Boarding strength... WTH?

[Kitet]

Today I intended to 'rescue' a Stork heading to sure doom, not the first one, but I was confident in the ability of my marines. I trained them from scratch so that I have 2-star and above. I released boarding pods at the ship with numbers showing 2481 boarding strength (me) vs 112 resistance. There were 119 men on that Stork vs 60 of mine.

I lost 10 people, completely random individual strength. At first, my 60 men went through first half of the opposing crew in few seconds with no losses on my side. Situation became more or less 2481 boarding strength vs 10 resistance with 63 people left, At this point the struggle began.

Boarded crew was diminishing one by one every few seconds. I watched this with my mouth gaping wider and wider. Around 10 people resisting and 5 their strength, I began losing people. I mean 60 became 50.

My overwhelming strength meant nothing before the Stork's janitors.

WTH?!? is the only thing I could get out of myself for the next few minutes. Anyone cares to explain what went wrong since the practically half of that boarding process?

And BTW, when does target hull strength play a role at all, aside from the time it takes from boarding pods' landing to the hull breach?

[Нагризолич]

From what I observed it seems that boarding forces are split into groups of 5, their strength added up and treated as a unit with 5HP. Then, I assume, every crew attacks randomly(?) chosen crew on the opposite side where they weigh their attacks vs their own, and a random number is rolled based on a result. This means that:
a) hordes of untrained marines (two stars is barely trained, let's be real) are practically guaranteed to suffer losses, while small team of highly trained elites rarely have any. My cobra with 25 elites with strength of around 2400 can take on a split destroyer with resistance of over 800 without losses, while taking over carriers with hundreds of fresh marines always lose 10% to 20% with the same or higher attack-to-defence ratio.
b) even 1 death quickly lead to more losses to a multiple of 5 - it seems that when losses occur, boarding team takes a hit to attack rating and consecutively becomes more vulnerable, up to a wipe. Since teams, again, seem to be shuffled randomly, a recruit will endanger an entire team of veterans and get them all killed.
I haven't seen the code for this, but a general rule of thumb that got me through over a hundred captured vessels, is this: match your boarding crew evenly, never send elites with recruits; if you suffered losses - train another B-team on builders and resuppliers for reinforcement. Always send marines in multiples of 5. Check target vessel: a rambo situation is 100% possible if there is 5 or more 3+ star marines there, where they will wipe out your entire horde of 80 jabronies that can do nothing to them (I've had a situation when my 2000 bs vs their 800 turned out to be a complete failure, lowering defence to 693 or something - 7 enemy veterans survived and facerolled everyone).

[Cyrill Echo]

It does , i once lost 5 marines to the last crew member that a had a total of 1 boarding strength. Game rolls on each boarding stage and defenders have a bonus based on hull strength which represents ship's internal defence. At least thats my understanding of the system from back when i cared about marines . Now theres plenty of 2 and 3 stars for hire and i just throw millions at them .

[Kitet]

If what you both say is true then this is ridiculous - a player has to know how the game calculates things in order to not go bald from ridiculousness calculated. I'll try to apply that knowledge. Note that I said I had 2-stars and above, this included few elites, make no mistake, I didn't have 60 two-star marines.

From previous game where I had 9 elite marines, 5 full stars, I sometimes lost one on a bad roll boarding a miner with no marines. It was like 850-some strength vs 15 or 20. It's like they tripped exiting the elevator and died by hitting their head on something sharp. Or space rats attacked, I don't know.

[Wraith]

Could be a war of attrition

As they fight the enemy is also leveling up in marine skill

I once accidentally made all the enemy elite 5 star marine

[Azrelus]

Always board with the maximum amount of marines.

[trooperrob]

I think each boarding pod has to dig through the hull.
If a pod with 5 rookies gets in first, they may panic, and die.
I think the weaker the hull is, the less the delay between pods getting in.
I wonder if you have a nearer ship with elite, and a further ship with rookies, the rookies will get into the ship after the elite and therefore not panic.

a few high level enemy can have a disproportionate effect.

Always try to board with max marines, if needed throw your marines at a few freighters to train them up a bit.

But I find even with better marines, I loose a lot.

To be fair, they do give different levels of boarding, hull high, hull low etc, and indicate risk.

[Saintanik]

my gut feeling based on limited experience has been that I've taken fewer losses when starting at a lower hull strength, so I suspect that's a factor (as someone already mentioned above), but I'm not 100% sure yet.

Having said that, I've been capping freighters lately by just throwing marines at 100% hull strength and not shooting any turrets so that there is no police response. Takes ages, but you can leave the scene and go about your business while the target ship calmly goes about theirs, right up until they are captured. It's a bit weird and feels a little cheaty though

[Kitet]

I get what all you're saying, glad to have some of you share your experiences.

Originally posted by Saintanik:

my gut feeling based on limited experience has been that I've taken fewer losses when starting at a lower hull strength, so I suspect that's a factor (as someone already mentioned above), but I'm not 100% sure yet.

Having said that, I've been capping freighters lately by just throwing marines at 100% hull strength and not shooting any turrets so that there is no police response. Takes ages, but you can leave the scene and go about your business while the target ship calmly goes about theirs, right up until they are captured. It's a bit weird and feels a little cheaty though

In another game where I have sufficient elite marines, I do that too. I land an M ships on some Odysseuses, start the boarding process, when all pods touch down I get out of the ship, cancel all its orders and put it inside internal storage at the victim using the map interface and teleport away. It's a good tactic to yank a ship out of a fleet and essentially disassemble the fleet without firing a shot. Sometimes a resupply ship or a carrier which has low level marines can be done this way too, but since its crew roster often exceed 100 I sometimes get result like the OP.

I sometimes get the impression that crew numbering 100 or more on a ship is somehow special. They can be all grease monkeys but I will fail anyway. I started to try diminishing that number first by patiently keeping it at 5% hull or lower for considerable amount of time. Also disabling engines helps, like not neccesarily destroying them but damaging them just enough for them to be unable to propel the ship. And I also just noticed some service crew members could have up to one star in Boarding.... maybe those are the ones providing resistance when all marines perish.

[PeaceMaker]

Originally posted by Kitet:

Today I intended to 'rescue' a Stork heading to sure doom, not the first one, but I was confident in the ability of my marines. I trained them from scratch so that I have 2-star and above. I released boarding pods at the ship with numbers showing 2481 boarding strength (me) vs 112 resistance. There were 119 men on that Stork vs 60 of mine.

I lost 10 people, completely random individual strength. At first, my 60 men went through first half of the opposing crew in few seconds with no losses on my side. Situation became more or less 2481 boarding strength vs 10 resistance with 63 people left, At this point the struggle began.

Boarded crew was diminishing one by one every few seconds. I watched this with my mouth gaping wider and wider. Around 10 people resisting and 5 their strength, I began losing people. I mean 60 became 50.

My overwhelming strength meant nothing before the Stork's janitors.

WTH?!? is the only thing I could get out of myself for the next few minutes. Anyone cares to explain what went wrong since the practically half of that boarding process?

And BTW, when does target hull strength play a role at all, aside from the time it takes from boarding pods' landing to the hull breach?

Don't seem that crazy to me.

Ok, your troops move in, they pick off some guys, but remember, defence is FAR easier than attack. The defensive guys that remain are entrenching themselves and firing from tight positions.

The attackers have to move forward while weeding out the defenders. An EXTREMELY hard job, even for professionals who want to capture (and not totally destroy) an objective. The defenders may also have grenades, etc. Soon attackers numbers WILL begin to drop.

And you don't have surprise, they know you're coming.

In warfare, when attacking a defensive target you always need at least 2-3 times the defensive army strength to win and will always lose men unless real lucky. Plenty of real life examples of this.

This seems about right to me.

I think the real issue here, is you don't SEE the battle. If the battle could somehow be simulated for you to see, then you'd probably accept the losses more.

[Kitet]

Yeah I sometimes try to imagine how it would look, like when I play some survival game I'd camp at the exit of some narrow corridor (or put hidden turrets there) so that I can pick off enemies one by one as they come or even lay traps. I know all that, believe me, but this is a game that shows things in numbers. Numbers, that make you believe you're sure to overwhelm the enemy. I guess I just needed to whine about unfavorable result, one too many. Later, I got that stork but it cost me way more hassle - it was in a Xenon-overrun system where I had to defend that thing from two Type-Ks with my single Odysseus-E. I can't remember how many times did I load game until I got the result I wanted, but I eventually did. At the end I was thinking that Ks are not so scary if you know how to go about destroying them... so maybe I even gained something from all this.

[Asmosis]

It's just dice rolls. If you're pitting 1/2* marines vs 1/2* crew, you can get unlucky and lose a bunch even with only a few resistance remaining. You'll notice this less and less as your marines get more exprience, with full 5* and double the resistance, you'll almost never lose a marine.

I dont know what the exact formula looks like, but it's most likely on the Egosoft forums.

For K's i'd recommend a small ship with Paranid burst ray weapon, with a bit of practice you can fully disable (guns, engines, shields) a K in less than a minute.

[Kalisa]

Burst rays are so good, can even mod them for more surface damage if u want, a single S ship can easily disable any large/xl ship super easy with them, its usually my go to early game when K's and I's are more problematic, il just go and disable them, leaving the npc factions to mop up.
Also tend to do this on terran asgards, minimal rep hit to disable their modules and just leave them dead in the water to slowly be wiped out or captured at a later time, takes them ages to repair.

Since finishing the MTS beta, i been using the yasur mk3 with 2 of its experemental weapons, and 2 burst rays for my all around fighter, the 2 experemental weapons are more then enough for all my s/m killing needs, and the 2 burst rays make for exceptionally easy disabling of enemy craft for my boarders. Then i use my 2-3 medium boarder ships, or call in my erlking if i need allot more boarders. Usually have around 250-300 Marines on my erlking.