(*surprised* - Well I didn't expect the
Spanish Inquisition)
I'm aware that I'm misusing the term 'bug' in the technical sense.
I'm more concerned with the player experience, and in that sense I believe I can make a strong case for the undesirability of the 'feature' as currently implemented.
There are 3 compounding parts to this problem.
1 - loss of equipment is random and binary.
2 - Marines are slow to 'build' and require a lot of manual effort (compared to Laser Factories... etc).
5 - Military Ships designed to use marines (M6/7/...) are more vulnerable to lose them all than a non-military TP.
1 - Any hull damage, no matter how small in relation to ship health, has a chance of destroying equipment. I'm no expert on how this works (feel free to enlighten me), but in my experience the amount of damage has nothing to do with the likelihood of equipment destruction.
- No matter how expensive or important it is, all equipment is equally likely to be destroyed in every hit.
2 - There's no complex to churn out marines, training them takes hours, they're expensive (relative to other equipment), and training fighting requires you to risk them in boarding missions...etc In terms of player effort - marines are the most costly 'thing' in the universe. This is not bad in and of itself.
3 - Although all big ships are designed to carry Marines for defense, and some for offense, only non-military ships provide military grade life-support that is protected from battle damage.
4 - You can't install backup life-support.
5 - All marines die instantly when life-support fails. (so you can't mod in backup life-support)
Now lets talk about dealing with these problems.
1 - Ships have multiple Shields / Lasers , and you can keep extras in cargo. Other equipment (jumpdrive / software) is rarely mission critical and most of that is pretty cheap. Many mods exist to ease the difficulty of replacing that equipment from LV's kits to Cycrow's Dock Research and others... I mention those mods because they are widely considered indispensable for good reason.
2 - Very little - Players can have a ship in every military base ready to buy marines, but must still inspect and pick good individuals, then train them on low value targets.
3 - Players can have the 'tougher' non-military ships carry the marines and then transfer the marines just before commencing a boarding operation. If the ship you wish to carry marines can dock a TP, you could script something to transfer the marines around based on conditions...
4 - ...
5 - ... (surprise, fear, and a ruthless efficiency?)
The combination of these problems is unique and unintuitive.
it means:
- Weak fast firing weapons can neutralize a capital ship and kill all of it's marines, even though it does very little damage.
A heavy weapon can wreck the hull, but leave all the equipment (and marines) in tact.
Marines on my M2 might all die from one shot from an M5's Mass Drivers.
Marines on a non-military ship with a fraction of the hit points are much safer in the same scenario.
Marines are always ready to be ejected into space, but they're never ready for the loss of life support.
Marines are treated like cargo on one hand, but per ship limits prevent you from stuffing the cargo hold full of them.
Marines are the most fragile and most expensive equipment the player can obtain.
As Bullwinkle points out - A fighter with Mass Drivers is paradoxically much scarier for large ships that small ones. That lucky shot can destroy a 1M credit gun or all 20 Five-Star marines. Fighters carry much cheaper stuff and will evade most shots.
The player cannot protect himself from this weapon - his only means of handling it is to destroy the attacking ship. This raises the balance problem of Big Ships vs Little Ships, firepower and accuracy. Any balance that allows the player to effectively protect himself would be overpowered favoring Big Ships.
IMNSHO the best answer available to these problems is modding Cargo Lifesupport into every Marine carrying military ship.
If anything were possible, I would instead give the ship an Oxygen counter that decreases over time if marines are onboard. Main Life-Support would be destructible and sufficient only for for the ship's official # of Marines. 'Cargo Life-Support' would allow any number of Marines in the cargo bay.
You would be warned when transferring Cargo Life-Support to other ships if it would result in the eventual death of your Marines.
