[Shadowstar]

Just reading this topic gave me all kinds of ideas.

Why stop at making missiles into units? What about making a kind of troop thats designed for space combat?

You could make Space Marines (or Space Troop): they behave like fighters and are designed to carry a boarding parties unit and possibly some other components. Very cheap and easy to destroy, but because they behave like fighters, they can be launched and carried on ships that otherwise wouldn't have boarding parties. Also, they could travel on thier own (using a jetpack - perhaps make different grades of jetpack available by researching so you could make faster marines), saving a ship from having to get dangerously close to its target. Send them in behind a wave of missiles designed to draw enemy point defenses so they dont get killed or just deploy them in large numbers. Hmm... You could even have Space Marines to fight other Space Marines...

Hmm... The only problem I can see with that is that when you grouped Space Marines (if you did it like fighters) you could end up having alot of boarding parties to use against an enemy ship, which could lead to balance issues. Perhaps doing something similar to the Smaller Weapons would work here. Have a miniaturized Version of the Boarding Parties component designed for the Space Marine to use. It would be less effective, but designed to work in large numbers. After all, you wouldn't want to send a single marine to capture an enemy ship! You'd want to have a team of marines, or maybe several teams of marines. Course this could lead to the development of Special Ops forces that you could deploy in space too. Special Ops would have some kind of cloaking or ecm that would make it harder for the enemy to see them in combat, but they would have much less boarding party value. They would be able to carry special equipment for sabotaging or subverting enemy ships...

Hmm this could be a fun idea to explore.