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[SafariJohn]

Wait, is anyone noticing that stream of 4 rocket-type weapons? Those are coming at a much faster rate and tighter spread than what Annihilator Pods are capable of...or maybe they are Annihilator pods but with Missile Spec 10. Hmm...

I'm 99% sure it's 4 Annihilator Pods on an Onslaught. Note the TPC shots hitting the Paragon from the same direction.

[Dri]

Yeah, I'm sure they are.

I'm one of the few that doesn't really invest in Missile Spec for my main character so when I saw those rockets firing so much faster it looked like something new at first.

[Zudgemud]

An idea of how to make the ship capturing process more skill based could be to make the ship break apart depending on intact armor cells (maybe only the ones closer to the edges?). Then certain weapons and tactics would be preferable to prevent ship breakup.

[Sy]

An idea of how to make the ship capturing process more skill based could be to make the ship break apart depending on intact armor cells (maybe only the ones closer to the edges?). Then certain weapons and tactics would be preferable to prevent ship breakup.

a big problem with all these ideas of making overkill damage or similar combat details affect boarding in a big way, is that you'd need a detailed way of telling all of your allied ships how they should treat every enemy ship.

go all out and don't care about overkills? take a balanced approach and/or try to decide for yourselves based on risk? be as careful as possible, even if it means taking unnecessary damage yourself? and if it's the later, at which point does "unnecessary damage" become too risky for an allied ship that's already close to death itself? sacrificing a Lasher for a chance to get a Hyperion would likely be a no-brainer, but sacricing a Hyperion for a chance to get a Lasher would be the opposite.

and not only could it be necessary to set all of these detailed orders for every single enemy ship, but you might also need to adjust them frequently, potentially every few seconds, based on current situations and overall battle progress. and these kinds of orders would be especially difficult to get right for something like a torpedo bomber wing, as the delay between "firing weapons" and "dealing damage" is often several seconds long, which is long enough for a situation to change quite drastically.

[Tartiflette]

That could be compounded by making apropriate loadouts, or with a simple standing order on that particular ship.

[Alex]

Yeah, I've thought about that - this very naturally touches on that, doesn't it? The stuff Sy said are all difficulties, plus the way boarding works right now wouldn't really play well with that either. To get optimal results, you'd have to disable one ship in a specific way and then pound everything else into scrap (while deliberately not winning the battle), and that just seems convoluted. Then, if you *could* do this reliably, I'm not sure providing a way to board a specific enemy ship reliably is a good idea in the first place.

I just don't think glomming this onto boarding right now would actually solve any problems, but I'm theoretically open to making boarding better in the future.

[borgrel]

there already exists ships made for transporting personnel
and i think some of them are military? (no civilian hull?)

give those ships a ship system called boarding manoeuvre (or boarding pods?)
each APC can only do it once per battle and the marines available to board with are limited to how many marines the APC can carry (so a capital ship would prolly need multiple APC's to dock during battle to manage

after battle ends u get the same boarding dialogue as previously used (or more than 1) with the possibility still existing for a 'clean' capture as its currently done (maybe with a lower chance?) with all forced captures also represented if the boarding manoeuvre succeeded

[Gothars]

You know, this break up thing would go great with giant asteroids on the map. Just saying




About boarding: As long as being able to favor a specific ship for boarding is unwanted, this is moot.
But if it's desired, you could solve most of the problems listed here by having an assignment ("spare for boarding") that you can put on one target per battle. That would tell the RNG gods that this is the ship you'd like to board (saving you the trouble of having to wipe out all other options), and your ships' AIs to stay away from it (as with "avoid").

[Deshara]

you could do a simple feature add and make boarding act a bit like the phase-ship's offensive abilities, only instead of being a fancy high-tech power its a shuttle transfered to the targeted ship and then the enemy ship loses cr over time at a determined by the difference in Marines until the boarding ship disengages (at which point the shuttle returns), and the real affect on the gameplay is that a ship being boarded is guaranteed not to break up on death, which rolled together with the increased after-action boarding chance essentially puts boarded ships at the top of the boarding list without incentivising unfun play through garanteed ship captures.
And to make it balanced and lite until it gets fleshed out later on you could make the actual number of marines not change within an engagement and make the boarding ship's shuttle not return to it if its boarding target dies until the targets wreckage reaches 0, both contextualizing the difference between a ship that's been disabled from engaging in combat and a ship that's been actually defeated and is able to just be taken (ie establishing that just because a ship can't fight other ships doesn't mean it can't defend itself from boarding, suggesting that ships that are simply disabled in combat but never get the chance to be boarded after-action are destroyed by their own crew) and rendering ships that get used to board larger vessels into non-boarding vessels for a while to discourage boarding-smurfing

oh and simple command line that designates a ship as a primary boarding target, trading a command point for an increased chance of specific ship capture which incentives use of the fleet skill tree and gives a natural buffer to board-smurfing

[Zudgemud]

An idea of how to make the ship capturing process more skill based could be to make the ship break apart depending on intact armor cells (maybe only the ones closer to the edges?). Then certain weapons and tactics would be preferable to prevent ship breakup.

a big problem with all these ideas of making overkill damage or similar combat details affect boarding in a big way, is that you'd need a detailed way of telling all of your allied ships how they should treat every enemy ship.

go all out and don't care about overkills? take a balanced approach and/or try to decide for yourselves based on risk? be as careful as possible, even if it means taking unnecessary damage yourself? and if it's the later, at which point does "unnecessary damage" become too risky for an allied ship that's already close to death itself? sacrificing a Lasher for a chance to get a Hyperion would likely be a no-brainer, but sacricing a Hyperion for a chance to get a Lasher would be the opposite.

and not only could it be necessary to set all of these detailed orders for every single enemy ship, but you might also need to adjust them frequently, potentially every few seconds, based on current situations and overall battle progress. and these kinds of orders would be especially difficult to get right for something like a torpedo bomber wing, as the delay between "firing weapons" and "dealing damage" is often several seconds long, which is long enough for a situation to change quite drastically.

This is not really applicable for the simple idea I had in mind, I was thinking more in the lines of, if you want a to keep the wreckage whole and thereby increase its chances of its capture you either have to spend command poins on micromanaging your fleet to avoid the ship or you simply call off your heavy hitters and do all the slugging yourself. And that would only increase the chance of retrieval by putting it in the pool of non ruined ships, not guarantee capture.

[FooF]

About boarding: As long as being able to favor a specific ship for boarding is unwanted, this is moot.
But if it's desired, you could solve most of the problems listed here by having an assignment ("spare for boarding") that you can put on one target per battle. That would tell the RNG gods that this is the ship you'd like to board (saving you the trouble of having to wipe out all other options), and your ships' AIs to stay away from it (as with "avoid").

Why the arbitrary "one target/battle?" Perhaps the command itself isn't a restricted quantity but there are deleterious combat consequences for doing so: i.e. AI ships are never aggressive toward it, limit their weapons (such as "no missiles"), will not fire back past a certain health % on the targeted ship, etc. Essentially, there would be a "cost" for doing so but not quite as extreme as to completely avoid.

Alternatively, allow for the capture of partially broken hulls, not the ones "pounded to scrap," that result in hulks that need to be towed to a proper port to be repaired via Supplies. Perhaps "basic engine capabilities have been restored" which slows the ship by -2 Burn (relative to base speed) or an Ox could tow it without the burn penalty. Likewise, capturing a hulk may take less Marines or have a higher chance of capture since the crew on board have ostensibly been eliminated. Relative to how boarding occurs now, broken apart ships may be easier to capture but can't be used/repaired immediately and inconveniences the whole fleet but it does give the player hope that a high-value ship accidentally broken apart in combat is still available for capture.

[Sy]

if you want a to keep the wreckage whole and thereby increase its chances of its capture you either have to spend command poins on micromanaging your fleet to avoid the ship or you simply call off your heavy hitters and do all the slugging yourself.

isn't that what i said? ^^

of course if you always just do all the related work yourself, then you don't need specific orders on how your fleet should act. but i don't think having to tell your fleet "just don't act on this at all" is a good solution.

[Movementcat]

I hope there is another update this month.

Thanks anyways looks awesome !

[Midnight Kitsune]

I hope there is another update this month.

Thanks anyways looks awesome !

Awwwww, would you look at this? They still have hope!

[Dri]

So long as Alex and David continue to take mercy on us and feed us a blog post each month, I can handle the wait...