Best way to capture ships?

[Goatrocity]

I've put a good amount of hours into this game but I've never explored the aspect of capturing ships. What's the best way to do it? My issue is that I'll get the ship's shield down and then the hull almost all the way down but they never seem to bail. Do I need to comm them when they're that low and ask them to surrender?

[Axeface]

S and M ships is just shoot at them and damage their hull, sometimes they bail. A script runs each time you hit them to see if they bail so try to do as little damage as possible. L and XL ships need to be boarded with groups of marines, you do that by right clicking a target and pressing board - your ship (or a ship in your squad) needs marines onboard.

[Goatrocity]

Ok, then it's time I make the hard decision to make one of the factions my enemies. I've been trading for awhile so almost every faction likes me.

[Axeface]

You can capture SCA ships with no penalty or punishment if you want, just make sure to scan them to reveal their SCA faction before firing.

[Set-115689]

For s fighter ships use an s ship and get some light smart missiles. Larger ships get a penalty vs s ships. Fly around 2 km from ship or what ever works for you and fire 5-6 light smart missiles. If the ship bails it's yours. If the ship has more hull left or all the missiles didn't hit then maybe fire some more volleys. You might get 2+ bailed ships with 22 missiles. Beams on s ships work also.

For m frigate ships beams work also. Again use s or m ships to capture m ships.

For large ships blow up the engines. Use heavy swarm missiles, torpedoes or even guns to quickly destroy it's turrets. Target the ship and press home to cycle through the surface elements. You can assign missiles to different groups and cycle through launchers to make stuff faster and avoid cool downs.

Traders and miner ships seem to be harder to make bail than fighting ships. Maybe hit point related?

[trooperrob]

for large you need marines, for s/m try removing the shields, then repeatedly taking small chunks out of the hull, the more hits you take out of the hill the more you give him the chance of persuading him to bail, try taking a gun that only does a little damage and switching to that once shields are down

[Big Papa]

Find a marauder minotaur raider, you can use the ship you start with, a small ship will do, I use pulse lasers. all the minotaur raiders are pirates. scan it with police scanner if it doesn't identify as scale plate pact. then get behind it and blast the shields off and about 10% of hull, then use controlled bursts and slowly work down the hull. stay behind it because the turrets on the minotaur can be powerful. you can save your game before and load if it doesnt bail and try again.

[Goatrocity]

Hell yeah, really appreciate your guys suggestions! I'm going to work on this stuff tomorrow!

[Jabras]

To obtain an L / XL ship with the least possible penalty (damage to the ship, loss of reputation, loss of boarding team, authorities interference...)
Process as follows: provide 2 ships one for boarding the other to maneuver the operation.
1st scan the ship to obtain its resistance to the boarding and provide an adequate boarding team, it will always be necessary for your intervention force to be higher than the resistance for a guaranteed success.
Secondly immobilize the ship, for this purpose use an emp magnetic bomb (if they have been debugged) and provide 2 sticky bombs to pass the ship's hull at least 95%. this way you will not need to destroy the shields. If the emp bombs do not work directly attack the engines sporadically to lower them to 30% and thus prevent the ship from turning enemy. The ship will then stop to repair on its own.
3rd order your other ship to start the collision. Personally I configure in maximum risk to get the whole ship without damage. This is where it gets tricky because the ship will go over as an enemy and will thus fire up your boarding podes. You will need if you wish to distract the turrets to have the least possible loss ... once every podes arrived you will just have to wait until the end and pray that everything will go well.
In this way you will hardly see any loss of reputation or loss of staff at all and you will get a ship with all these turrets and structurally at 95%. you will also be able to get ships like the colossus in Prime Argon in this way. But you will really have to prepare your operation because it will be much more complicated than a classic boarding.

[Goatrocity]

Originally posted by Jabras:

To obtain an L / XL ship with the least possible penalty (damage to the ship, loss of reputation, loss of boarding team, authorities interference...)
Process as follows: provide 2 ships one for boarding the other to maneuver the operation.
1st scan the ship to obtain its resistance to the boarding and provide an adequate boarding team, it will always be necessary for your intervention force to be higher than the resistance for a guaranteed success.
Secondly immobilize the ship, for this purpose use an emp magnetic bomb (if they have been debugged) and provide 2 sticky bombs to pass the ship's hull at least 95%. this way you will not need to destroy the shields. If the emp bombs do not work directly attack the engines sporadically to lower them to 30% and thus prevent the ship from turning enemy. The ship will then stop to repair on its own.
3rd order your other ship to start the collision. Personally I configure in maximum risk to get the whole ship without damage. This is where it gets tricky because the ship will go over as an enemy and will thus fire up your boarding podes. You will need if you wish to distract the turrets to have the least possible loss ... once every podes arrived you will just have to wait until the end and pray that everything will go well.
In this way you will hardly see any loss of reputation or loss of staff at all and you will get a ship with all these turrets and structurally at 95%. you will also be able to get ships like the colossus in Prime Argon in this way. But you will really have to prepare your operation because it will be much more complicated than a classic boarding.

That might be a bit much for me since I haven't ever boarded yet, lol.

[stomper123]

just send the marines to board either a ship that is stopped (behind the engine area is best spot here) or from in front while they fly incures 0 rep loss and only takes 20 or so min for them to go thru hull and most of time no losses on them going to the ship

[...]

What a bunch of landlubbers!

Being a pirate is srs bznz.

First of all, bail checks occur once every 30s when hull damage is done.

So bring all your guns to bear to get the shields down, and then switch to a different loadout with only a single low/mid damage weapon. Ping their hull a couple times, wait 30s, and repeat.

It also doesn't hurt to demand they surrender now and again.

Now, different races have different stat allocations. Teladi, for instance, are more likely to have bonus management. Paranid are most likely to have bonus morale. That makes them take longer to bail on average.

Medium ships will slowly heal part of the damage that you do to them back. This means that you can more or less definitely bail them, if you're willing to put enough effort into it. Sometimes I feel the need to blow them up for their recalcitrance, in order to send a message. What, do they think this is some kind of a game??

@set - I believe you are correct that it's hull related. I want to say that you receive a bonus to bail checks when your max hull is smaller than theirs. I cannot recall for sure because I bail everything with a Nemesis or Minotaur regardless.

Jabras advice would probably work, but where are you going to get huge stashes of EMP and sticky bombs? Crafting? Hells bells! Are you a chemist or a pirate?

The solution to all problems in the X universe is the application of appropriate force.

Blow up the turrets. Blow up the engines. Capture the ship. Once you dock a new captain on it, it'll convalesce enough to limp to an equipment dock. You'll probably end up swapping the loadout anyway, so who cares about the turrets. As for paying a couple hundred K to repair the hull and engines, so what? You just got a X/L ship that would have cost 10s of M for 100s of K. I'd call that a good trade.

As for reputation loss, who cares? Just have a few factions where you're doing enough trading to more than make up for a few turrets and deployables. If other factions want to get all butt hurt, well that's fine. You can either conquer them and annex their sectors or simply be completely unconstrained in the liberation of their assets.

It might even almost make the game interesting to co-exist with a hostile major faction or two, unless you've been having trouble with the SCA or Xenon already. Some people do. They're probably good, tax-paying citizens that pay for their ships and their blueprints. They probably need 3B+ credit investment to achieve Great Power status, and they have to come by it honestly.

A pirate probably only needs around 800M, and s/he can literally start earning millions of credits in their first hour of game time from any start.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Goatrocity]

Originally posted by ...:

What a bunch of landlubbers!

Being a pirate is srs bznz.

First of all, bail checks occur once every 30s when hull damage is done.

So bring all your guns to bear to get the shields down, and then switch to a different loadout with only a single low/mid damage weapon. Ping their hull a couple times, wait 30s, and repeat.

It also doesn't hurt to demand they surrender now and again.

Now, different races have different stat allocations. Teladi, for instance, are more likely to have bonus management. Paranid are most likely to have bonus morale. That makes them take longer to bail on average.

Medium ships will slowly heal part of the damage that you do to them back. This means that you can more or less definitely bail them, if you're willing to put enough effort into it. Sometimes I feel the need to blow them up for their recalcitrance, in order to send a message. What, do they think this is some kind of a game??

@set - I believe you are correct that it's hull related. I want to say that you receive a bonus to bail checks when your max hull is smaller than theirs. I cannot recall for sure because I bail everything with a Nemesis or Minotaur regardless.

Jabras advice would probably work, but where are you going to get huge stashes of EMP and sticky bombs? Crafting? Hells bells! Are you a chemist or a pirate?

The solution to all problems in the X universe is the application of appropriate force.

Blow up the turrets. Blow up the engines. Capture the ship. Once you dock a new captain on it, it'll convalesce enough to limp to an equipment dock. You'll probably end up swapping the loadout anyway, so who cares about the turrets. As for paying a couple hundred K to repair the hull and engines, so what? You just got a X/L ship that would have cost 10s of M for 100s of K. I'd call that a good trade.

As for reputation loss, who cares? Just have a few factions where you're doing enough trading to more than make up for a few turrets and deployables. If other factions want to get all butt hurt, well that's fine. You can either conquer them and annex their sectors or simply be completely unconstrained in the liberation of their assets.

It might even almost make the game interesting to co-exist with a hostile major faction or two, unless you've been having trouble with the SCA or Xenon already. Some people do. They're probably good, tax-paying citizens that pay for their ships and their blueprints. They probably need 3B+ credit investment to achieve Great Power status, and they have to come by it honestly.

A pirate probably only needs around 800M, and s/he can literally start earning millions of credits in their first hour of game time from any start.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ha! Quality post! Love it! I'm about to hop in now and my rep is high enough with factions that I can afford to take a hit there. I have a bunch of Nemesis already so it looks like I'll take one of those out to get the ships. I'll just need to get more marines than crew.

[...]

While I often use a Nemesis to disable L ships, I use a Minotaur Raider with 13 marines to cap them. Using a small, elite strike force was helpful because, back in the day, you used to have to transfer each marine back manually. I think I could probably sue Egosoft if I ever develop carpel tunnel syndrome. :)

I want to say that, after 3 dozen or so caps, the combat rating of the team tends to stay in the 550-750 range, with periodic attrition. Even the best defended AI ships tend not to clear 300. (That's L ships. XL ships are another matter entirely.)

There's also the Zapp Brannigan school of thought, where you could use something like a Selene Vanguard loaded with marines for the actual boarding. In this case, you're happy to sacrifice as many green marines as necessary to get the job done. No muss, no fuss. Maybe a bloody mess, but it's not like YOU actually have to go on the ship. Eventually, you'll end up with a team of a bakers' dozen veterans that you could transfer to a Minotaur.

[Goatrocity]

Sacraficing innocent marines for the glory of my empire? Yes!