Ships Orders

[Suicide Junkie]

Were you fighting a Psychic race, by any chance? Or perhaps a Cruiser or larger?

Psychic races get double the normal boarding defense, and swashbucklers are not very strong.

If you ship will not overcome the defenders, it won't attempt to board.

[DavidG]

Psychic No. The enemy was mostly Battle Cruisers though.

[Taera]

I once had been using ship capture strongly and used CRs armed with two shields sapper, double shield and the rest loaded with boarding parties. THey just sapped the shields and ran to the corner, only to die there. The enemy was not psychic and did not have any boarding defense.
Same with ramming - tried putting weapons on them, and they dont ram but dance around firing weapons instead.

[Mephisto]

Well, either the problems arise with the MODs you are using or there is just something set wrong in your strategies. If you don't touch the strategies (i.e. out of the box) and obey the need-weapon/no-weapon outlined below it will work every time both in my regular game (1.78) and beta (1.81). In short, I wouldn’t blame it on SE4 in general but to some screwed up settings in your games or some variables we all overlook in your examples.

[geoschmo]

David, did the enemy ships have SDD's? This will cause your boarding ships to not try to board. It's like they know if they board they die, so they don't attempt it.

Geoschmo

[DavidG]

SDD's??? Good thing that Acronym thread is here. No I don't think they had them. Howver they were all CA's or BC's. I gathers from SJ's post that my ships would probably not have had the boarding strength to take these ships thus did not try. If this is the case a message from the ship captian would have been nice.

One thing I am 99.99% of certain of is that there is a bug with fleets not obeying their 'Don't Hurt Me' orders.

I'm not sure I understand the weapons/no weapons comments. With Ram and Capture orders does it make a difference if the ship has other weapons on it?

[Grandpa Kim]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
David, did the enemy ships have SDD's? This will cause your boarding ships to not try to board. It's like they know if they board they die, so they don't attempt it.

Geoschmo

I'm playing a solo game at home. I just sent three newly constructed capture ships after three lone enemy ships (three separate battles). As it turned out all the enemy ships had SDD. There are now six less ships in the universe. My ships attempted boarding without hesitation after using their shield depleters to bring down the shields.

Its this type of inconsistency that drives me nuts. One person says black, the other say white and they are both right!

Kim