Boarding Parties

[Ferendra]

Hi folks,
I created a ship with boarding parties and shield depleter and set its strategy to boarding enemy ships.
Each time I simulate a combat with this ship it turns away from enemy ships and flees.
How do I get the ship to actually capture enemy vessels ?
Ferendra

[Seawolf]

Check the stragy for the ship. It needs to be set to board ships. I would guess it is currently set to don't get hurt.

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Seawolf on the prowl

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ferendra:
Hi folks,
I created a ship with boarding parties and shield depleter and set its strategy to boarding enemy ships.
Each time I simulate a combat with this ship it turns away from enemy ships and flees.
How do I get the ship to actually capture enemy vessels ?
Ferendra

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This is another case of the simple documentation in the config files being inadequate. I haven't seen anything in the manual that covers all the details of boarding, either. First, you must not use 'Board Enemy Ship' as your PRIMARY strategy (even though that's what the default config uses! apparently MM changed the way boarding works at some point and forgot to change the text file) -- unless shields will not be involved. In order to be boarded, your target must have no shields. If your boarding ships will only go after colonizers then using 'Board Enemy Ships' as a primary strategy will probably work. Edit the "Capture Enemy Ships" in default_strategies.txt to use a normal attack strategy like 'Optimal Firing Range' or even 'Short Weapons Range' since you want to be close when the shields are gone. Make your boarding ship as fast as possible of course, and give it lots of PDC. Also, give it lots of ARMOR, because another undocumented feature of boarding is that the attacking ship ALSO loses all its shields. Apparently they have to be "turned off" to launch the boarding parties. Including shield regenerators in a boarding ship might be a good idea, but skipping shields entirely is an option with a good armor tech like organic. Hmm, with crystalline you're missing the advantage of your armor if you don't have shields... Guess crystalline is a good choice for a boarding ship. Anyway, set your SECONDARY strategy to 'Board Enemy Ship' and your boarding ship will suddenly change behavior when the target's shields are gone. It WILL close in and board at that point. Yep, just REVERSE those two strategies in the default_strategies.txt file! Final hint, once your boarding ship uses its boarding parties, IT will be completely vulnerable to boarding. If your enemy has boarding ships, best to include a self-destruct device even in your boarding ship!

BTW, the "Time Distortion Burst" in Temporal Knowledge techs is just about the ideal boarding ship weapon. It's a powerful shield depleter but also a useful weapon so the boarding ship is not helpless if it's boarding parties are gone. A boarding ship with the TDB and Crystalline armor to regenerate it's shields would be just about the ultimate. Getting bothof those techs would be mighty expensive, though...

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 15 March 2001).]

[Windborne]

You can set your individual ships strategy to "Board enemy ships" then put it in a fleet set to "optimal firing range". If you do that your ship should work right.

[Possum]

Fer,

hey, bro

Another thing that helps, is to make sure you design the ship as part of the class "Boarding Ship", rather than "Attack Ship"

[Alpha Kodiak]

Ok, I've tried everything I can think of, and I can't get boarding parties to work in strategic combat. According to the earlier Posts in this thread, the secret is to use a normal attack strategy as primary and boarding as secondary.

I've tried point-blank, optimal and maximum range strategies, and in all cases, my ship keeps attacking until the enemy is destroyed. In the simulator, I have tried all of them against both attack ships and colonizers, to no avail.

The only time, I succeeded in capturing a ship was when I had boarding as the primary strategy. My ship went into a corner and the other ship chased it. It just happened to end its move adjacent to my ship, and my ship boarded it.

Has anyone succeeded in getting the boarding to work under SEIV v1.41 with TDM Modpack 1.75? I just want to make sure that boarding didn't stop working under the latest Version before I drive myself completely sane trying to figure this out.

[tesco samoa]

You should attack my ships they attract boarding parties like flies to stuff.

This is a good thread. I am learning about the boarding parties in a very painfull way.

Thanks for all the info

[capnq]

Have you experimented with the other strategy settings besides Movement? I'd imagine Firing, Damage, and Formation could all affect the boarding ship's behavior. I've yet to attempt a ship capture in simultaneous myself, so I don't have any concrete advice, but those are the areas I've experimented with in trying to capture planets.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Suicide Junkie]

Did you put a weapon on your boarding ship?

Use something like a meson bLaster, or the TDB, but it must be able to do damage to the hull of a ship.

PDC, shield depleters, won't work.

[Alpha Kodiak]

I tried a couple of designs. My operational design is a BC with 3x time distortion bursts and 1x tachyon cannon, plus 2x boarding parties. In the simulator, I also tried a simpler approach with a destroyer fitted with one meson bLaster and one boarding party. They are both boarding ships rather than attack ships (although I created a copy of the BC that was an attack ship and tried that in the simulator - same results).