Boarding System Proposal

[Sutopia]

Since I figured this would be rather long I decided to create a new thread.

Current system’s apparent awkward factor: attackers don’t need to stick around after pods are launched. Boarding party size is limited by target crew capacity. No rep lost when boarding.

Reference: RL modern pirates

Proposal: Remove boarding pods.

Boarding ships are required to stay in the “sticky” sphere during boarding operation, thus it becomes important for player to disable the target’s turrets. During boarding, attackers may utilize the boarded party’s landing pads as the minimum “safe” amount of marines being sent in if the attacker doesn’t want to deal with turrets. If a boarding ship is destroyed, all its associated marines are spacesuited immediately. All marines immediately go back to their original ship upon finishing the operation, or if the attacker decides to halt the operation.

There are now different boarding goals, which needs to be filled before launching an attack. Some examples: GTA, privateering (replaces comm asking to drop cargo), sabotage (destroy cargo).

For various goals, the difficulty of course will be different. Taking the entire ship should be the most difficult: it will move the ship sufficiently far away from its belonging faction’s territory (2 jumps out? Faction dependent?) to “lose” pursuers while the faction previously owning the ship will send patrols attempting to destroy the boarding ships (since it ejects the marines), forcing player to fight for the prize. For privateer or sabotage, faction patrols will be hostile toward the ships doing such operation if they happen to notice the action, but otherwise they just take time to finish depending on how much cargo are you stealing/destroying.

Now we should discuss about how marines and target’s service crews affect the boarding. For all operations, the service crews will attempt to launch distress drones and marines can stop them from doing so. Each service crew will attempt to send distress calls periodically, interval determined by skill; each marine when idle can block a call, cooldown before a marine can block next call determined by skill. The crew calling interval is significantly reduced if a faction patrol is in radar range. Once a certain quota is met the faction police will be aware of the operation (indicated by distress drone being deployed) to take action and the attacker will take an immediate reputation hit. For GTA, service crews can also perform sabotage attempts when the operation is already known by the police. The crews will attempt to sabotage the ship’s engines that disables its travel drive to stop the ship from escaping pursuing range.

P.S. during boarding (as soon as first ship comes in range/landed on target) and before the operation is known by the authority, all rep losses due to surface element destruction should be upheld and nullified should it be done covertly but otherwise applies in addition to a fixed amount of rep loss from the operation itself when the operation is exposed.

This should hopefully bring different approaches to boarding and make it more engaging, especially for GTA cases that is very likely ending up in a fight. It’s currently so cheesy to oos board with a large freighter knowing there is no consequences doing so.