Is there a way to lower fighting rank?

[76561198106301119]

I got assasin rank too quickly farming credits on xenon patrol and defence missions and now i cannot board M7s that yaki send on station defence missions without 75-90% loss of marines because there is no more way to train fighting on previous rank missions with M6s.

I tried focusing on eco for few days with intensive SETA usage but it didn't drop a single percent of fighting rank.

[changtau2005]

Stick all your marines into training at any friendly military base until they max engineering, and preferably everything other than fighting. Then board TLs. Pirate ones will do, because they're super easy to find, or if your marines are still really noob at fighting, then you could try boarding civilian TLs. You know, those arena / casino ships. Use any ship that can fire boarding pods.

Rinse and repeat until you have a squad of 100% fighting Arnold Schwarzenegger marines.

[76561198106301119]

Originally posted by changtau2005:

Stick all your marines into training at any friendly military base until they max engineering, and preferably everything other than fighting. Then board TLs. Pirate ones will do, because they're super easy to find, or if your marines are still really noob at fighting, then you could try boarding civilian TLs. You know, those arena / casino ships. Use any ship that can fire boarding pods.

Rinse and repeat until you have a squad of 100% fighting Arnold Schwarzenegger marines.

Thanks i'll try finding some yaki TLs but i don't expect much.. All my marines are already 4-5 star of all secondary stats but somwehere between 50-70 at fighting. Actually finding some wandering ships is a good idea, i completely forgot about that and hoped only for M6 missions.
Ships that fire boarding pods are too big, slow and costy so i prefer spacewalk, i've got 2 centaurs and a marauder that way.

[76561198106301119]

Nah i just boarded ruy but only 4 of 10 survived, exactly the same thing as with M7 attempts.

[[XU]Cycrow]

if your boarding larger ships, then you need to send more marines, you should be sending 20 for M7 and TL.
You can board with just 10, but they need to be trained well in fighting. If they are rookies, you need to be using 20 instead

[lPaladinl]

This was an issue in vanilla X3:AP as well.

I don't know if FL adds anything to help lower rank, but the only way to lower rank in X3 was to just wait. All ranks slowly decay over time, but it takes forever and is not worth the effort. You'll be sitting around for hours just to lose 1 rank.

Otherwise you gotta scale up your operations to keep jobs, which is a pain when combat missions don't pay that well given the risks involved. Bring bigger ships, more marines, etc.

[76561198106301119]

Originally posted by XUCycrow:

if your boarding larger ships, then you need to send more marines, you should be sending 20 for M7 and TL.
You can board with just 10, but they need to be trained well in fighting. If they are rookies, you need to be using 20 instead

Okay thanks, i think i can find few more m6s maybe some existing rare ships. Didn't want to ruin reputations yet but well it's a part of the game

Originally posted by lPaladinl:

Otherwise you gotta scale up your operations to keep jobs, which is a pain when combat missions don't pay that well given the risks involved. Bring bigger ships, more marines, etc.

I have outstanding income from upgraded chip plants so thats not much a point of my concern there, interested in fighting 100 to get xenon stuff and start building some fleet.
Daamn i can not imagine wasting a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of time again for 10 more marines training, ill try sticking with existing 10 as long as possible but thanks

[kasnavada]

Ummm last time I checked, you needed at least 15 marines alive at the end of the boarding phase to capture the bigger Xenon ships. And some will die, apparently, even with 100 stats. So you'll probably need to train marines in any case.

What I did to train my guys in fighting was to just capture the wandering TM & TLs. A bunch of 10 marines will capture TM with little to no losses. Another idea is to just go to a "core" sector of an enemy faction with a shipyards, there is usually 2 TL there, once again, if you got 20 marines they mostly should survive, assuming there isn't internal lasers or anything. Also those sectors tend to have casinos and / or other "civilian" TLs, which, again, are easy to capture. You do need to remove the M2 & M1 around though, they tend to come interfere.