Question to good player: boarding

[Fyron]

If it is set to capture ship strategy, the ship will head for the corner no matter what else it has if the enemy ships have shields. If you set it to something where it will fire the weapons, it will no longer board.

[Cyrien]

That isn't correct. I have successfully used ship boarding several times.

I have temporal weapons equiped with the temporal shield depleter a meson cannon and a shield disrupter large mount(can't regenerate if the generators are gone) on a light cruiser all other space with shields or armor.

Doesn't matter if the enemy ship has SDD or shields or shields with shield regenerators it still goes after it takes out the shields and board and with a SDD on enemy ship ussually dies.

I have effectively used this strategy mid-late game. Mass produce lots of cheap LCs to self destruct against battleships, dreadnoughts and baseships all equipped with SDDs.

Oh I also altered the default capture enemy ships strategy.

Primary - Capture Enemy Ships
Secondary - Point Blank (Default is optimal, which may cause the retreat in standard strategy, never used the default myself so can't say if that causes retreat)

Firing - Nearest, Strongest, Fastest, Has Weapons

All break formation.

PS: This has worked in both strategic and auto tactical.

[ September 25, 2003, 05:37: Message edited by: Cyrien ]

[Grandpa Kim]

In my experience, boarding parties work quite well in the vanilla game. Against unshielded ships with no SDD, they are awesome. The best design, in fact, contains no weapons but the boarding party. Against shielded ships, shield depleters are the best weapon. Against the SDD... well, don't worry about the SDD. Either it won't be knocked out and you will not capture the ship, though contrary to what's been said, your boarding ships may still try to board thus destroying both ships-- a win for you, or your line ships will knock out the SDD and you will board successfully. You may get it virtually intact or you may get a gutted hulk. It's a crap shoot.

But the key it to have lots of boarding ships. Somewhere between 10% and 20% of each fleet should be boarding ships and you will make captures regularly.

[Cyrien]

Just ran a test of boarding parties with default strategies set and it worked fine.

Also in a test with a ship only have Shield Depleter and Shield Disrupter and boarding party the ship still moved to the attack and attempted to board. Thus the APB or other weapon would not be necessary.

Note I did not use the simulator for any of my tests. I used actual combats in actual games with strategic resolve. This was done in a sim turn game.