Baron M. wrote:
quote:
There is a problem with using real units for boarding. How do you board ships that do NOT have cargo space? Or if you allow boarding of ships without cargo, what happens to the units and how do you get them OUT of the ship? Essentially, they would be destroyed by boarding, which is the same thing as the component being destroyed in the current system.
I'm not trying to transport my troops into his ship, I'm trying to board it. I don't need cargo space. Much like, I suspect, if you try and drop troops on a planet that 100% of its cargo space full of enemy troops, there is no problem. Your guys don't take up space (until after the battle in the case of planets).
Suppose I have 10 raiders and board an escort with no cargo space at all (hence, no dedicated defending marines). The game resolves a ground attack against some default value (pretending the ship has 5 population per crew quarters maybe). If I win, my raiders come home (actually, they never left my cargo hold within the game code). If I lose, it just kills all my marines. If I only lose some marines, it only kills some of them in my cargo hold.
Sure, there should be rules for prize crews and capturing a ship shouldn't be instantanious (multi-turn battle) and I shouldn't be able to attack an escort with 10,000 marines (no room), but I don't feel those are terribly big concerns. If your boarding components only allowed 10 raiders to attack in a single boarding action, you'd for the most part eliminate the Last part. This would also mean boarding components would not be destroyed on use (you'd be losing troops every time you tried to board, so you're still limited).
quote:
It's probably much simpler to just change the current boarding attack to check the ship for how many boarding parties components it has, and pop-up a dialog asking how many to use if it has more than one.
That would be my minimum request for a fix. If boarding is just a "if attacker's boarding strength is > defender's defense strength, ship is captured" then I don't even need a pop-up. Just use exactly enough BPs to take the ship.
[This message has been edited by Zanthis (edited 23 January 2001).]