Boarding parties

[PvK]

I think the deal is that boarding ships will only try to board ships without shields. If they have no other weapons, then they have no reason to close on enemy ships that have shields.

Giving them shield depleters generally gets them to try to remove the enemy shields... I think... experiment with boarders + depleters using Board Ships primary strat and max range (or optimal or point blank) secondary strat.

PvK

[Puke]

i seem to remember, at least back in 1.19, that even if you gave a boarding ship shield depleters, the boarding strategy would cause it to hold back until the shields were down. I think i had to put shield depleters on the rest of the fleet so they would not destroy the target.



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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)

[Baron Munchausen]

As I pointed out in another post a long time ago, you have to set "capture enemy ship" as the SECONDARY strategy. Give it a normal strategy like "optimal weapons range" for it's primary strategy. Then, when the target ship's shields are gone, it will switch strategies and board. Or at least it used to. I haven't used boarding in strategic combat for a long time now.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 14 July 2001).]

[capnq]

D'oh!

Despite the title of the thread and virtually every post in it including the phrase "boarding parties", my previous reply was talking about using troop transports to drop troops and capture a planet. I haven't had an opportunity to use boarding parties in a simultaneous game.

I've had troop transports run away from the planet they were supposed to take recently in one of my solo games, which is probably why I got the two problems confused.

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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"

[Dragonlord]

I have done some tests too, in the combat simulator. One ship design has only engines, armor and boarding parties. The ship strategy is "Capture enemy ships".
This works as intended in the simulator.
Another ship design is same as first but now with a shield depleter added. This won't work, my ships will run away. This is against enemy ships with NO shields. I tried it with both the settings of having "board ships" as the primary OR the secondary movement strategy. (the other was optimal range).

What worries me is that you can't add fleets to the simulator. So if an individual ship's settings work in the simulator, that will only work in fleets the moment the ships orders kick in (overriding the fleet's orders). It is still a mystery to me when exactly that happens.

And I'm worried that if I set fleet orders to Capture Ships, all my other regular attack ships will sit around doing nothing...

Can anyone shed some more light on this? I'm getting more and more confused...

[Phoenix-D]

You can use fleets in the simulator. There's a set fleets for players button.. problem is right now there's ALSO a bug where the fleet (if you make a new one for testing) disappears when you try to add ships to it.

Phoenix-D

[Suicide Junkie]

Once again, the solution for the Simfleets bug is to open the "fleets for player" window, close it, then open it a second time. It will now work OK, but you must do that each time you open the simulator window.

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