Problems with ramming

[geoschmo]

Pablo, for me it works to give the ship the startegy to capture enemy ships: Primary startegy to board, secondary strategy to ram. If the enemey ship has no SDD and does have shields, and my ship has only organic armor and shield depleters it will attack, fire the sield depleters until the shields are gone, board the enemy ship, and then it will find another enemy ship and attempt to ram until the battle is over.

If the enemy ship has SDD though this strategy is suicide as my ship will simply hang out not doing anything, will not even attempt to do it's secondary strategy and ram. It also will not work if the enemy has shields and my ship has no shield depleters. In this case my ship again will do nothing, not even ettepmt to ram, until the enemy comes for me and destoys me.

Are you on 1.78? If not that is why you are having trouble getting boarding to work with shield depleters. There was a bug but it was fixed.

Geoschmo

[Pablo]

geo, I tested in v1.49 which as you said was bugged. Then I tested it in v1.78 + DNM v1.70 and it also failed to board/ram. I'm gonna test it with pure SEIV Gold v1.78 later today.

[geoschmo]

Pablo, Hmm, not sure what the issue is for you in 1.78. It works fine for me.

You said you do have the ship strategy set to "Capture Enemy Ships" right? And in the Capture Enemy Ship strategy the primary strat is board and you change the secondary to ram? Is that precisely what you are doing?

Geoschmo

[ October 08, 2002, 15:30: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Pablo]

geo, that's exactly what I'm doing. Primary - capture, secondary - ram. Scenario: ram till the shields go down and switch to the first strategy.

[Pablo]

now the working hours are over and I'll do some more testing when I get home. Maybe I'll come up with what's causing the problem with the help of beer
Read you 2morrow

[geoschmo]

Oh, no it won't work that way. I thought you were using shield depleters. A ship with boarding as a strategy will attempt to drop the shields of an enemy ship using weapons, shields depleters or standard weapons. But it will not do so by ramming. You have to have a weapon to get the shields, the ship will then board, and after the boarding parties are used up it will switch to it's secondary stratgy and ram other enemy ships.

[QuarianRex]

I have found that strategic boarding parties work very erratically in this game.

I was recently testing out my Borg mod (they rely heavily on boarding parties) and encountered some odd problems.

I had a small sphere (550kt) that was equiped with a tractor beam, shield depleter, boarding cannon (only damaged security stations and all SDD's are given boarding defense), a boarding party, and support equipment (engines, armor, shields, etc.). Now the sphere would work beautifully in strategic combat, chasing down ships and assimilating them etc.

The problem occured when I got medium cubes (900kt). I carried over the design (same basic components, just more of them) and the thing wouldn't budge. The cube would just sit in the middle of the screen and twitch around. I tried messing with the attack priorities and such but it was no good. They just wouldn't chase anything down.

However, if an enemy ship came within range of a tractor beam it would get pulled in and boarded. THEN the cube would start to jerkily chase down other ships.

I just can't explain it. All other characteristics were basically the same (just scaled up), including the strategies. The little guy would perform as expected while the big one wouldn't. Can anyone explain this?

I also noticed something else. Boarding will only occur BEFORE weapons are fired. If the weapons have to be fired the ship will not board that turn. This means that a single shield regenerator will completely protect a ship from a single boarding craft. To capture that ship you need to tag-team it with two craft, one to knock down the regenerated shields and one to board.

I hope that some of this helps and/or someone can provide some sort of explanation.