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[JUDGE! slowpersun]

This may have already been answered in the forums, but didn't feel like wading through 600 posts to find a response, and didn't see any reference to this in first pass of whatever limited game descriptions are already available.  I've had more than a few ship battles, in which I see mostly asteroids being generated as a limited form of "space terrain."  Sometime even acts as a nice blocker for certain attacks, although doesn't seem to really do much damage to ships so running into some asteroids doesn't throw a ship battle.  However, can't determine whether the location of the ship battle generation may affect the ship battle's "space terrain."  As in, if I try to escape burn through an asteroid belt (or debris field) and get caught, do way more asteroids (or dead ship hulks) spawn?  If I kit my entire fleet out in solar shielding and mange to lure some enemy fleet deep into a star's corona, does the ship battle map continuously damage the enemy ships (unless said enemy ship also happens to have solar shielding)?  This is as opposed to a battle outside of some "space terrain" zone, with maybe only a few asteroids.  Just curious, why spend like 4 hours trying to test this in game or dig through code when I can just ask?

If the game doesn't do this and this question has already been asked/answered, what reasons were given for why not added?  Just to prevent fps reduction (same reason why spamming too many fighters can cause issues), or maybe just would take up too much time/money (besides AI code, I address that at end of this paragraph). Not to mention if this doesn't exists, adding it could lead to some legit terrain tactics, don't get me started on having a battle near a black hole with like a fifth of the battle space showing part of a circular event horizon to avoid or die while also slowly getting pulled towards it... unless you get caught in event horizon and pulled towards edge of map but are lucky to be able to phase back out of the event horizon zone (this assumes black holes will eventually be added, but it illustrates the concept of terrain tactics nicely).  Of course, there is also the answer of "coding AI to not only handle but even take advantage of said terrain is recursively difficult (ie, pointless)," but still worth asking.  But since game still doesn't even have much options for even deliberately waypointing from A to B (or doing curved flight paths), perhaps premature to make such an ask...

Totally unrelated, but why does this game have (space) marines but no boarding party options during battle (whether single "missiles" or some form of boarding party fighters, either of which would require that a fleet waste cargo space on marines in order to function)?  Again, maybe already answered (and discarded for cpu overload or coding reasons), or just in order to better delineate this game from like FTL or some other game?

[Morrokain]

Welcome to the forums!

Short answer:

Yes battling in a asteroid field spawns more asteroids iirc though not a huge amount of them as the field would imply. Just more. Same goes for battling in a corona - your CR will decay faster on all ships present.

Reason these aren't more extreme/aren't more of them:

AI can't generally handle that kind of thing well. It's great for player tactics but horrible for AI ships on both sides. Some people wouldn't want to lose ships to these hazards (there is a camp of people who don't even like hyperspace storms because of the inconvenience) and there are others that think terrain mechanics like that are too gimmicky and not worth the design effort since it either impacts the battle very little or in a bad way.

That's what I remember from conversations from the past anyway.

For the boarding mechanic, see this thread for an explanation. It's the second item on the list.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

Regarding "space terrain," yeah, one person attempting to code an AI to be more creative than an insect or a particularly slow pet is generally a fool's errand (although some of the recent advances using GANs have led to some interesting results...).

As for boarding, wow, 8-9 years ago, clearly this horse has been beaten to death.  And maybe back to life.  Wasn't really suggesting it would work like the second item (ie, minigame), that clearly misses the point of the ship battle (if this game were to contain anything like a mini-game, better to have it be something poker-like in the bars); Item three is closer to what I guess I was getting at, I would assume it would work like a weapons system that you should only use on fluxed out ships that are temporarily disabled, and basically just either eats CR faster for big ships and/or partially or completely disables smaller ship for purposes of battle (more intact freebie afterwards instead of a derelict to recover); rarely the smaller ships might even switch sides.  Essentially, the intention would be to speed up battles with the added possibility of getting relatively intact (fewer D-mods, more supplies/fuel/commodities), or one side loses faster cuz it wasted space on these systems but misfired them (or properly used them but having extra marines in crew successfully fought off).  Also, possibly interesting results for when the map has a space station present.

Again, could lead to AI issues for when to best use such weapons, but a good portion could be eliminated by just having AI behavior only allow for such weapon system use to be occur against a fully fluxed out enemy ship.  But implementing such a change this late in the game process seems an unlikely ask, more likely added in 1.1 update or something... unlike allowing pirates to demand money/stuff or die instead of wasting ships, that code literally already exists (basically Luddic Path's tithing, since remembering to drop cargo pods of stuff seems unwieldy, even if already coded).  Food for thought!