Whats Cheaper, Buying a TL or Capping a TL?

[Marc1314]

OK so i want a TL and the cheapest one is the Split TL which is about 18 mil.
Would it be any cheaper to cap one?
What would it cost to buy and train enough marines to board and cap it plus the price of a ship to launch the marines?
I'm at war with the Argon so i would probably try and cap one of theirs.

[FourGreenFields]

Well, TLs are a good way to train the combat-skill of marines. And you'll likely want marines anyway - so you could say the cost of capping is "0" (or just the price of any missiles/ammo shot).

But until the marines are ready, it'll take quite some time. Maybe too much time.

[Marc1314]

i've got enough cash to buy one now but...
any ideas how many hours (real-time) it would take to fully train a marine?
would it be possible to cap one with untrained marines?

[Cheshire Cat]

If you are not planning to use your marines all the time to cap other ships, then buy split tl and do station building missions. this way you will get your money back and build reputation quite fast. To train one marine completely to all 5* costs around 5mil and training takes a lot of time. that being said, I think to capture a tl you could do fine with 3* marines. just don't forget to save.

[FourGreenFields]

How much time it takes depends on the training you want. Engineering (or whatever minimised the hull-damage) I'd allways max for every single marine. Then you need marines with high hacking-skill and high mechanics skill - which I'd train to 100 as well, even though TLs can be capped with much less.

If you cut down a little on the training it may actually not take that long though.

[DrSuperEvil]

To cap a commonwealth TL you need >710 total fighting skill so can be done with 8 good marines and you need 4 with a mechanical skill of 53-80 (80 is guarenteed hull entry) and 2 with a hacking skill of 31. Just make sure you use ion disrupters to strip off any anti boarding equipment first.

It is always good to start training marines early since you need 30 to cap xenon capital ships. Train up the fight skill on TM and M6 ships. As to whether it is cheaper to buy or board a TL is obvious since to max all skills of a marine costs 936,000-1,560,000 + about 100-200k initial cost credits although you can start boarding TLs with far less trained marines and the cheapest TL (Elephant) is 10,687,000 credits. Once you have the marines though you can keep collecting TLs to keep or sell at no additional cost. The ships boarded during training of the fight skill also help cover the training costs with M6s being worth about 4 million each to sell.

An alternative path is to get mechanical skill to only 40-55 to cap a military M7M and use boarding pods.

[Lymark]

Originally posted by DrSuperEvil:

To cap a commonwealth TL you need >710 total fighting skill so can be done with 8 good marines and you need 4 with a mechanical skill of 53-80 (80 is guarenteed hull entry) and 2 with a hacking skill of 31. Just make sure you use ion disrupters to strip off any anti boarding equipment first.

Where can I find more info about the total skill points/number of marines needed for boarding certain ships? Wiki only has a 'Min Mech Skill for Hull Breaching' table, it says space walking a TL would need 85 mech points, but it never mentions about needing 4x mech marines or 8 fighting marines. I'd use some more detailed info so I won't screw up lol

[Fedora01]

Originally posted by Lymark:

Originally posted by DrSuperEvil:

To cap a commonwealth TL you need >710 total fighting skill so can be done with 8 good marines and you need 4 with a mechanical skill of 53-80 (80 is guarenteed hull entry) and 2 with a hacking skill of 31. Just make sure you use ion disrupters to strip off any anti boarding equipment first.

Where can I find more info about the total skill points/number of marines needed for boarding certain ships? Wiki only has a 'Min Mech Skill for Hull Breaching' table, it says space walking a TL would need 85 mech points, but it never mentions about needing 4x mech marines or 8 fighting marines. I'd use some more detailed info so I won't screw up lol

I'm not an expert at boarding but I believe the general stategy for capping ships is to just throw a bunch of marines at something and see who lives. Plus because of the rng behind it all it's best to be safe than sorry 10/10 times.

[Ketraar]

In DrSuperEvil's cost assessment there is no reparing cost mentioned, since boarded Ships will have quite a bit of damage that will need to be repaired, which in turns is a cost either in lots of time or credits.

MFG

Ketraar

[FourGreenFields]

Originally posted by Ketraar:

In DrSuperEvil's cost assessment there is no reparing cost mentioned, since boarded Ships will have quite a bit of damage that will need to be repaired, which in turns is a cost either in lots of time or credits.

MFG

Ketraar

Unless max engineering skill for all marines. If you manage to keep the shields just barely up, you can cap ships with 100% health (iIrc; may have been 99%, but anyway).

[DrSuperEvil]

On the egosoft wiki is a guide on the boarding mechanics: https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence/display/X3WIKI/Boarding+Hints . The numbers listed under the ships is the minimum needed to succeed. For 100% chance you need to multiple the number by 1.49x. 84 is for Terran TLs with a Hull Polarising Device anti boarding equipment if using boarding pods to board. Dont know where you get 85 for space walking from.

When boarding each group of up to 5 marines uses the mechanical skill of the best two marines in that group to enter the hull. This means a group of 8 is grouped as 5+3 so needs 4 marines with mechanical. If you used 21 marines to boad that is 5+5+5+4+2 so 10 marines with mechanical are needed as stated in the wiki.

With the fighting the minimum total amount needed for no casualties is 525 but for guarenteed no casualties 710 is recommended. This means you need at least 6-8 marines which still means 2 groups so 4 marines with mechanical. The boarding strength is the sum of all the marines fighting on the decks at once.

Again if the ship has anti boarding equipment you will need to remove it with Ion Disrupters.

The min boarding requirements are for >0% success while the max is for 98%. Never use marines with less than 40 fight skill unless compenasted for by a really high fight skill one.

It is cheap enough to bring marines up to 50 engineering for less than 200k invested so ships only take 30% damage and you can repair one boarded ship by selling a few others. When it comes to TLs there are plenty of civilian ones able to be boarded. There is also a bug where if you load while fighting it will forget to do damage.

[Marc1314]

I think for my first TL it will be better just to buy it but i should also start buying a couple of marines and start training them. If they cant be trained in combat then i'll buy the ones with the highest combat rating to help with their first mission.
I'll probably go for the split elephant which is 17,415,102c. It only has 34,000 units of cargospace but its pretty nippy for a capital ship with a speed of 131 m/s

[DrSuperEvil]

If you are serious about boarding then you need to get the first marines training early so you can start capping ships to pay for the second generation of marines training. If you already have the credits it is quicker to buy a TL. Ship prices are bested on how high your race rank is.

[Marc1314]

I never knew that ship prices depended on race rank
thanks!

[Ketraar]

Originally posted by Marc1314:

I never knew that ship prices depended on race rank
thanks!

They dont, there is no variation in prices based on ranks for any ware. Ship prices are the same anywhere too and like any dock they dont have stock fluctuation.

MFG

Ketraar

[DrSuperEvil]

The price to buy, sell and repair ships does change based on the race rank you have with the ship yard owner race. That is why it is cheaper to buy ships if you have a higher race rank.