The Boarding Party snafu update

[Shadowstar]

It's my understanding that it's the crew itself that is the problem. If you take out just the crew quarters you can't build ships because you (and the AI's) have no way to give them crew. You have to modify all vehicles that require crew so that they won't require them anymore, so that you can build them without crew quarters. Then boarding parties should work.

Just building ships with master computers won't stop the AI's from doing it. You effectively have to remove crew from the game entirely. It's actually cleaner than just using master computers since it preserves at least some element of the gameplay formulae created by the difference between live crews and master computer ships.

[Phoenix-D]

You can't just remove the crews I don't think, because if a ship doesn't have SOME sort of CQ (whether CQ or Master Computer) it'll suffer the Critical Damage effects described in the last patch.

[AngleWyrm]

For the next test, I modded the Frigate hull to require 0 crew, and removed the crew quarters from my target ship. The ship appeared to behave normally, moving and shooting.

Question: Does the security team thingy work?

First run - Target had one security, Attacker had two Boarders. Successful, and the ship ended with 4/0 crew (started with 0/0).

Second run - Attacked with three boarders (11 soldiers each vs 11/security station) and won with a leftover 6 crew.

Third run - Target with two security stations, and couldn't defeat it. Even when attacking with ten boarding teams on one ship. Examining the ship after battle showed that one security station had 100% damage, but the other had 0% damage.

It's beginning to look to me like maybe there's a piece of code that should be in a loop, but is only being called once instead of once for every crew-ish thingy.

[Dizzy]

Huh?

Ok, so if we remove CQ from the ships, we then have to remove them from the vehicle requirements. And we can simply raise the Life support cost by 2 to compensate. But do the lack of CQ have a cost we dont know about? What about the above post that concerns critical damage of CQ are absent?

How many things are tied into CQ?

[Phoenix-D]

A ship without CQ components will behave the same as a ship which has had all its CQ components destroyed- it'll only move at half speed, its defense and attack modifers will be cut in half, it will NOT be able to cloak, etc.

Even if the design doesn't require CQ.

[AngleWyrm]

Yes, critical damage is affecting 0-crew ship.

I put twelve engines into a frigate with no quarters (0-crew mod), and in combat it only moved at a speed of 6. The attacker, also with twelve identical engines, moved at 12.

[Suicide Junkie]

All you have to do is add 1 point of CQ ability to the hull, then it will go full speed.

[AngleWyrm]

EDIT: Correction (bad test run)The Master Computers are doing their thing; six engines = six speed.

Just tried a new test with Frigate hull that had no CQ and no Control requirement, plus the added ability of crew quarters 0. So far it acted like a critically injured ship.

EDIT:
Adding the one point of crew count to the hull did make it go full speed, but also made the ship invulnerable to boarding.

Really bizzare:
Just tried adding CQ ability(0) to a shield depleter, and it still didn't avoid the critical 1/2 speed. Maybe zero-crew is the cause of critical? Made Shield Depleter CQ(50) and it worked just like a crew quarters.

This leaves me with one more question: How come I can take over a ship with a Master Computer?

Summary of this test
If crew quarters are made with 0 crew capacity, ship goes critical
Master computers somehow manage to be 0 crew, but don't make the ship go critical
Ships with master computers can be boarded

[AngleWyrm]

Adding the ability 'Master Computer' to a frigate hull made it fly normally (non-critical), and still allowed the boarding parties to take it over. Evidently the boarding parties don't have to destroy a master computer.

And since Toxic Injecters don't work anyway, one could abstract away the whole Bridge/Quarters/LifeSupport thing and simplify the vehiclesizes.txt at the same time.

[Suicide Junkie]

Master computer explicity removes the bridge/lifesupport/crew quarters requirement for moving full speed.