Problems with ramming

geoschmo · #1 October 8th, 2002, 04:30 PM

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 · #2 October 8th, 2002, 04:35 PM

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 · #3 October 8th, 2002, 04:58 PM

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 · #4 October 8th, 2002, 05:43 PM

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 · #5 October 8th, 2002, 08:26 PM

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.

Pablo · #6 October 9th, 2002, 11:28 AM

geo, you were right. It works if my ship has shield depleaters and it does not - without any weapon assuming there is no SDD.
-BUT-
If enemy has no shields and my ships have no shield depleaters - it also works. My ships capture as many ships as they can and then ram others if there are any left

I've noticed an interesting thing: let's say I capture enemy ship that has some beam weapons but there are still enemy ships left and attack my rammers. The captured enemy ship runs away and waits until the ship that captured it is destroyed and only then gets involved into the battle. Maybe this is not a strict rule and happens not always but it really has some influence upon combat end IMHO.

oleg · #7 October 9th, 2002, 12:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Pablo:
geo, you were right. It works if my ship has shield depleaters and it does not - without any weapon assuming there is no SDD.
-BUT-
If enemy has no shields and my ships have no shield depleaters - it also works. My ships capture as many ships as they can and then ram others if there are any left

I've noticed an interesting thing: let's say I capture enemy ship that has some beam weapons but there are still enemy ships left and attack my rammers. The captured enemy ship runs away and waits until the ship that captured it is destroyed and only then gets involved into the battle. Maybe this is not a strict rule and happens not always but it really has some influence upon combat end IMHO.

There is a time lapse before captured ships regain control of weapons (does not apply to AS converted ships). I think it can be edited in settings.txt. Not sure though.