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[nomadic_leader]

I know this is in the FAQ, but it has not been properly discussed before.

We're getting great new campaign features and cool stuff, so why crack open this old chestnut? Well, it needs work. But no silly minigames where you control the respiration of every marine: sensible people agree SS is about flying starships, and nothing should distract too much from that. But as it is, we have a minigame already.

This is the minigame we have now:

Spoiler

But with 5x more inscrutable decision trees.
YOU MAY:
1. SEND BOARDING SHUTTLES
2. HARD DOCK SHIP TO SHIP
3. PANCAKES FOR THE MARINES
4. INTERMINABLE KUBRICK DOCK (WITH 'BLUE DANUBE' SOUNDTRACK)
5. SPECIAL SHUTTLES
ETC…

[close]

There's a bunch of confusing options, you don't choose the ship to board, it rarely works, and you don't get numerical feedback on how choices effect the success probability, so it feels pointless. And what do all these options about how to board really add to the game? Not much, I'd argue.

But boarding and capturing should be a central mechanic in this game.

Look at the 90s game Escape Velocity, just for comparison (not slavish imitation).  You disable a ship. You move your ship on top of it. You press the "B" key.


A. dialog box pops up, showing you what you can loot, and the probability of capturing the ship (A function of your fleet crew size vs the ship's crew)


Sometimes when you click one of the buttons, the ship 'repels' boarders.
Or sometimes as you try to loot it, it blows up, but:
-The explosion could only destroy you if you're severely damaged
-Big ships that make more damaging explosions blow up slower, so you have time to move away using skill (cf. the starsector RNG roll!)

Simple. Quick. Doesn't distract from game flow. Tells you the probability of capture, so by changing your ship and boarding different sized enemies, you learn it organically.

Possiblities for SS

Put boarding into combat.

• This would be another command in fleet window.
• Extra crew/marines are proportionately distributed to all the ships in the fleet at the start of battle (or something)
• you can do it with your flagship if you want, or:
• Click on friendlies and target an enemy, or click on an enemy and it autoassigns enough of your fleet for a certain success rate (TBD).
• If the enemy is not disabled yet, your ships engage it gingerly trying not to blow it to pieces (ie the AI wouldn't drop 100 bombs on a ship whose armor is nearly gone)
• If the enemy is already disabled, your ships move close, disengage shields/ weapons, and 'board' it (via progress bar that doesn't stop combat)
• You never  mess around with any dialog boxes during combat
• Your ship(s) loot a random amount of stuff and/or capture the target ship, or it blows up based on the crew ratios and some luck, or nothing happens and some crew are shot, or the ship is just too broken.
• Maybe you can also board hulks of your own ships if they were disabled and repair them
• After battle you get a dialog of all the loot/ships, and decide what to keep.

Wait! This will make it too easy to capture any ship you want!!! Balance! Ah, not so fast:

• Boarding in battle is dangerous since your ships disengage their weapons/shields to board
• Ships blow up a lot easier—you don't see as many floating 'hulks' (to make captures rarer/balanced.
• So you don't get as much commodities/weapons loot either
• But you get more captures/loot off ships you want! Instead of 50 more machine guns
• Crew from your boarding ships go over to the captured ships, meaning your ship has less crew/CR in the current battle. So wait until it's over.
• But maybe if you spend to much time in combat boarding ships, the campaign clock ticks, and someone else attacks your fleet.
• Maybe the AI tries to capture your ships, maybe it doesn't. TBD. If they do, another reason those proportionately distributed marines come in handy

Why this is good:
-something else to do in combat besides just shooting
-no messing around with dialog boxes

Ok if you don't like that, here's another option:

Put boarding in 'campaign.'

• As before, ships blow up a lot easier—you don't see as many floating 'hulks' (to make captures rarer/balanced.
• After any battle in campaign where ships get disabled, a grey 'disabled hulks/spacejunk' fleetlet appears in campaign layer. (maybe two, one for each side?)
• You go up and click it
• you choose one of the disabled ships
• You choose which of your ships and how many marines/crew will board it (none of this boarding shuttles stuff- who cares)
• You are shown clear numerical % indicator with chance of success for each one
• A progress bar appears as campaign layer keeps clock ticking, like when you install a sniffer in a comm. Beacon in campaign. you are vulnerable!
• At the end, the target ship blows up, or they repel you, or you succeed and you get a loot dialog of what to take, including the ship, if it's not too broken.
• You click on another ship in the disabled fleet,
• repeat
• Maybe as time goes on in campaign, the surviving crew on the hulks die off
• Maybe if the hulk is devoid of crew, you don't get penalized by the faction for looting them (law of the sea)
• Maybe you can give supplies to repair their ships instead, rescuing the survivors and getting a rep boost from the faction

why this is good:
-fun in campaign as vulture fleets compete over the prizes
-another way to interact with factions
-opportunity for distinct behaviors re salvaging, repairing, rescuing.

Any other ideas? Suggestions? Remember, any objections you come up with relating to little details about crew management or CR or whatever can easily be overcome with same. The more valuable questions are, does it overall make game more fun or less fun.

[orost]

I would actually like to have boarding both in battle and in campaign: combat boarding has much higher chance of success (the enemy crew hasn't had time to scorch the ground, antimatter stores have not had time to destabilize and start blowing up, etc.), but a ship doing it in battle is very vulnerable. Campaign boarding takes place some time later, so only a few ships are still viable for capture, but it's much less dangerous. High-risk, high-reward versus slow and safe.

It would be a big and complicated system, but I think looting and capture should be one of the central mechanics of the game and that they deserve the space.

[TJJ]

I've always liked the idea of capturing in-combat.
Though it'd need some serious balancing work for it to be meaningful; capturing would need to be either risky & time sensitive, or extremely unlikely.

Star Trek: Armada did it quite well.

Hulls only became derelict (and thus capturable) when their entire crew was dead; this would rarely occur naturally, usually requiring:
- ships entering combat in a depleted state, or
- actively focusing your attack upon the enemy ship's crew (via boarding, or disabling their life support)
Even when ships were captured, they were extremely vulnerable to destruction (or recapture) for significant periods afterwards.

Applying this to Starsector:

- Crew become another ship resource that can be depleted in combat.
- ships only become disabled when they lose all their crew; reducing hull to 0 results in explody destruction.
- disabled ships only remain disabled for a short period, after which they explode.
- once captured, the ship has to limp off the battlefield

[Gothars]

I think the idea of putting a campaign time constraint (progress bar) to boarding is very good!
I would simply combine it with the existing text boarding system though, where it becomes another resource besides marines and ship health. I think the current system is fundamentally sound, it just lacks the options to make it interesting.


I'm not in favor of combat boarding. This

Boarding in battle is dangerous since your ships disengage their weapons/shields to board

does just not really apply, since you can easily arrange circumstances during many battles in which boarding ships would be perfectly save while doing their work.


What I would really like to see added to boarding (besides more interesting options) are two things:
- More influence on which ships end up boardable, this current pure chance approach is unbecoming for a goal oriented playstile. Mhh... maybe if you could only board ships you disabled during a retreat scenario or something?
- The option of boarding ships that are not disabled, but have surrendered. Which of course first requires the mechanic of surrender (faction relation dependent?).

[Tartiflette]

While adding more player agency in boarding would be really nice, what I'd really like to see is salvaging. Unlike boarding it would consist in towing a disabled hulk of your choosing (between a few "salvageable" ships) with tugs to the nearest star-port equipped with a drydock (a new economy building). There you could restore it. In addition, having a construction rig in the fleet could allow to repair some of the engines giving the hull a burn of one instead of 0, leaving you the choice to use either tugs or rigs or both. The hull complete repair would cost the same or even a bit more than buying a new ship, but it could allows the player to build a decent fleet without having to farm reputation with every factions and then visit all the markets hopping to find the right ship. And given that towing would be slow, it would be quite dangerous to do so in an hostile system but very rewarding (especially with the sensor update coming).
So more player control over witch ship get salvaged, more use for the tugs and rigs, and more reasons to wage war upon non pirates factions!

Next to that the current boarding stay mostly as it is, but like Gothars suggested only for surrendered ships. Those could be in a much better state, but you may have to overcome some defenses.

On the other hand I'm not into the idea of in-combat boarding as it could be confusing and easily exploitable (see Homeworld's ion frigates armada).

[xenoargh]

Practically all of these ideas were implemented into Vacuum. 

Heck, I had weapons called Boarding Teleporters that could beam Marines into ships and Boarding Shuttles that could fly around the battlefield looking for hulks to board without needing players to do anything (other than pay for their upkeep).  It was a lot of fun.

There really aren't any good reasons to not have in-game boarding, which is a lot more entertaining.

Balancing it is pretty straightforward; if players aren't supposed to be able to get many good ships that way, then blow them up during the battle before they can be boarded.  It's really not that complicated, and it would be far more dramatic to have that happen during the battles.

I guess that my feelings about the current system is that it's Very Placeholder and improving it is a very low priority and that's that.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Personally I would like to see several mechanics added to the current system from the old boarding system. The old system had a much lower rate (5%) to board but A) ships that were being delivered or were mothballed would surrender and B) the board chance would be fore each ship, so larger fleets gave you a bigger pool of ships to pick from. Add some skills to help out with boarding and some info on chances of capturing, destruction or uselessness, the ability to raid their cargo instead, and the ability to board multiple ships would make things much better in my eyes.

The way I see it going would be like this:
Game sees which, if any, ships are boardable
Game lists out the ships that can be captured
Game tells you whether or not muti capture is possible and the chances of it
You choose a ship to board
Choose whether to demand cargo or surrender or to board them
If boarding:
Choose boarding target (cargo or capture)
Choose whether to concentrate your forces on the bridge (prevent or drop chance of self destruct sharply) engineering (prevent or drop the chance of the ship being unusable) or spread out your forces (Default chances to self destruct and unusable)
Outcomes are decided
repeat if muti boarding is possible

[nomadic_leader]

I think the idea of putting a campaign time constraint (progress bar) to boarding is very good!
I would simply combine it with the existing text boarding system though, where it becomes another resource besides marines and ship health. I think the current system is fundamentally sound, it just lacks the options to make it interesting.

I conversely think we need less options, since boarding as it stands now is a minigame that interrupts the flow of the main game without being fun enough to justify itself. This is why I thought to put in either campaign or combat but with a lower footbrint.

I'm not in favor of combat boarding. This

Boarding in battle is dangerous since your ships disengage their weapons/shields to board

does just not really apply, since you can easily arrange circumstances during many battles in which boarding ships would be perfectly save while doing their work.

Examples? Any of your ships that are busy boarding won't be fighting, which is itself significant for your fighting power. Or if you deploy more ships just to board, that's a CR/suppllies cost for the deployment.

Also maybe requiring the construction rig like someone mentioned is a good idea for this (since they're just totally crippled at that point) As for multi captures at once of big ships, it would be basically impossible unless you have a bunch valkyries-- otherwise you'll be severely crew understrengthed and in danger of malfunctions (or just mothball everything)

Whatever we come up with, we should aim for something intuitive that doesn't require a lot of arbitrary game rules and hand-waving (only being able to board during retreat, etc is the kind of thing i'd prefer not to see), because they make the game harder to learn, and break immersion.

[TJJ]

I think it's worth adding that in-combat capturing would bring a 2ndary objective to battles; if you're engaging a fleet with a nice juicy capture target in it, you'll be aiming to isolate the target ship (either by separating it from the escorts, or destroying them)
Organic player created goals such as this are IMO a great way to bring added depth & meaningfulness to engagements.

Though you'd need a new "Do not destroy this ship" order to prevent your AI fleet members from mucking up your plans.

[Gothars]

I conversely think we need less options, since boarding as it stands now is a minigame that interrupts the flow of the main game without being fun enough to justify itself. This is why I thought to put in either campaign or combat but with a lower footbrint.

Flow? The boarding dialog happens after combat, before picking up loot, when you are in menus anyway. I don't see much flow going on there, nothing to interrupt. If you already closed the after action dialog, are back flying in the campaign and then have to click on a wreck to board it that seems much more disruptive, no?


About giving it a low footprint, we kinda had that a few versions back. Getting free ships from time to time without effort was to be expected. It was not fun in itself (how could it?) and had a negative impact on other campaign mechanics (little reason to purchase ships, XP gain by sacrificing them).

Examples?

If you're winning a fight, i.e. have destroyed the first few targets, you usually have far more ships on the map than you need to defeat the remaining enemies. You use those to board without risk.




Mhh. Maybe we should first ask what boarding is actually good for.

I think boarding is not really needed as a mechanic for the game. It's nice, but not essential for any other core mechanic to work. It only offers two advantages at the moment:
1. getting your hands on otherwise unavailable ships
2. possibly, with luck, getting a ship cheaper that usual

The second one is a very rare case, it can be ignored. The first one demands such high initial investments (marines price and upkeep) and takes so much time to succeed that it is not recognized as a worthwhile option by most players. Resulting in (what seems to be) the broad consensus that boarding is quite useless at the moment.

I think the two options are to either improve and expand on those benefits, or scrap boarding all together.


So, besides making the boarding mechanic in itself more fun, it would be a good idea to give more initiative to risk boarding in the first place. What could make boarding wortwhile?

- Information. What if, after boarding a patrol ship, you could see the position of all patrols of this faction in the system for a minute or so? Or after boarding a trade ship you get detailed (price) information about its home port and destination markets. Boarding a pirate could lead you to his station, or to other pirates, or even to the classical buried treasure chest. Many options.

- Freight. Especially if you play as a pirate, it seems extremely wasteful that you always have to blow up what you want. Why not give the player a chance to capture a cargo hold full of the locally needed commodity intact?

- Prisoners. Give crew and officers back to their faction for a reputations bonus, or sell them on the black market of some pirate station. Maybe some will join you?



The existence for all this different motivations for boarding would then be a base from which to expand the boarding mechanic dialog. Choices could be implemented where to send your marines (CIC -> intel, reactor-> ship, cargo hold->commodities) to prioritize the different possible outcomes and risks.

[Linnis]

I think it's worth adding that in-combat capturing would bring a 2ndary objective to battles; if you're engaging a fleet with a nice juicy capture target in it, you'll be aiming to isolate the target ship (either by isolating it from the escorts, or destroying them)
Organic player created goals such as this are IMO a great way to bring added depth & meaningfulness to engagements.

This is totally absolutely true, combat will become much more better when you want to board that paragon but its really ripping apart your fleet. Instead playing a choice minigame after battle.



In-game boarding can also come with other mechanics,

1. permanently disabled weapons (for the battle), when the armor is gone on the tile the weapon is placed at, further damage has a chance of permanently disabling the ships weapons, or engine parts, or its sensors (ability to add to detection radius)

2. permanently disabled shields, when a ship receives hull damage, there is a higher and higher chance its shields will be permanently disabled, this is important so a ship cannot just shield "bump" the emy ship away.

3. Dock points, some ships could have an "combat docking" port (say, like battle cruisers, freighters, carriers, wont have them) placed on the ship. Say a hound's dock point would be on its butt. Or a valkrie's combat ability could be launching drones that automatically dock called "boarding shuttles" (boarding emy ship while hiding behind husks etcetc)

4. Dock ability , when activated like pressing "v" in this case, "b" or something the ship would propel itself with dock point first towards the nearest enemy that has disabled shields, and is considered "docked" when it hits the armor of target ship.

5. All ships attempting to dock will have shields disabled, and once docked will not be able to activate engines opposing ship being docked will not be targeted by all fleet weapons, and opposing docking ships will receive targeting priority.

6. A progress bar will appear on the enemy ship meaning resistance and time left till capture. Ships with more crew alive (hull value multiplied by modifiers such as that crew saving door hullmod) has longer times.

7. Once captured the opposing ships will switch flags and be targeted by the other side, and vice versa.

8. If the enemy fleet is retreating, and is a (military or non pirate/independent) type of fleet, all successful boarding attempts will be met with self destruction.


Just imagine it, this is possible, and make docking combat (skill and strategy) important, also, players with low combat skills can fly a Valkyrie or something and play the docking game instead of battle every single time.

[Linnis]

also as a follow up, don't want to edit 1293810238109740 times, after a ship is captured, you get its cargo depending on how much hull it has left.

[nomadic_leader]

I think it's worth adding that in-combat capturing would bring a 2ndary objective to battles; if you're engaging a fleet with a nice juicy capture target in it, you'll be aiming to isolate the target ship (either by isolating it from the escorts, or destroying them)

This really is the number 1 reason for in-combat boarding. Combat really needs richer, more varied tactical interactions besides these inexplicable, anemic objective beacons.

Gothars, don't look at it from a minimaxing perspective alone. Boarding is fun, that's why it should be in the game. It opens another playstyle and another way to acquire goodies. Games in 1994 had this mechanic. It is enjoyable. Alex is adding tonnes of cool, elaborate mechanics to the game like sensors. There's no reason why boarding shouldn't be in here too. Some people get more enjoyment from stealing than from buying.

Yes, given the supplies, CR, time, etc, boarding should, when you average it out, be only maybe 20% 'cheaper' than buying the ship normally. (The 20% discount is justified by the danger, and the fuss ). It's another way to do things that makes a lot of sense in the game world.

And getting a super rare ship, or a faction specific ship (some mods or total conversions might have these) also justifies its inclusion.

Flow? The boarding dialog happens after combat, before picking up loot, when you are in menus anyway. I don't see much flow going on there, nothing to interrupt. If you already closed the after action dialog, are back flying in the campaign and then have to click on a wreck to board it that seems much more disruptive, no?

It's an interruption between combat and campaign.  I see your point about having to go back and click on something in campaign after campaign is over-- but that opens the door for being able to salvage stuff from battles between the AI, which is a lot of fun. But perhaps instead it's better to go with boarding in combat instead of campaign, since this, as TJJ suggests, brings desperately needed 2ndary objectives to combat, and can be done without any midstream dialog boxes, just the fleet commands and a loot dialog afterwards.

If you're winning a fight, i.e. have destroyed the first few targets, you usually have far more ships on the map than you need to defeat the remaining enemies. You use those to board without risk.

Whereas now if you're winning, you can basically drool onto the keyboard and still win. Now you have something to do in the mop-up that actually requires thought and choices. I don't see this as a problem.

- Information. ... Boarding a pirate could lead you to his station, or to other pirates, or even to the classical buried treasure chest. Many options.

This is a pretty cool idea.

- Prisoners. Give crew and officers back to their faction for a reputations bonus, or sell them on the black market of some pirate station. Maybe some will join you?

This is also very good.

The existence for all this different motivations for boarding would then be a base from which to expand the boarding mechanic dialog. Choices could be implemented where to send your marines (CIC -> intel, reactor-> ship, cargo hold->commodities) to prioritize the different possible outcomes and risks.

This again seems too much like another game like FTL. Detail resolution too high. Compared to navigating around in combat or campaign, going through these text decision trees does not sound very interesting. That's how I feel in the current boarding, and adding more options would just add to that.

3. Dock points, some ships could have an "combat docking" port ....

This also seems too elaborate. In combat boarding should be doable by fleet commands alone, and so I don't see the point in having special orifices to the ships. Just get close to a disabled ship, lower shields/weapons, and wait for the progress bar.

[Linnis]

3. Dock points, some ships could have an "combat docking" port ....

This also seems too elaborate. In combat boarding should be doable by fleet commands alone, and so I don't see the point in having special orifices to the ships. Just get close to a disabled ship, lower shields/weapons, and wait for the progress bar.

The docking port is there so you risk more, and allow for more skill based play, if in combat we do the disable and then board later style, then its just disable everything then do the minigame. Or we do the launch marines with their combat suits into space, it might work but its still low risk low skill type of play.

I also don't see there will be any real difficulty to code this docking mechanism.

[Thaago]

Eh... I don't think in combat boarding would be all that fun. It just sounds like busywork to me.

Gothars suggestion of having different rewards for boarding I like.