Boarding is a bad feature

[Evald]

Can someone explain why it is so bad to board? Okay I damage the building, but why can I not repair it with repair ships? Why can the crew not repair it over time? Why do I have to spend 8 mill rescources and 80 mill credits to repair it? I really think it's stupid tbh, that there is such a debuff. It removes the whole idea of going to war with another faction. Taking their stuff instead of looking for huge astroids you can build mines on. It's not like it's cheap to go to war or getting boarders for that matter. I mean they are so expensive and rare that if you can't clone and train boarders it's it almost impossible to do. I really want to know why this is the case.

[Druark]

You can repair things that haven't been blown off, but if I blow off your arm a doctor can't just magically form a new one. You have to replace it.

It's the same premise here, you can repair things that are still there but if it's been blown off in to the void then you need to replace it.

If they could repair missing parts you'd have infinite resources as you could just keep damaging the station, letting it repair and then selling the magically repaired parts for free resources.

[Evald]

Originally posted by Druark:

You can repair things that haven't been blown off, but if I blow off your arm a doctor can't just magically form a new one. You have to replace it.

It's the same premise here, you can repair things that are still there but if it's been blown off in to the void then you need to replace it.

If they could repair missing parts you'd have infinite resources as you could just keep damaging the station, letting it repair and then selling the magically repaired parts for free resources.

What are you on about???? On my own ships I can say remove destroyed blocks and the ship can regain it's HP passively from my crew and repair ships can increase the HP of my damaged vessel, which makes repairs much cheaper. But on a boarded station this feature is taken out and the station have a DEBUFF that makes sure you can't repair passively or actively with repair ships untill you have paid the premium and repaired the entire thing first. So don't come here and explain to me that I can't magically regrow my arm when you aren't reading what I am writing in the first place you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ smartass ♥♥♥♥.

[Druark]

Originally posted by Happy Henry Wholesome:

You ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Why do people even comment when they aren't reading or are unable to comprehend what is written. You ♥♥♥♥♥♥

Wow, no wonder no one is helping you. You're either trolling, or you really need to go touch grass, this is the most ridiculous over the top response to someone replying to a question I've seen in a while.

You literally asked why the game is like this and were given an explanation, your disagreement with that explanation doesn't make it true or false.

I also literally stated that you can repair damaged blocks that are still on your own ship/station. That's all you're doing with the passive regen on your ship when you remove the destroyed blocks, regenning the still intact blocks. This effect is limited on stations because they are worth millions, passively regenning 20% of their health is usually at least 1-5m credits not to mention a few 100k+ resources. It'd be easy to exploit.

[umop-apisdn]

If I shoot the tires off your car, you can replace the tires without having to buy a whole new car first.

I agree, this mechanic is poorly implemented.

[LORDSOL]

Originally posted by Happy Henry Wholesome:

Can someone explain why it is so bad to board? Okay I damage the building, but why can I not repair it with repair ships? Why can the crew not repair it over time? Why do I have to spend 8 mill rescources and 80 mill credits to repair it? I really think it's stupid tbh, that there is such a debuff. It removes the whole idea of going to war with another faction. Taking their stuff instead of looking for huge astroids you can build mines on. It's not like it's cheap to go to war or getting boarders for that matter. I mean they are so expensive and rare that if you can't clone and train boarders it's it almost impossible to do. I really want to know why this is the case.

think of it this way.you capture an enemy station you have no idea about there tech so the way to express it is high repair cost,i made the decision after my first boarding that for me it was more economical to just salvage the stations

[Firefrye]

Originally posted by Happy Henry Wholesome:

Can someone explain why it is so bad to board? Okay I damage the building, but why can I not repair it with repair ships? Why can the crew not repair it over time? Why do I have to spend 8 mill rescources and 80 mill credits to repair it? I really think it's stupid tbh, that there is such a debuff. It removes the whole idea of going to war with another faction. Taking their stuff instead of looking for huge astroids you can build mines on. It's not like it's cheap to go to war or getting boarders for that matter. I mean they are so expensive and rare that if you can't clone and train boarders it's it almost impossible to do. I really want to know why this is the case.

1. The most frustrating thing for me is that I can't even shrink the station which would allow me to dock and move it to a repair station for easier and cheaper repairs.

2. The actual *cost* of the repair is fairly low if you're actually using the boarded station to found expensive factories. Once you *do* pay for the repair you get a 50% discount on the total founding cost for any station type. This can save you a few hundred million credits on the most expensive stations, and a few tens of millions on the next tier down.

3. That makes boarding only useful for very expensive stations unless you plan to do the whole boarding thing just to steal the station's cargo without it becoming branded as stolen (this is another advantage of boarding. you get all their goods without a trip to a smuggler).

4. My strategy: build a carrier with nearly all its processing power dedicated to gyros, thrusters, and dampers + a large chunk of crew quarters/cloning/academies + minimum shields/hangars. This should allow you to have 9 wings of combat fighters made from a high dps/s turret and 1 wing of self-made boarding shuttles. The fighters deal all the damage and can be re-called to prevent you from accidentally killing the station. Once you steal the station, dock it to your glorified combat tug-boat and jump to the nearest repair station. You'll need really good thrusters and dampers for this part because you need to get some part of your new station to be within 1km of the repair dock -> sit in the station -> repair -> save a lot of money/resources. Alternatively if you're willing to wait 10min, have a tiny repair station in transport mode docked to your normal combat carrier. Once you steal the new station, drop the tiny repair dock off right next to it and wait the 10 min for station mode to re-engage. Bonus points for letting you set this repair station to be your own reconstruction site for only 1 million credits making ALL the repairs COMPLETELY FREE through the station itself.

[Blueberry Muffins!]

Guess what happens when the military's going to abandon a vessel?

They scuttle it. So the enemy can't have it. There being any station at all for you to occupy is a testament to the speed, skill and ferocity of your boarders. Rejoice!

----

But I don't think that'll satisfy OP, this smells an awful lot like juat another mommy-make-it-easy-for-me argument pretending to be about realism. A particularly lazy excuse for one at that.

[Weaver]

Regardless of the tone and attitude presented thus far, I have to agree that Boarding is far too heavy-handed in its "balancing." That word should just be code for "punish the player for even trying."

If the intent is to guarantee the boarded/captured entity can't be used, or 99% of the time is destroyed during the attempt, then why bother having a Boarding feature in the first place? Just remove it.

The trouble is...there are so many "features" in the game that operate like this, if we did apply this logic to all of them, we wouldn't have a game.

[Bobucles]

The financial cost of boarding is high, but the real benefit is pushing above your shipyard cap. Go capture tiny useless ships, that way the cost of repair is nothing, and then transform it into some support vessel like a merchant or mining ship.

[Firefrye]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

The financial cost of boarding is high, but the real benefit is pushing above your shipyard cap. Go capture tiny useless ships, that way the cost of repair is nothing, and then transform it into some support vessel like a merchant or mining ship.

Counterpoint: in the time and effort it would take you to start boarding (minimum of trinium build knowledge and already being near the barrier to START), you could already make the push past the barrier and reach avorion to simply IGNORE the increased material-level of the founding costs of ships. This would be less important if you could make hangar blocks out of one of the starter materials like titanium (cloning blocks and academies would be a bonus). At that stage of the game, the ability to make some basic fighters, hire some boarders, and steal a few pirate ships would actually make a difference because you'd be able to expand your fleet before you even reach naonite.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Firefrye:

Originally posted by Bobucles:

The financial cost of boarding is high, but the real benefit is pushing above your shipyard cap. Go capture tiny useless ships, that way the cost of repair is nothing, and then transform it into some support vessel like a merchant or mining ship.

Counterpoint: in the time and effort it would take you to start boarding (minimum of trinium build knowledge and already being near the barrier to START), you could already make the push past the barrier and reach avorion to simply IGNORE the increased material-level of the founding costs of ships. This would be less important if you could make hangar blocks out of one of the starter materials like titanium (cloning blocks and academies would be a bonus). At that stage of the game, the ability to make some basic fighters, hire some boarders, and steal a few pirate ships would actually make a difference because you'd be able to expand your fleet before you even reach naonite.

Counterpoint to your counterpoint: unless I'm mistaken, breaching the barrier requires tens of hours worth of questing, whereas boarding only requires a bit of money.

Counterpoint to my counterpoint to your counterpoint: expanding your fleet before access to Avorion allows you to have an unlimited number of ships in your fleet is actually counterproductive, in the long run; nothing you capture will be a "station founder", aside from enemy stations themselves... which are insanely expensive to actually commission, once captured (due to needing to be fully repaired first), as well as being difficult to move and ridiculously vulnerable to (counter)attack.

Since captured ships count against your fleet size, it is possible (and actually quite easy) to exceed the maximum number of ships one is allowed, thus removing one's own ability to make stations without decommissioning large portions of the existing fleet.

[Niebaum]

Originally posted by Druark:

Originally posted by Happy Henry Wholesome:

You ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Why do people even comment when they aren't reading or are unable to comprehend what is written. You ♥♥♥♥♥♥

Wow, no wonder no one is helping you. You're either trolling, or you really need to go touch grass, this is the most ridiculous over the top response to someone replying to a question I've seen in a while.

You literally asked why the game is like this and were given an explanation, your disagreement with that explanation doesn't make it true or false.

I also literally stated that you can repair damaged blocks that are still on your own ship/station. That's all you're doing with the passive regen on your ship when you remove the destroyed blocks, regenning the still intact blocks. This effect is limited on stations because they are worth millions, passively regenning 20% of their health is usually at least 1-5m credits not to mention a few 100k+ resources. It'd be easy to exploit.

Explanation? Your reply was more of an elitist jackoff response.

[Firefrye]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Counterpoint to your counterpoint: unless I'm mistaken, breaching the barrier requires tens of hours worth of questing, whereas boarding only requires a bit of money.

In terms of time investment to breach the barrier:
1. Swoks and the AI can be forcibly spawned without their quests.
2. Botan requires a halfway decent warp drive to do his quest quickly, and then the mission to get the unique system to sabotage him cannot be skipped as far as I know. This will require a LOT of time manually flying around to buy parts, OR it requires a merchant or smuggler to procure the goods (might be more expensive, but should take less time because this can be done in the "background")
3. The Four can be fought by finding their quest in a near-the-barrier bounty and is a tough fight but not super time consuming outside of the combat.
4. The MAD stations are easily located with a scouting captain in the "no-man's space" near the barrier. Just look for notes with lots of asteroids and "something strange" (or a similar message). They spawn frequently and killing 4 forces the boss fight. Have a stone ship and it's super easy with almost any damage of your own.

After these, the remaining items are significantly more time consuming inherently
5. The Unarmed system requires becoming allies with a faction and saving up a few milion credits to buy both a equipment salesman beacon AND the system from the salesman themselves. The reputation grind is the slow part but can be automated with a decent combat ship set to "patrol sector" and leaving the game running overnight in a well populated sector.
6. The Arbitrary slot system forces you to collect enough systems through purchasing and/or combat drops to research your way all the way to 3 legendary systems which will then research together to guarantee the artifact (with 1-2 of them being AI/Swoks systems this can be shortcut a bit).
7. The most tedious and RNG heavy artifact is the Operation Exodus one. This requires scouting or exploration to find enough beacons to piece together the x,y coordinates of a single clue. Then go there and find new coordinates. Repeat till you can put in the A/B four digit combination to open the wormhole to the edge of the map and get the artifact. Without very good warp systems (Botan + another exeptional/exotic with no cooldown) this can be quite tedious. Once you have the artifact you can either take the VERY slow way back with the gates, or send your ship home with a travel command.

Outside of the artifacts, grinding enough credits/resources to build your fleet to the point you can run these missions will take a lot of time as well. However, a lot of this grind is required to reach Trinium ANYWAY, so you wouldn't be able to start boarding until then in the first place. My entire point was that by the time you COULD start boarding, you've already done most of the time consuming things anyway (or could have), so it shouldn't take much additional effort to just breach the barrier. At least no MORE effort than would be required to invest into boarding to the point you can "make a profit" by over-capping your fleet.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Firefrye:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Counterpoint to your counterpoint: unless I'm mistaken, breaching the barrier requires tens of hours worth of questing, whereas boarding only requires a bit of money.

In terms of time investment to breach the barrier:
<snipped list of tens of hours of grinding>
Outside of the artifacts, grinding enough credits/resources to build your fleet to the point you can run these missions will take a lot of time as well. However, a lot of this grind is required to reach Trinium ANYWAY, so you wouldn't be able to start boarding until then in the first place. My entire point was that by the time you COULD start boarding, you've already done most of the time consuming things anyway (or could have), so it shouldn't take much additional effort to just breach the barrier. At least no MORE effort than would be required to invest into boarding to the point you can "make a profit" by over-capping your fleet.
(emphasis added)

I don't know how my playstyle differs from yours, but I can reach Trinium in a matter of hours from starting a new game, and I usually hit the barrier a couple hours after that (mostly because I stop to add hangars to every ship in my fleet). I'm looking at doubling or even tripling my current playtime from that point if I want to gather all the required XSTN artifacts and fight my way into the core.

Since the only thing Avorion is good for is dropping a microscopic hyperspace core on your ship so you can jump over those "rift" sectors that otherwise block your way, skipping the "fight your way into the core so you can grind some more" portion of a playthrough is perfectly valid, in my opinion. My end-game is setting up a "shopping mall" in an empty sector with a gate, zero asteroids (other than the ones I drag in) and low (or no) dust (because I like being able to see more than 2 seconds' travel ahead of me).

"Grinding credits" is simply a matter of vendor-dumping my unused resources, which I do on a fairly regular basis while I'm "building up"; by the time I can make hangars and deploy fighters, I've got at least 6 (and usually 8) mining vessels acquiring literally millions of metals per hour (hundreds of millions, once I get hangars); either as "locust swarms" on a sector-by-sector "eat all the asteroids" run while I shop around for captains/modules/turrets/fighters, or using the map missions if I want to do something in the real world instead of sitting at my desk micro-managing stuff... I get enough of that in the real world, thanks.

I'll happily leave the core to those who feel the need for endless combat, and count my billions just outside the barrier.

[Snuggy Serian]

Sorry, i'm a bit out of touch with the game (last time playing is some good time ago).
SInce when is there a limit to a fleet and what kind of *cost reduction* is there after doing whatever you all were talking about?