I made a comment in another thread, but I feel it would be more appropriate here:
Surrender Mechanics
I would like to see officers bring back a surrendering mechanic. That is, if a captain's perceived chance of survival falls below his "courage" threshold, he/she has a chance to either surrender or straight up flee.
I say this because I really liked the old surrender mechanic where you would capture a ship basically by default if it was unable to fight. Now, I think that the new mechanics with how ships can be crash mothballed and etc in order to flee makes more sense, but it still seems like there should be situations where an enemy captain should simply surrender rather than taking the chance of being shot of of the sky.
(unless of course that mechanic exists in the current build and I just don't know about it >.> )
Obviously this was made in the context of adding officers, but even without them, it makes sense that not every ship would risk running, especially if the pursuing fleet is faster and/or the ship in question is at such low hull or CR that it cannot enter the field safely without crash mothballing.
The CostI don't want surrender to be free. While these ships would obviously come with crew, hull, and weapons intact, I would expect them to start at 1% CR. After all, when a ship suddenly switches sides, a commander doesn't just welcome them with open arms. The reduced combat readiness represents the lockdown of ship systems during the sweeping of the ship and examination of the crew, not to mention integration of ship command systems with the fleet at large. Perhaps the CR loss could be partially negated by the presence of Soldiers within the fleet, as they are trained and equipped for such action thus speeding the transfer of the ship.
A surrendered ship would still be a huge boon, but this way it wouldn't allow a fleet which captures a surrendered ship to jump immediately into combat with the turncoats as their flagship.
Vanilla BoardingTo be clear, I
don't want this to replace current boarding mechanics. Boarding is a hostile action with high risk for a specific reward. Surrender would occur independently, after potential combat engagement, but before pursuit
deployment. That means, ships aren't going to surrender if you don't commit to chase their cowardly little asses down.
Also, similar to boarding, I would like the option to blow the ship out of sky (or let it go). Since it is trying to surrender, it won't be combat ready anyway, so destroying it shouldn't be an issue logically.