Boarding Parties

[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).

[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"

[Alpha Kodiak]

I've created a save game from a full tech start with a couple of ship designs, one called Boarder and one called Target. I have tried all kinds of options under strategies to no avail, so I'm wondering if someone could look at what I've got set up and see if they can get the boarding operation to work.

The set up should be pretty straight forward. In the simulator, put the Boarder ship on the human controlled side and the Target ship on the computer controlled side. The let it fly, so to speak.

Somebody please tell me that I'm just missing some stupid detail, because this is driving me totally sane at this point.

[Deathstalker]

The only time I got boarding parties to work was with the following scenario: normal attack ship, two boarding parties in the 'must have' line, then the ship was armed with abp 1st and trac beams 2nd. Attack strat was optimal firing range but 2ndary was capture enemy ships. It only seemed to work when I went into tactical combat (never did see it happen in sim combat) and it almost seemed a 2ndary effect that they boarded at all, the ships would attack with apbs, trac in the ship and then IF the shields were down they would board....strange thing....never did see an actual 'boarding ship' board though....

Hope this sheds some light.....(I'm about as confused on this issue as anyone....that and the damn 'ship yard ship as a repair ship', never seen that work either, though I'm testing three AI's with it currently)...

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"And what the hell would you know about sanity?" demanded Beatrice. "There are depressed lemmings on the edge of cliffs who've got a better grasp on reality than you have. And more common sense."--Simon R. Green 'Deathstalker Rebellion'.

"We are all...the sum of our scars"....(paraphrased) Matt. R. Stover-'Blade of Tyshalle'.

"Memory," the old man said softly, "is tricky. I have learned two things from it. One: That without meaningful memories, there is no life. Two: that we are desperate for our lives to make sense, to have meaning,--and at a great enough remove , all memory is malleable." -Michelle West 'Sea of Sorrows', SunSword book IV.

[CW]

Alpha Kodiak, after another hour of simulator time I finally got my boarding parties to (sort of) work. I designed a light cruiser with the following specs:

1 bridge
1 life support
1 crew quarter
5 quantum engines III
1 solar sail III
1 stealth armour III
3 orgainc armour III
1 combat sensor III
1 ECM III
2 shield depleter V
1 enveloping acid globule V
3 boarding parties V

Costs exactly 9600 minerals, the max my homeworld shipyards could build in 2 turns at normal rate. I tried them out on your BBs with the strategy set to primary - board enemy ships and secondary - point blank. They would keep running to a corner ACROSS the map (not the normal behaviour when a ship can't execute an order, but is still running to a corner, strange...), the BBs would give chase, the two sides would keep firing at each other until the BBs have no shields left, then the boarders would come out of the corner and take them.

However they do something totally different when attacking something with no weapons (colony ships for example). The boarders would charge right towards them and blow them to bits, totally ignoring the "fire until all weapons destroyed" check box.