Mission needs me to capture

[Muton]

So Im trying to capture a ship, It's a cruiser like mine. I knocked it down it to maybe 40% health and many of its systems destroyed. ..It has a lot of marines on board, like 25, not sure if my ship and my other ship has enough transporters/marines together. Anyways, my other ship is ordered to capture it as well. It sent some marines over as well.. But then it fired 4 photons at it and blew it up.. Just wondering what the best plan is to capture it..and how to prevent my sister ship from blowing it up.. We have to keep knocking its shields back down to transport so we have to fire at it once in awhile I believe. Ive never had to capture a ship with more than 6 marines before and taking on 25. I should probably set both ships to capture right in the beginning? but it can keep dishing out a lot of damage if Im not dealing damage back waiting around for all the marines

[kalnaren]

Set weapons to disable and keep hammering. Tell your buddy ship to do the same.

[Muton]

Well that worked..thanks. .Disable kills lots of marines too..If Im up against a big ship I'll try disable next time to knock out systems before going for hull

[kalnaren]

Originally posted by Muton:

Well that worked..thanks. .Disable kills lots of marines too..If Im up against a big ship I'll try disable next time to knock out systems before going for hull

You won't have any more success doing it that way. You won't be able to use either your photons or your drones.

Better way is to 'Miza' concept your damage. Don't fire everything in single, large volleys. Spread your fire over several seconds on a downed shield. That way you score far more hits on weapons and warp power systems. I can't remember what counts as a "turn" in SFC.. something like 2.3 or 2.5 seconds at the default game speed. Whenever possible spread damage over multiple "turns" rather than alpha striking everything in a single turn.

This is a carry over concept from SFB. Starfleet Command uses basically the same Damage Allocation Table from SFB with similar rules. IIRC its mentioned in the manual but almost in passing.

[Muton]

hmm ok

[kalnaren]

Originally posted by Muton:

hmm ok

Yea there's a lot of concepts in the game that aren't that well explained or kind of hidden (as in not reflected in the UI). I only realised just how close these games are to Star Fleet Battles when I started opening stuff in hex editors and looking at the tables in the computer game.