From /v/ with love
What I can think up the board is maybe design a new class of missile cruiser that's actually a troop transport or retrofit the Valkyrie for the job
>The active function is to either have the torpedoes be for sabotage or for boarding (basically you get to switch between the two modes of an integrated missile launcher, or a bought version of the launcher, the launcher's size is medium for valk and maybe larger for other possible ships). The twist is that these torpedoes only work on naked hulls, can track for exposed areas of hull and are pretty fast.
>Sabotages mode causes direct hull damage and EMP damage like you would from a successful tachyon lance hit. High chances of losing your men after they get overwhelmed by the crew or you defeat the ship anyway blowing everyone up. If they survive (from you disabling the ship instead of destroying it) they will instead revert to boarding behavior and increase the chances the ship is salvageable after combat ends. This is less effective if the targeted ship has both bulkhead and thick hull mods installed (the ship's crew trapped them in only part of the ship and the EMP damage simulated by the loss of systems from sabotage is limited)
>Boarding mode on the other hand uses the old traditional weighted RNG once the torpedoes hit. You will get a flagged message every 15 seconds, so it's not a quick process. Frigates with ~50 crews and 0 marines hit by one torpedo will take at least 15 seconds to neutralize for example when the torpedo carries 25 marines (which even by RNG standards should be 100% win for the marines), more by a percentage if both bulkhead and strong hull mod is installed. After 15 seconds, you get a prompt telling you if the boarding has been successful, failed or ongoing. The successful and failed instances will have more detailed reports after the combat phase is over, simulating an AAR summary. In successful instances, the ship deactivates immediately, simulating a hostile takeover of the ship at gunpoint.
Now there's a few things to a mechanic like this. Mods like heavy armor, bulkhead compartments and thick hull becomes extremely important to prevent boarders from coming in and taking over. There also needs to be a change to how crew numbers are simulated (have a slider for number of crew in ship from minimum to maximum number of crew, you need to assign every crew to a ship, maybe a frigate gets a skeleton crew while a battleship gets more spare crew members). Then you can either assign the remaining spots for marines or park them someplace else, giving a paragon a complement of marines on top of the crew can help reduce the number of crew who die from fighting off boarders since marines will take the hit first and in the case of a troop transport/boarding ship, you have slightly more than a skeleton crew and the rest is filled with marines. Make it so new combat damages to the hull (so that beam spam to one spot doesn't kill off the entire crew) has a chance to kill a number of your crew immediately (including the unlucky marine stationed there), making it result in the same effect of as the loss of standing CR if you try to pilot the ship with less than the required crew in the current version. This presents a very new way to defeat large ships despite being outgunned. If their ship has a less than optimum number of extra crew members to replace the ones who died from combat damages, their CR start dropping and eventually, a ship stripped of all its armor and damaged around the hulls but not fully damaged, kills enough crew to get the CR level to suboptimum levels, which causes penalty to stats, causes malfunctions and eventually when it crosses the minimum crew threshold, the ship just stops functioning, giving you the disabled message. This will prevent everyone from immediately using skeleton crews and parking any excess crew members in logistic ships since now maintaining a good crew numbers play a part in combat CR level.
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Yeah I think a new suggestion that plays to the current system without adding way too much would be good. I wouldn't do it quite as you said, I'd simplify it further. To put it into simple terms
>Create new "boarding pods" weapon. It's basically a missile
>Maybe create a specialized boarding ship
>Firing Boarding Pods consumes marines, some may be recovered if boarding fails
>If Boarding Pods get past enemy defenses, reduce enemy CR by an amount depending on ship size
>If Enemy CR reaches 0 (even without boarding!), ship becomes special-disabled
>Special-disabled ships can be recovered by the victor after combat with no lasting damage
And the worth of EMP weaponry would come into play there, because the doctrine of this play style would be
>Get shields down
>Get EMP weapons to hit and land to disable PD subsystems of a certain area you want to hit
>Launch angry marines
The issue imo is more how the AI utilize or react to this system as like you said, mechanic wise it's pretty simple. A mod like this might actually convince alex that making a meaningful boarding system is possible.
Also, remove this:
>At less than 40% CR a ship will have reduced missile magazines (dropping to empty at 10% CR)
