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[Grizzlyadamz]

Before we get started, a fair warning: there's cheating, and this'll be blog-ey. There's a tl:dr.


Alright, so, this started last night with a particularly hectic trip to the Corvus system.

We were returning home to the Omnifactory orbiting Somnus, having done well on the procurement/bounty-hunting romp up to Ursula & Diable's FOB. 300k richer & sporting a fair number of new gizmos for the factory, we dropped into Barad's gravity well and found the system in turmoil- Barad and the MI ship-port were in perihelion, and the pirates & new Hegemony administration of the Port were duking it out over their now-cramped living space.

Well, we offloaded our cargo and headed back towards the fray- Glory & XP were calling, and I had a vested interest in both curbing the Hegemony & scoring some points with our pirate friends.

Over the course of about 3 hours, we probably gained about 250k XP and depleted what was left of our supplies.
Only problem is, by that point Java had leaked up to crash-range and an ill-timed f5..well.

Most recent save was about 2 hours back, just before the largest battle of the evening- a pirate armada (5 destroyers & 8 frigates) vs a hegemony strike fleet (1 capital, 1 destroyer, 10 frigates).

This particular battle had been tough, and I'd previously lost a couple times & save-scummed on a couple victories after losing too many of my officers. Both times I'd been mockingly given the opportunity to board the capital, (an Onslaught), with my pitiful 35-marine garrison.

Well, I figured if I had to redo the last couple hours again, I might as well make it fun- make it benefit me. Like, say, not being so poorly mocked by that Onslaught opportunity.
So I cheated in a couple hundred extra marines, and went to work.

An hour later and 4-5 victories failed to give me another opportunity. So I gave myself enough XP to level-up & acquire the close-hanging Leadership bonuses to boarding and kept trying.
Another 2 hours & twice again the number of victories, and I'd only been given a chance at a couple of frigates. At this point I started looking for alternatives. It was getting too late, I'd spent too much time on this, and I wasn't walking away empty-handed.

But I didn't want to cheat and just add the thing- that would be lame. I'd rather get it quasi-legit, have to haul it back to base & dump my entire supply cache into getting the thing serviceable. It'd be the head-canon base defender, and the big gun for the big bounties.
If only the game would let me attempt the capture..


Fast forward to today.
I spend another hour on it, and start trying additional approaches. I try waiting until it's just my fleet fighting, I try commands like 'rout', 'toggleai', & abusing 'kill' among others, traditional strategies like making sure I disable the capital and only the capital.
And well, see for yourself:

Spoiler

[close]

It was actually part of the XIV Battlegroup.



TL:DR
When you absolutely, positively, MUST capture a capital ship:
-add a troop transport like the Nebula (otherwise you'll lose all the extra troops after battle)
-add 200-400 marines
-toggleai the capital you wish to capture
-'kill' all the other ships TWICE to ensure only the capital 'survives'
-And MOST IMPORTANTLY, adjust the ""boardingChance":0.05" in Settings.json to ""boardingChance":1.00" to get a 100% chance to board (Shout-out to Weltall in this thread!)

And there you go: a quasi-legit capital you captured in battle.

[MesoTroniK]

I don't get it, if you are going to use straight up Outside-Context Cheats to stack the odds in your favor to capture a ship... Why not just go all the way and add the ship directly? In the end a cheat is a cheat is a cheat.

[Midnight Kitsune]

OR... you could just type in addship onslaught_xiv or whatever the file name of the ship is and be and be DONE with it in less commands and changes
Edit: And how the HELL is adding in XP and marines, nuking the enemy fleet and TURING OFF the enemy AI considered "legit" to you?!

[Grizzlyadamz]

Why not just go all the way and add the ship directly?

Heh, because that's too easy.
I try to avoid aggravation & timesinks while challenging myself enough to continue playing & having fun.
This is where I drew the line- where I'd be if I'd kept save-scumming until I succeeded, except a couple hours earlier & in a better mood than I would have been.

Edit: And how the HELL is adding in XP and marines, nuking the enemy fleet and TURING OFF the enemy AI considered "legit" to you?!

Emphasis on 'Quasi-'.
I'd beaten the fleet more than a dozen times already, so the XP/Nuking/AI were simply a means to accelerate the process.
It wasn't out of reach, given the marines, it was just dependent on luck & time.

The marines were the only true cheat, and as I said I added them on a whim because 2 hours of gametime had just gone down the tubes &, hell, why not?
Not like I'm going to be relying on it- it's a base-decoration and a fun toy for hunting larger bounties, if/when the mood strikes me.

So, it's quasi-legit in that it's a ship spawned by the game which I could have taken had I packed more marines & gotten lucky with the boarding chances.
That's a bit less BS than summoning some NPC-only god-mobile out of the aether.



But hey, point wasn't to offend/argue, (why I labeled everything with 'cheating' beforehand), it was to share the ordeal and perhaps tell others what I'd learned, in case there were any other like-minded people out here. ^...Bueller?

[Weltall]

I can give a simple answer to "why to go to the trouble etc etc".

Because everyone's mind is different. How some people perceive things and how they give them different satisfaction, varies.

Personally I can not understand this particular way of doing things, but as someone that occasionally cheats at games, I can understand that cheating at times makes my game more pleasurable.

It is pointless to argue if cheating makes the game boring, unfun, uninteresting or makes it lose it's point. We play games to enjoy our time in out own always after all, because when we stop enjoying it, it is not a game but a chore~

My cheating is to raise the % from 5 to 15. I am sure some might understand me, some might say that since I do that, why not crank it up all the way to 100, since I am cheating anyway and some will feel I am not actually putting enough.

To each their own =)

[Deshara]

yeah some people would rather go through out-of-the-way roundabout fixes to force a game to play out a scenario in a way they think it should than to simply do what they want. It's more closely related to roleplaying

[Sy]

yeah some people would rather go through out-of-the-way roundabout fixes to force a game to play out a scenario in a way they think it should than to simply do what they want. It's more closely related to roleplaying

for me, it's not mainly about RP, although that does factor into it. i just really enjoy the feeling of 'working' (preferably in a way that is fun by itself, of course) towards a goal in games. the next ship, the next tech, the next building, the next weapon upgrade, the next spell, the next unit type, the next talent point, the next armor tier, whatever. anything that provides interesting choices, adds new ways of playing, or just makes me feel more powerful. it gets to the point where i lose complete interest in a game as soon as i've unlocked everything i wanted, even if there is still more content of a different kind to experience.

but i frequently dislike the way a game's progression itself works. and that's just as often a feeling of getting something overpowered too early and/or easily (i hate the feeling that a bunch of interesting stuff further down the line was just made obsolete because i already got something that's just straight up better), as it is getting bored by progress that feels too slow or grindy. so i cheat/mod/edit to make it fit my preference.
to that end, just giving myself all the good stuff through cheats would generally make my experience worse, rather than better. but coming up with sort of self-enforced rules, where i set my own goals with their own rewards that i can work towards, can make a game a lot more enjoyable.

after having played it so much, i now cheat a lot in SS. but in a way that changes progression to make it more fulfilling for me, not just in a way that makes everything faster and easier.