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[BrickedKeyboard]

I've played this new patch the last 6 hours, and have been offered a chance to board a ship exactly twice.  This is a big problem, because it is sort of lame to have the only practical way to get new ships be to buy them from the shop. This means that if the ship isn't in a shop, it will take countless hours of grinding to get (or save SCUMing).  Either way, lame.

You mentioned in the blog that the idea behind the more complex boarding system was to force players to risk a ship and their marines so that player's fleets won't grow and grow from capturing ships.  That's fine and all, but the game needs a way to capture ships you don't have and can't buy, even if that way requires sacrificing ships of your own.  I'm thinking either special assault ships that are disposable, and/or weapon systems that disable an enemy ship  but leave it intact but have drawbacks of some kind.

[PCCL]

agreed. Risk in boarding is fine, boarding a ship that you can get from a shop anyways shouldn't be desirable in most circumstances, but if you caught a mothball paragon, and has enough marines and stuff to cover the ship before she self destructs, you should be able to board her instead of disable and hope for RNG

[Voyager I]

Boarding is kind of dead right now.  Just keeping Marines around is expensve, it's highly unreliable as a means of acquisition both in terms of getting a chance at a ship you want and actually getting it without it blowing up in your face, and repairing a successfully boarded ship from a wrecked hull costs about as much in terms of supplies as just buying a new one from a store.

Now that markets actually restock with new hulls, there's really not much reason to bother with it.

[PCCL]

yep, in the finished game ship market is supposed to be less well supplied though, guess that's when boarding can be a thing again

[Alex]

Will take a look at both for 0.6.1a - the base chance and the marine upkeep. IMO it's a fun event when it happens, so definitely want it to be a choice that comes around more often.

[PCCL]

I think boarding should be more often, and with more degrees of success

now it's mostly boarded the ship or it blew up in your face (right? Haven't seen any other outcomes)

Maybe we can have things like personnel rescued (added to crew/marine), salvage secured (more loot), or things like that even if we couldn't quite capture the ship itself

[ciago92]

I think boarding should be more often, and with more degrees of success

now it's mostly boarded the ship or it blew up in your face (right? Haven't seen any other outcomes)

Maybe we can have things like personnel rescued (added to crew/marine), salvage secured (more loot), or things like that even if we couldn't quite capture the ship itself

salvage secured can happen, it's something like "too much collateral damage from taking the ship, ship is unusable"

[Zapier]

I've had outcomes of securing them, them blowing up in my face (and taking my poor frigate with it when it was hard docked), securing it but it was too badly disabled in the firefight so I only got more loot, and them repelling my boarders (so far only when I launched them from a distance) and escaping.

I've been wanting to get my hands on that troop transport again because I was hoping it might provide a boost for boarding with marines, especially hard docked. I don't think this is the case but I've love to see the troop transport be better and safer for using hard docking...

[PCCL]

oh huh, guess those things ARE already in game, I just never seen them

shows how often boarding happens

ty guys

[BonhommeCarnaval]

I think boarding should generally be high risk and require a lot of marines (probably more than now) except for small ships, so that you mostly only bring marines along when you specifically want to capture a ship. To make this possible, you should be able to select 1 of the enemy ship as a capture target to greatly increase the chance of having a boarding opportunity. Perhaps doing so would also give you some sort of penalty, to simulate the fact that you and your captains are trying to "take this one alive".

What this sort of change would result in is that people would buy a lot of hopefully expensive marines, both in purchase cost and supply upkeep, then hunt down their intended capture target and take a large risk in exchange for a decent chance at capturing it. There would be a cost, a risk, and a payout. That makes it interesting and introduces an actual choice the player has to make. People not intending to capture anything in particular could carry no marines or very few (to replace their lost frigates for example).

Pre-patch, the situation was that you could easily carry a huge army of marines and capture everything given the chance, and you were given the chance often. That results in a steady extra income for the player which is definitely not needed right now as credits are already easy to get just by destroying ships.

Post-patch (currently), the situation is that carrying marines is very supply intensive and the rewards are rare, random and generally useless.

[BillyRueben]

I think boarding should generally be high risk and require a lot of marines (probably more than now) except for small ships, so that you mostly only bring marines along when you specifically want to capture a ship. To make this possible, you should be able to select 1 of the enemy ship as a capture target to greatly increase the chance of having a boarding opportunity. Perhaps doing so would also give you some sort of penalty, to simulate the fact that you and your captains are trying to "take this one alive".

Big fan of this idea. It makes a lot of sense and seems balanced for a change. It would also be cool if that troop transport ship (can't recall the name) would give a slight boost to the chances for boarding.

[PCCL]

would it be possible to make that a hull mod? "advanced assault airlocks", increases success for boarding and decreases potential damage taken from hard dock.

This could be built into another variant of the valkyrie (assault variant) that instead of specializing in self defense and speed, specializes in boarding.


Also, just had a boarding where the ship was too damaged... In those cases can we have an explicit display of how much we got from that ship? Just so we can accurately gauge how much we're earning from those marines

[Voyager I]

The Valkyrie is basically a space bus with some token point defenses on it.  It's not really designed for things involving direct contact with the enemy.  When I think of a post-collapse makeshift boarding platform, I imagine something like a Mule with the cargo bay retrofitted for troop deployment.  It's the most rugged of the civilian designs we have available and has a large internal space to work with, so it just seems like the natural choice for that kind of work.

Can we have a Mule Mk.II, Alex?

[BonhommeCarnaval]

would it be possible to make that a hull mod? "advanced assault airlocks", increases success for boarding and decreases potential damage taken from hard dock.

Call it Pizza Delivery Paintjob. With this paintjob, hungry captains are 25% more likely to welcome your pizza delivery staff onboard. The pizza tastes like PLASMA RIFLES. SURPRISE!

I wish I knew how to mod that in.

[NoImageAvailable]

I think the current system boarding system is just too punishing on the player. The chances for a boarding event are pretty low already and then you get the choice between a very high chance of losing the ship and your marines, or the ship, your marines and your ships. I understand that the previous system was completely broken in that it just gave out free ships every once in a while, whether to board or not should be a consideration. But as of right now you already have to carry around expensive and supply-consuming marines and a CR cost on the boarding ship, all to get a ship so beat up that repairing it will likely cost you more in supplies than simply buying it from a station and just selling it will probably just about cover the cost of maintaining and replacing the marines. Boarding is no longer just a random pile of free money even when it works, so when you have a ship blow up and take out your ships and marines it just feels like an unnecessary slap in the face, especially since the player is at the mercy of the RNG gods.

So I think it would be better if the risks involved in boarding could be mitigated through use of marines, so a sufficiently large force of marines could nullify the risk of a self-destruct or a ship getting away. That way a player must either take along a large and expensive compliment of marines along when they decide to go hunting for some specific ship type they want or take a gamble to get a chance at their 'freebie' by trying to board with their crew. Alternatively someone else suggested specified boarding ships/hull mods. Otherwise at least tone down the damage on a self-destruct and marines lost when a ship escapes, as it stands the consequences just seem too harsh for what is essentially a coin flip.

PS I don't think I ever wrote a forum post with so many occurrences of the word 'marine' in it