Boarding takes too long and is boring

[bloodymonarch]

Fresh marines take forever to get past stage 2 of boarding now. Why you would ever want to sit and stare at a screen doing nothing for 12 minutes or more is beyond me. This is (ironically) dead space in the gaming environment. Your player is just sitting there waiting for something to happen with no indicator of progress and nothing to do. This is a singleplayer game, there's no need to nerf mechanics to elongate the grind. If you want to increase the time an action takes, you better damn well give the player some interactivity during that time.

[zpc]

The trick in this game is doing multiple things at once. Send your marines over to the ship, cruise away [or do other stuff like manage your empire, fly missions, shoot stuff], wait for the marines to call in once stage 2 is complete. In fact - you can leave them alone until the boarding is complete. Either you have a new ship or you don't.

I usually crank up all options (threat level for boarding pods to fly towards the ship | hull of the target). Beforehand I scan the ship and make sure to send the proper rooky / veteran ratio to ensure victory.

[Xautos]

i always fly-by-board and do something else while that whole thing is going on, i tend not to pay attention to the boarding unless it's something of interest like an Asgard. Sometimes i can have many marines waiting and a transfer crew order for a ship in a nearby sector, this can help me fly-by-board many ships.

Of course i can't do it all over a duration because there is an IFF concern and a target might be captured before the last ship that got boarded changes their status from hostile, so it all needs to be done fairly quickly. that's just an example of something else i could do.

X4F is a sandbox game, you can to create your own missions and objectives within.

[loogi]

My issue is that I still have to babysit any ship i'm boarding so that my allies don't just blow it up

[Venerable_Sin]

Last I boarded a ship was 7.0. Both times there was one pod that I pretty much had to shoot or destroy in order for them to start the 2nd phase. I had to reload several times because faction police kept killing the thing so i had to hurry over and take out the faction destroyer engines before it got to the sca destroyer. I was so done with it by that point that i just stopped messing with it and played what was fun. It took so long to go to phase two on the police destroyer that I forgot I was still trying to board it. It actually jump scared me when the lady started talking out of nowhere. I almost she-at my pants until i realized what she said and what was going on. That one gave me a good startle.

[Jirikisunta]

I don't understand the thinking, at all, in the 21st century in a video game, to have a mechanic where you have to wait, for SO LONG, with NO INFORMATION about what is happening or how long it will take. How hard would it be to put a timer, or even a few updates along the way? I really don't get it.

[bloodymonarch]

I have since become less irritated with this feature. It was just a major pain in the butt when starting the fresh game. As the marines ranked up, it became less of a problem.

I think I was just shocked regarding the massive difference in how long boarding took prior to the update with unskilled marines boarding a weak ship to how long it takes post update with unskilled marines boarding a weak ship.

That being said, are there improvements that can be made to the boarding mechanic to make it less user unfriendly? Definitely.

Not having to manually send my marines back to their ships of origin after every boarding would be nice. Sending marines back to their ships of origin automatically after a successful boarding operation via a tick box on the boarding menu would be greatly appreciated.

That, or at least adding a button to transfer crew menu that will assign the maximum amount of that type of personnel to the ship you're transferring to. A "transfer from this ship's crew to this ship's max crew capacity" button if you will.