And necroing again. ^^
By the way, this thread is linked to "often made suggestions" here in the subforum....starting a new thread would make another wiseass appear and say "hey, we have already discussed this..."
Anyway, as far as I have red, the following arguments have been done against it:
1. to complicated, especially for the devs
2. hard to get a marine from ship A to ship B in combat
I don´t think so. For starters, mayn players here play this game tactical, they rarely drive their ship in combat...they just give orders and let the ai fight. So far to "this is too much for a player to control".
-Apply marines via special fighter wings with tons of losses(aka boarding shuttle). Also add new ship modules for frigates and larger, who just open the gates(airlocks) for short range space jumps by marine companies after ramming an enemy vessels and having it´s shield down (mucho losses included too). According to the fact, that I get rammed by enemy ships all the time in combat, this is quite a realistic option. Sometimes, they even get stuck in my structure!
-What kind of math should be done calculating the marine versus crew fight? How about giving each ship a new number, on board defence - combat readiness + defence value by number of own marines divided over number of ships of fleet as defender? New ship modules for on board defence? Additionally, why not making your own ships too targetable for ram and board attacks, as a kind of desperate measure to regain control of it?
-So, what should the marines do as a effect then? First hand I would say, just pure structural damage (hull) and taking out weapons around area of "impact" completly for rest of combat until the marines are removed(as a standart effect). Then with more sucess maybe taking out ths shield? Additional we could give an astronomical low chance of conquering the whole thing, given mass usage of marines by overwhelming the ship by sheer numbers.
Addendum:
At the moment, every faction kind of fights the same way. Adding a "ram and board" attack style would enhance the profile of two factions a lot.....
Ludic path and pirates.
At the moment, they are not really an impressive opponent, both by style and ships.
With this suggestion added, I would fear them.
PS: Maybe this way of fighting should be given only to some factions, while others don´t do it at all.