Marines mortality rate

[Kenshi]

So I've been doing some boarding lately, finally got a vet and then he instantly died the next mission before any recruits. Ok, so after a few more boarded ships I got 2 more vets, this time I save right before doing the boarding.

After running the boarding simulation 10 times I can say that it seems the mortality rate of your more experienced marines is much higher than recruits. More often than not both of the vets died before any recruits, 1 would always die in all the simulations I ran and this was against a defending party of 7-12 (my side had 14 recruits 2 vets, most recruits have 1 star boarding).

Each boarding attempt ended in success with 2-4 casualties overall.

So I suppose this begs the question: how are we even supposed to be able to get elite marines if they die more easily than recruits when they become veterans? It's like after all that training the recruits upgrade to become redshirts.

[IRWorm]

I was just about to post about this. Even with double the number of vets (48) to recruits (24) in my boarding op, the vets all die or most of them do yet more recruits than vets survive. By the end of stage two, recruits had 8 casualties, vets had 30. It's not even close! No wonder I've never earned an elite marine.

[bloodymonarch]

Originally posted by Kenshi:

So I've been doing some boarding lately, finally got a vet and then he instantly died the next mission before any recruits. Ok, so after a few more boarded ships I got 2 more vets, this time I save right before doing the boarding.

After running the boarding simulation 10 times I can say that it seems the mortality rate of your more experienced marines is much higher than recruits. More often than not both of the vets died before any recruits, 1 would always die in all the simulations I ran and this was against a defending party of 7-12 (my side had 14 recruits 2 vets, most recruits have 1 star boarding).

Each boarding attempt ended in success with 2-4 casualties overall.

So I suppose this begs the question: how are we even supposed to be able to get elite marines if they die more easily than recruits when they become veterans? It's like after all that training the recruits upgrade to become redshirts.

Don't start boarding with recruits. Go to Split space or Terran and recruit your marines from there. About 1/3rd of the recruited marines will be vets straight away. Fire or send the recruits to other ships and keep hiring more marines until you have as many vets as you want.

Begin boarding things that don't have a lot of enemy marines or skilled marines on board. You can see how many marines are on board an enemy vessel after scanning it, right clicking on it and going to information. In the crew section you'll see the skill and amount of marines on board. You can do this without any reputation loss, so pick your targets at first.

The goal is to get a chunk of experienced 3* or higher marines so you can start bringing on a lot more veterans to get trained along side of them. Right now I run around with a Falx and two argon frigates as my boarding team of 50 or so marines. They can capture anything with minimal losses at this point. The vets that die are replaced by more vets.

[Flavalicious]

The only thing ive noticed about boarding is how high your casualties run if the enemy ship is a warship. Even if your rocking 60-90 marines versus their 30, ive had to send a second wave in some cases lol. Damn Rattlesnakes put up a fight :P

[bloodymonarch]

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

The only thing ive noticed about boarding is how high your casualties run if the enemy ship is a warship. Even if your rocking 60-90 marines versus their 30, ive had to send a second wave in some cases lol. Damn Rattlesnakes put up a fight :P

It has nothing to do with what kind of ship, but rather the quality of marines that are on board the enemy ship and their quantity.

You're semi correct because those types of ships can have higher quality marines on board. All the way up to Elite class.

[iPossumX]

Realize this is an older post, better late than never I guess. This is long, but its interesting... and still seems to be a relevant issue. I just boarded an SCA Plunderer Phoenix Vanguard, one of those giant butt hole looking ships. They had 12 onboard and I have to assume at least some of them are service crew as they are actively repairing one of the engines. Still, it says defending crew is 11. Hull at 49, all turrets/shields are smacked. I launched 36 marines out of 4 ships at it, 8 vets, 28 recruits. Board strength: 644, defense strength: 288. Took the ship with 1 vet and 25 recruits left?! Repeated the same boarding action 6 times, one time I didn't even take the ship which is outright preposterous. I never ended up with more than 2 vets and typically between 16-22 recruits. That ♥♥♥♥ ain't right.

Then I thought, man, it'd be cool if you could arrange your marines into something like fire teams. And then I thought, well, you kind of can. Originally my 8 vets were spread out across 2 ships. Ship A had 7 vets and 2 recruits, ship B had 1 vet and 7 recruits. The other ships (call them C and D for the sake of continuity) had the rest of the recruits split more or less evenly. So, if you're still reading, I sent 2 vets to each ship and split the recruits up evenly. 2 vets, 7 recruits on every ship. "Irene!".... 6 vets kia, 16 recruits kia. The fire teams didn't seem to make a difference.

Now, I love the science and I'd love to be able to sit here and run this forever and figure it out, but I have a universe to conquer. So, I decided to try one more operation. I was going to put all 8 vets on one ship, and distribute all 28 recruits across the others, launch the 28 recruits, let them breach, then launch the vets. BUT, the 28 recruits had an attack strength of 260 compared to the defenders 288. My single vet pod had an attack strength of 384. So I kept this arrangement and let all of them go, one last hurrah! Took the defenders down from 11 to 5 with no freindly casualties! I thought, oh yea, mfer, we got it! Keep the vets together! Then 6 of my vets died in 2 seconds without killing another enemy. Their 5 went to zero and I walked out with 2 vets and ALL 28 F'ING RECRUITS ALIVE I DONT GET IT!
Done.

[Zalzany]

Its the fact you got a couple vets, and AI is using mostly vet marines in its crew, or its pirate ship that has been active longer, so even the service crew has high moral making it harder to just plow threw them. The trick to getting good boards is just pound on the ships till more enemies bail out. Like that is it like the first 5 ships I board are normally SCA I use for training use, and to make some money, I leave one sheild generator intact, and I just lower hp to about 50% and pound on the sheilds every time I let them recharge a bit, after disable its turrets and engines. Do that for a while its annoying 30 skilled crew widdles down to 11, and my 40 rookie marines how can't tie their own boot laces can board with only like 3 deaths lol

Also keep pounding on the sheilds and touch up the ships HP while they are boarding it ♥♥♥♥♥ with moral making them die or flee faster. Do this like 5 times you got like 12-19 vets now and suffered very little deaths training them just wasted like 3 hours doing it. I mean in real lfie a ship baording is like a siege either you gonna expect loses that are decent in number or you need an elite crack team. Having one good vet adn 50 rookies who can't be trusted to tie their own boots normally results in them getting the vet killed just saying.

I mean defenders got home field advantage, don't have to blow or hack any thing in the ship plus got cameras, and god knows what else in the ship, while you marines are going in blind where every corner they turn down is ambush point, and ever door way one as well. Ship boardings are not the same as clearing a house its tighter quarters, bulk head doors would be all over, lots of choke points and whole thing is air tight. Also suprise comando night raids, they saw the damn boarding pods and in most boarding in this game you fire on them first so they are already in battle ready positions lol

[Axeface]

Just send recruits, the feature is not well designed and you will never get elites. Ive captured countless Asgards with morons purchased for minimum credits, it is not a system that is well designed and you should not put any thought into it. Throw redshirts at things and close your eyes.

[Zalzany]

Oh and honestly that is job that should have a higher mortality rate then freaking space fighter pilots. Like you guys think this is bad, in real life mortality rates are way higher for this kind of work. I mean fighters are cool, but in reality like ww2 the mortality rate for bombers and fighters was just isanely high it was worst then infantry numbers. Like in the end it was people who could train in war time the most fresh meat that did the best. US aces were rotated out still really bad odds of living long, but Japanese and German Aces were pretty much all dead, or pows by the last year of the war, and they had no time nor enough mats or safe spaces to train new ones...

So honestly expect them to die, and expect to keep buying new "redshirts' as axeface reminds us that is really what are marines are. They die faster then anything else like I coudl see escape pods for fighters, would horrible slow down game to recover pilots, but boarders yeah its really good odds your gonna die, before they can think about retreating. I mean hell even the escape pods would be locked, and paths back to theor baording pods not safe in event of a them lossing.

[Ryno]

In my experience the trick to not losing marines is to do most of the work clearing out the ship yourself by scaring the onboard crew causing them to eject over time. If you can be patient and whittle them down, only having a few of their marines left onboard then your marines will get experience and be much less likely to die. Just kill the engines, get the hull below 75% and eventually they will start ejecting in escape pods.

Currently I have a Falx of 23 marines that are all 4 and 5 *'s because I wait until my target ship has 3 or less marines left. Then the amount of service crew doesn't matter. Yes, it may take like 2 hours to capture an Asgard this way but can be worth it to avoid losses. This is my style but others have their own.

Another trick I found to increase their odds is to set your marines as service crew until you are ready to capture. This way they gain experience as service crew to help fix your newly captured ship but they also gain morale which helps their odds of staying alive.

Hope this helps.