Boarding (Tips and Hints)

[mar3usmc]

As the title says, I am looking for some tips and hints to boarding. I guess the major issue is dealing with the AI. My ships just keep killing the ship, instead of just targeting components, and keeping it disabled.

I don't want to have to micromanage the crap out of boarding. It should just be a simple command to board, and the AI should take care of the rest!

[conrado.lacerda]

Maybe have a wing of fast fighters equipped with Burst Rays to attack the surface elements, and order your boarding ships to keep their distance.

[mar3usmc]

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

Maybe have a wing of fast fighters equipped with Burst Rays to attack the surface elements, and order your boarding ships to keep their distance.

I hate burst rays with a passion. Obvious OP gimmick weapon that makes zero sense. I refuse to use it.

[Pathogenic]

My boarding tips are as follows:

1. Use a M class corvette as a personal ship (Nemesis is very nice for this)
2. Have another ship or two with large crew capacity for marines
3. Scan target
4. Personally destroy engines first (keep other ships away)
5. Personally destroy turrets next
6. After engines and turrets are down, invite other ships to help get shields down
7. Tell your other ships to get lost
8. Destroy some of the large shields, but leave at least one
9. Get hull below 75% (I usually aim for 60%), and keep peppering the target to keep shields above 1%, but below 25%. This causes crew to bail, and is a slow but reliable way to reduce boarding resistance.
10. When enough veteran marines have bailed that you are confident you will have an easy fight, tell your ship with marines to start boarding op.
11. Turn off the turrets of AI controlled ships to prevent them from damaging the hull and potentially destroying the target.

[Bullpup]

A few bugs at play here. First is that when the target shoots out your marine carrying ship turret (eg using missiles) that turret can start firing again when repaired even if you manually set them all to "disarmed". If that turret is plasma, hope you had a save game recently.

If your support ship has plasma turrets these can take ages to stop firing. Like you need to give the order at >80% hull to end up with a target at 45% for a Rattlesnake.

For some reason destroyers can suddenly decide to use their main battery 5 mins into the boarding op killing everyone. So I stopped going for 'very weak' + 'very weak' because it often meant 'very dead'. 49% target hull gives you a chance to quickly save the situation by teleporting over.

OOS like the rest of the game, is on its own set of rules. An op that works IS will fail OOS even if you take out all the turrets IS and you don't take the target hull to 1% or anything near. Haven't tested OOS recently but before anything below "strong" target hull and a boarding force 4x the defending would mean OOS fail.

Not a bug but your marine ship can kill the target if one of the target turrets is repaired and aggros at the marine ship before it has a "board" order. It will just fire back with full force, often destroying the target.

[Ze one]

I've been personally doing it myself, via travel drive fly-by's. Just fling myself at my target, aim below to avoid most guns, pause when I'm nearly scraping our paint and hit the "board" button. Granted the ship will be full strength so you'll be throwing away a lot of marines, but the payday from the ship should more than pay for it.

[GONDAL]

I would actually just do drive-by boarding. Do not bother neutralizing the target because that cuts into your profits. Just warp under them, dump marines, and use your built up momentum to coast out of harm's way

[trooperrob]

I do drive by. I think if you ram the target in warp you risk bouncing the target away from the marines, but if you just launch when they are near it usually works.
There is a glitch at the moment where if you ram at slow speed then release the models lock together for long enough for the marines to get on.


Boarding plunderers at a station when they are waiting for collection cargo drones is good as it stops them from moving, but be aware that strong sector forces can kill the target.

my Boarding ships under ai control in my experience should not have missiles (enabled) , as they discount the damage done by missiles in flight. maybe some of the emp missiles may help, not tried.
Should have lowish but constant damage weapons. Different weapons from your attack - kill it now fleets.



take out the engines especially if the sector forces are weak, and you have problems catching the enemy.

Missile targets and possibly flak are bad.
You might want a missile boat nearby to switch to to take out the turrets, but under your control

Boarding freighters unloading at stations should be considered.
After boarding, remove boarding orders, recall subordinates as many times as needed.

I only have my marines on one ship.
If marines are not launched - the captain may not be high skill. - teleport to the launching ship.

If it fails, you can order the marines to transfer to another ship, but I think you can only order one pod at a time.

If attacking targets, you can use attack my enemy, and select a turret, all your turrets will focus on removing that turret / engine etc.

[Bad Omen]

Use a Barbarossa (on it's own), turrets set to 'missile defence'; go after builders, they are weak, tend to hang out near each other and have a high resale value. They are also slow and cannot escape easily.

Get in front of it to block the escape route; board with 120 marines, you will not lose faction rep.

Keep a captured builder (Mammoth Vanguard), at a shipyard, full of marines. Keep transferring marines to the Barbarossa (120 at a time, have the Mammoth buy replacements) and board multiple builders. Running concurrent boarding missions will rack up the credits with no faction rep loss.

Sometimes you get lucky and a builder will be worth 22m credits, but normally 10-12m each.

[trooperrob]

agree with bad omen. Large transports can be used if you haven't a barb. Scan before to check. I would try to board with at least 200% of his defence strength.
sell the equipment separately, and try selling the ship at different races shipyards they may offer you more.
Aux can also be lucrative if you can find them, but beware the defence forces.
Board with all the marines you can, the cannon fodder soak up damage, boost your chance and get trained.

[EvilVictor]

"fly by" boarding aside the easiest way is to use a good Corvette with a few Split disintegrators mounted. They bypass shields, all shields, so you can leave the target's shields intact and still knock the hull down a bit to speed up stage 2. If you're going after XL ships they should have no problem surviving hits from random NPCs.

It does work on fighters too but I recommend mounting a couple of dumbfire launchers on them to deal with the turrets faster since the small guns are quite a bit weaker. But, doing it in something like a Chimera or Shih makes it really easy to dodge turret fire. More fun IMO but that's subjective.

In either case, the ship full of marines should be alone, not in a fleet, just issue the board command to that ship and tell it to maintain distance. Even if it decides to shoot it should not be able to do much with the target shields still online.

The upside vs. fly-by boarding is that it's much, much faster so you really only need marines to replace losses. If you have all veteran or elite marines you don't need very many to capture a builder and can just use a Cobra and do everything yourself.

If you prefer the fly-by method a Barbarossa can do everything for you without needing any other ship so make one of those your first target. They are the easiest L ship to fly but the view kind of sucks.

Builders and auxiliary ships are the easiest targets with the most return. Builders often have 3-5 mil worth of drones on them and if they have mk3 thrusters there's another 12 mil or so. I don't even mess with the destroyers anymore unless I'm trying to soften up a faction. And carriers generally have more crew and I like to keep as many of my marines alive as possible.

[Despiser]

Originally posted by Pathogenic:

My boarding tips are as follows:

1. Use a M class corvette as a personal ship (Nemesis is very nice for this)
2. Have another ship or two with large crew capacity for marines
3. Scan target
4. Personally destroy engines first (keep other ships away)
5. Personally destroy turrets next
6. After engines and turrets are down, invite other ships to help get shields down
7. Tell your other ships to get lost
8. Destroy some of the large shields, but leave at least one
9. Get hull below 75% (I usually aim for 60%), and keep peppering the target to keep shields above 1%, but below 25%. This causes crew to bail, and is a slow but reliable way to reduce boarding resistance.
10. When enough veteran marines have bailed that you are confident you will have an easy fight, tell your ship with marines to start boarding op.
11. Turn off the turrets of AI controlled ships to prevent them from damaging the hull and potentially destroying the target.

I think that OP was hoping to avoid micromanaging

[Despiser]

Originally posted by mar3usmc:

As the title says, I am looking for some tips and hints to boarding. I guess the major issue is dealing with the AI. My ships just keep killing the ship, instead of just targeting components, and keeping it disabled.

I don't want to have to micromanage the crap out of boarding. It should just be a simple command to board, and the AI should take care of the rest!

It should, but the ai is very tedious to manage. I just blow everything to smithereens.

[Wraith]

The new boron weapons and Argon Ion are both great pirating weapons

Practically no dmg to hull but keep shields down and demoralizing the enemy crew

[mortis7]

So generally we have dozen of ansers in this thread and not a single one answers OP question :)

I would also be interested in remote piracy, but from my experience the AI is very incopetent of doing it on its own.

The first major issue is usually catching its target, as because of travel mode my pilots have a hard time catching its prey :) Boy och boy how the design changes between X3 and X4 can ruin simple things.

[Wraith]

Originally posted by mortis7:

So generally we have dozen of ansers in this thread and not a single one answers OP question :)

I would also be interested in remote piracy, but from my experience the AI is very incopetent of doing it on its own.

The first major issue is usually catching its target, as because of travel mode my pilots have a hard time catching its prey :) Boy och boy how the design changes between X3 and X4 can ruin simple things.

That what EMP missile are for
Taking target out of travel drive