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[Jonlissla]

The new mechanics looks good, but being forced to board a random ship? Nonsense. If I want to board a Paragon with nothing more than 4 Marines in a Hound, then I should be given the choice to board that Paragon with 4 marines in a Hound. Let the player decide and not a random dice roll. It only encourages save-scumming and serves little purpose aside from annoying the player.

[FloW]

The new mechanics looks good, but being forced to board a random ship? Nonsense. If I want to board a Paragon with nothing more than 4 Marines in a Hound, then I should be given the choice to board that Paragon with 4 marines in a Hound. Let the player decide and not a random dice roll. It only encourages save-scumming and serves little purpose aside from annoying the player.

From the blogpost:

Once that ship is picked, the winner has these options:

Organize a boarding task force
Select ships that will participate in the boarding action. The ships need to be combat-ready and will lose additional CR. The ship selection determines the maximum number of crew and marines that can be sent in a boarding party, but also exposes these ships to danger if the enemy ship self-destructs.

Order nearby ships to engage
Do not board, shoot the ship down instead. Requires some ready ships, but there’s no risk, though the enemy ship might get away. The AI always picks this option if it’s available. Note that this leaves the player a chance to escape with a single ship, even after a total defeat!

You do have the choice if you want to board or not.

[Movementcat]

Can you please finally stop working on the Combat System...you said 2 patches ago Combat is very very finished and now we still have no Content to play.

[SmellyDrinks]

So my question is why the whole boarding mechanic is not done in combat?

Destroy/disable a ship
 - Choose ship (ships?) to perform boarding action during combat (perhaps a weak assault ship or assault shuttles that excels at boarding but need protecting)
 - The assaulting ship is helpless and needs protecting (perhaps only point defence weapons are active)
 - After a successful or unsuccessful boarding action the two (or more?) ships taking part in the boarding turn and leave the battle but cannot fight due to crew being needed for prise crew/casualties or some such.
 - the player may end up having no choice to destroy his/her own ship if the boarding action is not successful and the enemy then leaves with them. or perhaps letting them leave in the hope they can capture them back soon.

Possibly more ships can be added to the boarding action on the fly if one side or the other is worried they are loosing.

This would open up so many battle options and completely remove all these dice roll options.

Eg. The player can gun directly for the ship he/she wishes to capture but it may require heavy casualties to pull off.

The tactical battle options resulting from such a system are extensive! Thoughts anyone?

[Gothars]

Ok, time for come-home-drunk-in-the-morning replies, fingers crossed...

How will the mechanics for small skirmishes be affected by this?
It would make for a nice and dramatic effect to have a small fleet move in on travel drive all at once from the map border in a formation of some sort.

Small skirmishes will have the same mechanics as grand battles, with a few differences. There will be no objectives and fleets will start out closer to each other.
You can make all your ships (up to the deployment limit, which should not be reached with a skirmish) deploy at once in a formation, but there will be no automatic deployment since it always cost CR to deploy a ship.

Can you please finally stop working on the Combat System...you said 2 patches ago Combat is very very finished and now we still have no Content to play.

Pure combat is more or less finished, but the way it interacts with the campaign is not. This update is all about that. There is not much sense in adding features to the campaign if they can't interact with the combat system, otherwise you will end up with two separate games.
I'm pretty sure after this patch the development will be focused on fleshing out the campaign.

So my question is why the whole boarding mechanic is not done in combat?

Simply put, because it would just overload the combat with stuff to do/consider/defend against. A capture would have to be very difficult to pull off if it is balanced, and during combat your attention is already spread very thin between piloting your ship and managing your fleet.

[Alex]

So my question is why the whole boarding mechanic is not done in combat?

Simply put, because it would just overload the combat with stuff to do/consider/defend against. A capture would have to be very difficult to pull off if it is balanced, and during combat your attention is already spread very thin between piloting your ship and managing your fleet.

That's definitely true, but there's also another consideration. I'm having a hard time picturing how it would *actually work* in combat. You could probably do boarding shuttles similarly to how fighters/the command pod work, but doing it that way forces certain design choices onto the boarding mechanics. For example, the part about exposing ships to harm during boarding would be hard to make work with a boarding shuttle approach.

Basically: very low level combat mechanics are tuned to make combat work the way it does. In-combat boarding, which is quite different from normal combat, and has different game design needs, is likely to run into problems. The kind of problems that don't come up when you're just thinking about it - things like relative ship speeds, accelerations, the specifics of how collisions are handled, details of AI behaviors, that type of stuff.

Not to say that it couldn't be done, and it sounds fun to me, too. Just have to draw the line somewhere, and combat is already fleshed out, while the campaign needs a lot of work. So any changes to the combat, I can't justify to myself without them being needed for the campaign - especially something so exploratory and not guaranteed to work out.

[zakastra]

Can you please finally stop working on the Combat System...you said 2 patches ago Combat is very very finished and now we still have no Content to play.

Just chiming in to say not everyone feels this way, Love new campaign options don't get me wrong, and hungry for extra content, but I'll not object to additional time spent on extra combat features/polish

Is it not possible to whittle down all the supporting ships surrounding a paragon, if you want to capture it, disengage leaving the paragon mostly intact, then re-engage the paragon? In the second engagement it will be the only ship present and thus capturable. or have I misunderstood the mechanics somewhere along the line

[Gothars]

Is it not possible to whittle down all the supporting ships surrounding a paragon, if you want to capture it, disengage leaving the paragon mostly intact, then re-engage the paragon? In the second engagement it will be the only ship present and thus capturable. or have I misunderstood the mechanics somewhere along the line

From what I understand 1 boarding per engagement is the upper limit, 0 is the lower. Having just one opponent does make capturing it a little more likely, but it's still unlikely and the chance to capture anything at all is much lower.


Thinking about it, the somewhat decreased capture chance for a specific ship that a random selection out of a number of capturable ships would mean is another drawback of not having the choice of target. As it is now zakastra's tactic does actually make sense (unless probabilities are calculated in a more complicated way here than I assumed).

[oranoron]

I am glad to see that a person very mindful of balancing is creating the game.

[N1ghteyes]

Most of the last two blog posts has sounded pretty spot on and i'm so excited for the next update. As im sure most of us are, the only thing that im a little worried about is the new boarding mechanics. The new mechanics seem to me to be an upgrade to the current system and i've seen enough of this games developement that i just assume it'll work out in the end. I recall boarding being discussed a couple of updates ago and having big opinions on it back then, but this new solution sounds workable.

So i guess what im saying is "great work and sorry i was such a jerk"

[Decer304]

Can you please finally stop working on the Combat System...you said 2 patches ago Combat is very very finished and now we still have no Content to play.

Just chiming in to say not everyone feels this way, Love new campaign options don't get me wrong, and hungry for extra content, but I'll not object to additional time spent on extra combat features/polish

Yeah, you gotta finish the foundation and the fundamentals of the game before you create more content. Its like if you build a building and chuck in all the features but not finish the structure, your building isnt going to stay up for long. Alex is trying to perfect the link between combat and campaign, its like the "glue" of the game. If you slap on more content it wont hold as well as if the glue was improved.

I am very excited for this release. I dont wanna rush you, but any idea on when this build will be released?

[Reshy]

Why not make the amount of different ships you can board at once a leadership ability?  IE If your leadership is poor it's harder to quickly organize strike teams for more than a single ship.  Note that this ability wouldn't mean you're guaranteed more just that you can get more.




Also Alex just an idea but why not make the chances of a ship being 'board-able' depend on how much damage past being disabled it took?  This means that smaller fleets can board ships more easily than larger fleets because smaller fleets aren't going to deal several thousand more points of damage than the ship needed to take.



Also when a ship is disabled the reactor core explodes, how does it self-destruct twice?

[icepick37]

Also when a ship is disabled the reactor core explodes, how does it self-destruct twice?

I believe the idea was that ships are really durable and designed to take the reactor exploding, but not without loss of life and infrastructure damage. So even though the ship is disabled, there's still plenty of ship left to destroy. So you rig up some explosives and blow the rest of the ship into shrapnel.

[Gothars]

Where did the idea come from that the explosion is caused by the reactor anyway? I can't remember anything indicating this.

I see the health-bar more like a "probability of critical failure"-bar, where the failure can occur in any part that is capable of explosion. That could be a overloaded flux capacitor, a part of the engine cooling,  an ammo depot, a fuel tank or the reactor (or one of several reactors). Possibly inducing chain reactions.
I'd wager that in any case where it was the reactor that blew, the ship is not captureable or repairable.

[intothewildblueyonder]

quick question/comment on balance

How  effective, practical and viable is making a specialized boarding fleet? This is also a question about boardings balance in the grander scheme of things. Consider, if a fleet were made to be exceptionally good at boarding how much time and resources would a player have to devote to making this work. The player would be sacrificing both general-space travel and combat ability in order to gain greater possibility of capture. Additionally, if a capture is successful the fleet would likely (or could be made to) become a more vulnerable target while it gets the captured ship spaceworthy.Perhaps a player would need certain contacts to repair a ship before they can use/sell it.
I would like to see capturing/salvaging as a (niche?) specialization (- which seems like would fit in nicely with the universe lore of everything being in short supply) that would require some player skill to attempt.