Problems with ramming

[Pablo]

Maybe I've missed this somewhere but tried to search the forum and failed. The problem I'm having is with capturing enemy ships / ramming. Tested this with SEIV and SEIVGold - no luck.
I'm playing organics and have Org.Armor III + boarding paries on board. What I was thinking is to knock down enemy shields by ramming and then capture. Set my ships to break formation and strategy was board/ram. No luck My ships ran away like chicken. Then I tried to fit shield depleaters. The same thing. Later I tried to play with no shield enemy ships and bingo! That was strange to me. Why my ships run away if the enemy has shields and do the work when there is no shield in sight. I tried the same with the strategy ram/ram and the result was the same. If no shields - everything's ok, otherwise - runaway.
Any ideas?

[Marco]

In your ship design there is any weapon (except for specials weapons as shields depleters)? May be the program don't recognize ramming as a valid tactic to lower shields and, if I remember correctly, unarmed ships revert to “run at corner” tactic by default.
Hope this can help.

[Q]

If you ram a ship either you or the enemy (or both) will be destroyed. Therefore after the ramming boarding does not make much sense IMO.

[ October 08, 2002, 09:52: Message edited by: Q ]

[Pablo]

If I ram with a ship full of Organic armor - the enemy is destroyed not me But I'm planning to ram big ships with a lot of equipment and I think that by ramming them I will destroy shields and/or armor that is present on that ship because they are the first items to be hit all the time without skipping abilities. Well, maybe an engine or crew quarters or anything else may suffer but not all the ship. And after the first ramming attempt huge amount of damage is inflicted - the shields are down, the first strategy (capture ship) is valid and the ships are near each other. At least theoretically I think it should work fine. But the problem is that it is only theoretically...

[Pablo]

Anybody has any experience in ramming/capturing ships in simultaneous combat? And how to use ramming at all (using organic armor III, when enemy has shields on)?
I tried to put some beams inside but it didn't help because the ships came to the optimal firing range and stayed there and died there

[ October 08, 2002, 12:37: Message edited by: Pablo ]

[geoschmo]

DO your enemy ships have self destruct devices? Because that always seems to give boarding ships the fits. I have got them to fire and drop the enemies shileds before, but when the enemy has SDD's the boarding ships wont attempt to board in my experience.

Geoschmo