Tips for boarding vessels?

[Midas]

The boarding system seems very clunky, to put it mildly. My allies will blow up ships even while my marines are onboard, and I have to micro-manage my units to stop them from blowing up the target while the boarding is going on. Yet I also have to get it damaged enough to make enough crew bail that the marines don't have an impossible fight, so I have to somehow get the target to low health, while also stopping it from being destroyed.

Between having to juggle leaving the target ship with some defenses so it can fight off my own damn allies, and having to manually turn on/off every single AI-controlled gun in my entire fleet, Boarding has become such a monumental chore that I don't even want to bother with it anymore, even under ideal circumstances.

Is there something I'm missing to make this more bearable, or is it just an awful system?

[NoDMoD]

I do it all the time and I don't find it that hard.

First off, I don't have a "fleet".

I have one dedicated boarding ship with 60 crew. Once you have elites boarding, the ships health doesnt't matter so much.

Once you board set all ships to "maintain distance" in the boarding window. If you have any more ships in the fleet, once you board, select them and remove orders.

My boarding ship has two fighters, that are set to docked. Once I board I set them to remove orders, so they stay docked, they only launch if I tell them to, to destroy laser towers.

That's pretty much it.

I also chose to board in empty sectors, no police, no patrols, no attacks.

Else I try to board on the outer side of a sector, where there isn't much traffic.

You can also try to lure your enemies to a spot that's etter for boarding.

[Asmosis]

Go around stations on foot and hire 2-3* marines. You'll only need 20-25 (i recommend a Cobra if you have the DLC). This will improve things immensely.

Most ships only have 20-30% crew capacity, so focus on things like destroyers, miners etc to get started. Carriers and the top end transport ships tend to have closer to 100 crew, you'll either need an elite 25, or a larger boarding crew for that.

Dont try to board ships that are in combat till you know what your doing.

You only need a ship to reach 80% hull for the final phase of boarding to proceed, and shields can be at 100%. If you're boarding things in combat, you'll want to use thermal desintegrators and not let shields reach 0%. Once boarding starts, the ship hull can go above 80% without issue.

You can then use your ship as a shield to absorb shots from whatever is shooting at it if its taking too much damage. You can also ram them to throw off their aim (or ram the sip your boarding if you blew up its engines, to send it moving). Ramming laser towers can be hilariously fun. Small ships do recover a lot faster though.

Also, you dont need to destroy the engines. Just reducing them below 30% HP renders them inoperable. This combined with careful deployment of marines lets you board a ship without suffering any rep penalties.

You can take it a step further and board ships in their home systems, provided the ship and any autonomous distress drones dont get within 30km of a station you also wont get a rep hit. Those drones are nimble though, you need to watch your lower radar like a hawk (and listen to the pilot).

[gorgofdoom]

@Asmosis

"You only need a ship to reach 80% hull for the final phase of boarding to proceed"

This is not correct. Boarding will proceed regardless of the enemy ships hull if set up properly. (breaching will proceed even if you set it improperly after some time)

With high level marines (specifically 1.5x the enemy boarding strength) you can board any ship anywhere without firing a shot. No shooting = no rep loss whatsoever. this strategy ensures zero risk to your boarding pods as the mark will not be concerned with them.

shooting your mark is only profitable when they have a significant advantage in boarding power. That being you can force them to bail, reducing their total crew power.

[Midas]

So basically either get used to jumping through hoops, or have overwhelming boarding power so you can finish up before anything goes wrong.

[NoDMoD]

Originally posted by Midas:

So basically either get used to jumping through hoops, or have overwhelming boarding power so you can finish up before anything goes wrong.

Well, if that's too much effort for you, then just don't do it. Plenty other ways to make money.

I enjoy boarding most and do not mind micro management. At the contrary, small fleets are fun to micro manage in certain situations, for me at least.

[SpaceToast]

I literally just fly up with a Oddy or any destroyer right up on there rear and destroy engines and a few turrets covering that side, then dump marines, its that easy. You can do this with any ship, M or L.

[Scutum]

At first I used a corvette to disable enemy ship, than few M traders with marines to board. For a destroyer 40 marines is always enough, so 2 M traders ( I used Boa, 20 marines ) suffice. Cheap and easy. Best to do this in unclaimed sectors like Heretic's end.

[Set-115689]

Board ships in areas where there's no allies on the radar.

Don't bother boarding ships in some sectors due to allies blowing ships up quickly and repeatedly.

If you scan a pirate ship for the first time they run away. If they are headed to deep space let them run for a while.

If you leave the sector while friendly ships are attacking your target the ship you are trying to capture might survive.

Easier to capture ships in enemy sectors since you can just blow up enemies.

Fly/personally manage the ship that releases the marines.

After capturing a ship teleport out of the sector. The ship might get stuck on escape pods, etc... You might get into a travel speed/stop travel speed cycle. Ships repair faster out of sector I think.

[Worzel]

quality of marines over quantity.

I believe they fight in grps of 5 and cycle through the team, and based on respective combat power casualties occur.

You can quite easily take a destroyer / large person ship with 50 - 90 people on it with 25 good marines and no losses (1 ship, a cobra). The dull bit is levelling them on miners. I like HOP because they hold fewer people, easier to train. Gas HOP has nasty turrets, send 5 good ones not 25. split miners tend to be low pop too

Find a populated refinery, wait for them to start docking

You'll wanna save and practice flying up behind into blind spots and dumping the marines on very strong / very strong, but there's no rep loss, no fiddly crap, but once your 25 marine group has over 1k boarding points you're laughing (until they get annihilated by rng pod spawn, so do save).

Much of this is dependent on patience and waiting to see engines go off etc, but its far less fiddly and rep damaging

[arrak]

Git Gud :)

Once you get the hang of it, its Mega Fun. That is if you are an adrennalin junky
like me. Atacking Freinly's just ads flavour, and more adrennalin with choreagraphed
splt second reaction.

There are rules to minimize reputation hits to close to unnoticeable when
eliminating freandly "unfreandly's" :)

Most of my destroyers and XL fleet are ships that i all captured. Except for my
Raptures which i baught. (Raptors are still an unsolved challenge for me)

If one gives all the "tips" on boarding, one shall need a big book to write it down.
to also include all the different strategacal views too, depending on situation

Edit: Ideal ships to be boarded, hides in certain places on the far outskirts of
a sector.
I have average 5 advanced Sats in each Sector ;)

[robbieray72]

what i usually do is a simple process, i come up and scan first so i know how many military i will need..

then, depends on how many they have, i keep a transport ship like a cheap frighter with just troops, i take out the engines all of them completely so it cannot move.. then i work around ship taking out its weapons, once done i then proceed to call in troops, as i move around and keep engines and weapons down, once they start breaking in, i back up and just wait, let them repair whatever .. very simple easy to do..

i use a corvette with gats, very easy to get ships oer n over that way.. i only keep the behemoths.. the rest i sell

[Midas]

Originally posted by robbieray72:

what i usually do is a simple process, i come up and scan first so i know how many military i will need..

then, depends on how many they have, i keep a transport ship like a cheap frighter with just troops, i take out the engines all of them completely so it cannot move.. then i work around ship taking out its weapons, once done i then proceed to call in troops, as i move around and keep engines and weapons down, once they start breaking in, i back up and just wait, let them repair whatever .. very simple easy to do..

i use a corvette with gats, very easy to get ships oer n over that way.. i only keep the behemoths.. the rest i sell

That is basically what I've been doing, I was just hoping there was some kind of command or order I could issue where the rest of my fleet wouldn't interfere. This is less about going out of my way to board ships, and more about doing it opportunistically when I see something I want, or near the end of a battle when there is just a few ships to finish off. It makes more sense to capture them than destroy them, but it's such a chore to actually do.

[Asmosis]

Originally posted by gorgofdoom:

@Asmosis

"You only need a ship to reach 80% hull for the final phase of boarding to proceed"

This is not correct. Boarding will proceed regardless of the enemy ships hull if set up properly. (breaching will proceed even if you set it improperly after some time)

That's not my experience. I've had 2400 boarding strength vs 50 boarding strength, on SETA for 15 minutes while i waited for the ship to move to somewhere safe to fire. As soon as i reduced it to 80% i got the comms message they were prepped for boarding and 30 seconds later they proceeded.

You do need a minimum amount of hull damage for the 3rd stage to proceed. Either that, or you need to wait literal hours for them to proceed.

Originally posted by Midas:

So basically either get used to jumping through hoops, or have overwhelming boarding power so you can finish up before anything goes wrong.

If you want to steal the car from the garage while the owner is watching TV inside, yes.

If not its
shoot engines
shoot turrets
board
done.
The first steps are optional, but if you don't want hoops that's the straight forward approach, and what i usually do with SCA destroyers.

[Lapo]

1- Get a Split Cobra, they can carry 25 marines. You don't need another ship except for XL ships.

2- Get decent marines. Split are always 1 star better than the others at this. You can also hire for free up to 3 star marines from any base you own that has an habitat or an administrative module.

3- Do a practice run to get used to the system.
For practice it is best to find a Teladi Destroyer, ideally belonging to the SCA. Park yourself in front of the middle forward hole. There is a giant blind zone there that no turret will cover. Use the pause key in your keyboard to halt time. Right click on the destroyer, use the boarding function, set both options to "very strong" then start the operation and hit pause again to continue the game. The marines will board unopposed since they are coming from a blind spot. Otional: Use the Cobra's weapons to lower the hull to 80% to speed up the breaching phase. The destroyer can't shoot back anyway since you are in its blind spot. Wait until your marines get you a new toy. Transfer back the marines, go get replacements and keep practicing.

4- Do it for real with other ships without such glaring flaws in their weapon coverage, keep piling up the dough until you can afford a shipyard.

5- Profitsss!!!

[Asmosis]

If your deploying satellites around to keep track of other stuff, you can set yourself a custom alert for SCA>L sized ships to get an alert every time there's an easy target flying about.

Your logs will continue to track the SCA ship current location even if it disguises itself.