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Author Topic: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics  (Read 3394 times)

Morbo513

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Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« on: January 17, 2017, 07:12:53 AM »

This is less about my own suggestion, more a prompt to discuss boarding and salvage in general, and how it's affected by combat. Don't worry, I'm not about to talk about boarding during battles or making it a mini-game, I'm more concerned with what defines the chance for a disabled ship to be boardable or recovered. As with everything, I'm not sure how 0.8's upcoming changes will affect any of this if at all, nor their practicality or feasibilty, but to get my suggestion out of the way:

Salvage, by default, occurs if a ship is disabled but not destroyed (regardless of whether it's enemy or friendly). There are two further variables: Whether the salvaged ship is recovered intact, or has sustained damage to critical systems - producing a (D) variant (In the case of modded ships or those currently without them, simply applying the hullmods - jumping ahead, how this would work with weapon mounts I don't know).
The type of damage sustained by the ship, and how often to what systems throughout the battle will determine these variables. For example, if it suffered a lot of EMP damage, it's almost guaranteed to have fried flux systems, possibly to the point of rendering all other systems inoperable.
If it had its engines damaged heavily, it's almost guaranteed to have degraded engines, if not destroyed engines which would necessitate a tug to get it anywhere.
 If a particular weapon mount were damaged repeatedly throughout a battle, it's likely to provide a malus to weapons mounted on them or disabled outright.
If it took tons of HE damage all over, it's likely to come back with compromised armour.
And so on.

Then comes the question, "What's the point of salvaging ships if they're just gonna be degraded afterwards?".
If you take care not to completely obliterate the ships you're fighting, you can take them more or less intact, though this'd be extremely rare unless you outfit your ships specifically for the purpose, but this'd come at the cost of the firepower needed to bring them down in the first place.

The next logical question is "Won't it be too easy to get new ships if it's easy enough to avoid doing too much damage?"
This is where Marines and surviving crew come in. The less overall damage the ship sustains, the more of its crew survive, meaning more Marines are needed to guarantee a successful boarding action. Surviving officers on board the ship could also give them a bonus (Depending on skills...?)

So you now have the ability to, damage dealt and marines spent notwithstanding, gain a ship (Or ideally, the option of attempting to board/recover all disabled ships) out of each battle. Where's the trade-off?

Recovery of any vessel, captured enemy or friendly, would necessitate the investment of heavy machinery and supplies to restore its basic functions, as well as time. If these are unavailable, they require a tug to tow them to a port that has the necessary facilities, or conversion of one of your operable ships into a tug with the Monofilament Cable hullmod, expending CR and supplies. If you don't have anything that can serve as a tug, it must be restored on the spot - this could be another utility for the construction rig, speeding up and possibly diminishing the costs of the process.

So, you got a crappy ship out of the battle that can't fire a Vulcan cannon without overloading. To go back to that first hypothetical question, "What's the point of salvaging ships if they're just gonna be degraded afterwards?", you'd also be able to restore these ships to their original states at certain ports - in order of cost, mostly through ones belonging to the faction the ship is from, but also through military markets you have access to and black markets. And costly it would be - each (D) hullmod you remove would cost somewhere around 1/3rd of the ship's value (Increasing the less friendly the port's faction is with the ship's originating faction, due to sourcing of parts), as well as further investment of supplies.

I think I covered the bases of cost/risk/reward, the hope would be that 95% of the potential salvages you simply disregard due to not investing into the logistical side of things, but when you encounter that one ship you really want for yourself you can take it, if you win and if you're careful about it.

And before I forget, the upcoming Salvage (Note, I wasn't referring to this when using the term "Salvage" before) mechanic, ie being able to visit the sites of past battles, could be another avenue for this, and a "career" option in its self - Invest enough into the logistics and you could go around picking up the husks from other battles, salvaging, recovering and restoring them, then selling them off. Both this and taking them as prizes from direct engagements are how I imagine the pirates getting the vast majority of their ships. There could be a couple skills in the Industry aptitude revolving around this.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2017, 07:16:25 AM by Morbo513 »
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TaLaR

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2017, 10:09:34 AM »

I don't see how you could damage a ship "carefully".
In the end any disabled ship has at least one facing of armor destroyed and whole hull worth of hp lost (unless it was already damaged before combat). You can't do less damage than that.
Doing more is only possible by stripping more armor facings or shooting at already disabled ship.
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Morbo513

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2017, 10:24:27 AM »

I don't see how you could damage a ship "carefully".
In the end any disabled ship has at least one facing of armor destroyed and whole hull worth of hp lost (unless it was already damaged before combat). You can't do less damage than that.
Doing more is only possible by stripping more armor facings or shooting at already disabled ship.
Well, let's say there's a base chance of each degraded hullmod being applied upon a ship being disabled; Damage in combat (While the ship's still alive) to each component would increase the chance of the hullmod affecting that component being applied.
There'd also be a tradeoff in that you can do further damage to a disabled ship to reduce the strength of any remaining crew, at the risk of destroying it completely - a choice you might make if you don't have many marines, but want to take a larger ship.
There could even be (expensive and rare) weapons with limited ammo dedicated to disabling a ship with minimal risk of damaging its systems, which would leave the entire remaining crew alive. There could also be (Equally expensive and rare) weapons that are designed to outright kill the crew, but are guaranteed to cause systems damage.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2017, 05:59:24 PM »

This moment is probably the worst possible time to talk about salvage, because we don't know how it'll play in the upcoming version.
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Mini S

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #4 on: January 18, 2017, 11:16:45 AM »

I remember that Alex said that the battle salvage was temporary.

i would not mind if it was permanent but there was other fleets that would salvage too. Some ting like all battles Player vs NPC or NPC vs NPC would create a salvage and and every faction would have salvage fleets that would roam their space. that would cause the salvage that were in highly frequented zones to disappear quickly and on more remotes zones would last a long time if not forever.
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Hi41000

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #5 on: January 18, 2017, 11:52:43 AM »

For boarding i always felt like a good way to do boarding (if you want basic and not advanced) is to have a hidden or visible dice roll from 1 to 10
anything that rolls from between 1-4 will be a total washout with you losing the ship you want to board from an explosion (1-2) which would damage the ship that tried to board it or (3-4) which the ship is luckily (or sadly) able to jump away/escape (something like that!) 5 would be you lose more marines then normal (1.25x) 6-7 is normal losses 8 is you lose less then normal (.75x) 9 you lose hardly any due to expert boarding (.50x) and a 10 would be, no life forms on the enemy ship were detected and we could capture it with 0 losses.
you would have a commander skill that could say increase the dice roll from just one die to two die and you just get the best one or just increase probability of getting a higher number.

After you capture the ship you should be able to
a)break it down for more salvage then normal 1.25x or 1.5x (depends on how salvage looks)
b)use it to train some of your captains (get x amount of exp due to size of ship) and you get to choose which captains so you could pretty much make a novice turn into a elite after him practicing on a capital ship for example
c)keep the ship and use it in battle!
 :)
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Morbo513

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #6 on: January 21, 2017, 09:30:45 AM »

I remember that Alex said that the battle salvage was temporary.

i would not mind if it was permanent but there was other fleets that would salvage too. Some ting like all battles Player vs NPC or NPC vs NPC would create a salvage and and every faction would have salvage fleets that would roam their space. that would cause the salvage that were in highly frequented zones to disappear quickly and on more remotes zones would last a long time if not forever.
This is a really cool idea, would love to see it. Said salvage disappearing over time does make sense because destroyed ships will maintain their velocity though, but I'd prefer that to be the "backstop" for instances where no salvage fleet shows up
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Ranakastrasz

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Re: Boarding/Salvage Mechanics
« Reply #7 on: January 21, 2017, 11:44:14 AM »

I got the impression that "Carefuly" damaging a ship involves dealing lethal damage and as little overkill as possible. hitting it again after it breaks would make the situation worse, and destroying it outright would do exactly that, only allowing minimal salvage.
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