0.3) [80% boarding] + (0.2 x 3.6) [20% morale] = 0.96. Conservatively rounding up, this guy is equivalent to a one star recruit but with a weaker damage distribution curve.

So even after factoring in the mechanics for potentialskill, it's inexplicable to me how was this group of defenders able to not merely survive, but moreover inflict massively greater damage against the overwhelmingly stronger boarding marines. This is completely immersion breaking and aggravating beyond belief. For the life of me, I tried a dozen times but could not manage to capture the Heron without taking at least 1 elite casualty if not more. And for anyone not aware from my other posts, I am personally on a quest to gather elite marines to capture an H. So such casualties are devastating! There's either something very wrong with the RNG or there's a logic bug in how the mechanics are implemented. I'm all for expecting some level of uncertainty in games (expect the unexpected), but this is honestly ludicrous.

TLDR:
1. Service Crew are not as weak and pathetic as some would have you believe.
2. In fact, they are absurdly more powerful than they should be (under any reasonable, non-immersion shattering depiction model). I.e., slightly over a dozen service crew shouldn't be able to hold off overwhelming numbers of marines, much less repeatedly take down elites in consecutive retries.

[azaghal]

TLDR:
1. Service Crew are not as weak and pathetic as some would have you believe.
2. In fact, they are absurdly more powerful than they should be (under any reasonable, non-immersion shattering depiction model). I.e., slightly over a dozen service crew shouldn't be able to hold off overwhelming numbers of marines, much less repeatedly take down elites in consecutive retries.

Heheh... I wonder what it would look like to use actual service crew for boarding a vessel. Funny enough - currently I have a ship full of (VIG) marines serving on board of a dedicated trader/barracks ship as service crew in attempt to boost their morale. Although I do not do nearly that many boarding attempts (just does not feel that time and money-efficient once you get past the early game) - mostly when I want to have a small break from doing other things.

Best regards

[GCU Grey Area]

I wonder what it would look like to use actual service crew for boarding a vessel.

That's pretty much what I do. Service crew on all ships I might want to board anything with are all elite marines too. They receive initial training as service crew on board one of my builders. Those with high morale then receive full 5* marine training at my HQ. After that they spend most of their time as service crew, only switching to marine role just before a boarding op is initiated. Then, after the bloody work has been concluded, it's back to service crew duties for them. Best of both worlds.

[stooper88]

It's a very good habit to routinely keep all ship crews as service crews, if nothing else than to prevent their morale from atrophying and for maximizing the overall rating of each ship itself. Regarding this latter point, every empty or non-service crew "seat" on a ship counts as a zero and towards the ship's combinedskill rating:

Ships themselves also have a combinedskill score, dependent upon the crew on board.
A ship's combinedskill score is calculated as 70% of the pilot's combinedskill plus 30% of the average combinedskill of all service crew members on board, where an empty seat or marine counts as a crew member with 0 skill. So a ship with a 5 star pilot, a full allotment of marines and no service crew will have a combinedskill of 70 (3 and 1/3rd stars), as marines - even ones with engineering skill - do not add to the combinedskill of a ship.

But yes, it's also well known that placing marines as service crews on builders and other ships is a good method for improving their morale (which levels poorly from boarding operations alone). This does little, however, to offset the massive imbalance that's apparent in the boarding mechanics. Not all players will have the luxury of being able to train elites at their PHQ, so every unfair casualty suffered during boarding is significant. It was bad enough when I was losing droves of 3 star veterans to purely service crew defenders. But it is grueling to repeatedly lose any elites under such lopsided circumstances as I demonstrated above. There is something very wrong with the mechanics.

[GCU Grey Area]

Not all players will have the luxury of being able to train elites at their PHQ...

Luxury? I consider it one of the basic pieces of infrastructure I setup right at the start of each new game, usually within the first couple of days or so. As long as HQ is moved to one of the easier planets (e.g. Black Hole Sun or Memory of Profit) all that is required is a Bubble City for habitation & the training facilities themselves to have an effectively inexhaustible supply of highly skilled marines (& pilots). No actual terraforming is required on those planets if all you want is the training.

[stooper88]

Not all players will have the luxury of being able to train elites at their PHQ...

Luxury? I consider it one of the basic pieces of infrastructure I setup right at the start of each new game, usually within the first couple of days or so. As long as HQ is moved to one of the easier planets (e.g. Black Hole Sun or Memory of Profit) all that is required is a Bubble City for habitation & the training facilities themselves to have an effectively inexhaustible supply of highly skilled marines (& pilots). No actual terraforming is required on those planets if all you want is the training.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement. However, I'm not keen on moving my PHQ at this time and had other plans. I realize your approach is much easier and more efficient. But I feel I shouldn't have to change my focus, playstyle, and long-term strategy just to overcome this insanity from the service crew death hordes.

[RainerPrem]

Not all players will have the luxury of being able to train elites at their PHQ...

Luxury? I consider it one of the basic pieces of infrastructure I setup right at the start of each new game, usually within the first couple of days or so. As long as HQ is moved to one of the easier planets (e.g. Black Hole Sun or Memory of Profit) all that is required is a Bubble City for habitation & the training facilities themselves to have an effectively inexhaustible supply of highly skilled marines (& pilots). No actual terraforming is required on those planets if all you want is the training.

You CAN build the Research facility for easy money ...

[azaghal]

Not all players will have the luxury of being able to train elites at their PHQ...

Luxury? I consider it one of the basic pieces of infrastructure I setup right at the start of each new game, usually within the first couple of days or so. As long as HQ is moved to one of the easier planets (e.g. Black Hole Sun or Memory of Profit) all that is required is a Bubble City for habitation & the training facilities themselves to have an effectively inexhaustible supply of highly skilled marines (& pilots). No actual terraforming is required on those planets if all you want is the training.

So... I have not yet gotten into the terraforming parts in any of my saves so far, but... Just looking at the teleportation requirements for the HQ, at that point you are most likely going to have insane amounts of money and infrastructure anyway (scrounging for advanced electronics is major pain in general without it)?

And if so... The boarding aspect of the game stops being any kind of sensible way to gain ships - so you either do it just for fun or for specifics of grabbing a Xenon H.