Hacking & Cylon-Boarding

[Wenzel]

The manual is very vague about how it works, and I could not find a guide on it. So, this is what I've figured out based on my observation. Maybe someone can add to it/correct it or explain hacking and boarding in detail? Any help is much appreciated!

HACKING

• You can start to hack ships within a certain range. My estimates: Nemesis: 5.500m, Wardrivers 3.000m, Phobos 6.200m. This range does NOT depend on the ship's current DRAIDIS range.
  
• Once the hacking has started, you need to stay within the distances mentioned above, otherwise the hacking will break off.
  
• While hacking, a ship can still fire.
  
• You can choose which of the opponent's subsystems you would like to hack first. If you don't choose any, the game will determine one randomly.
  
• Once hacking has started, the opponent's firewall will be attacked - the respective bar goes down. I suppose (but I’m not 100% sure) that the strength of the hacker somehow competes with the fire wall regeneration of the defender. Both, defensive as well as attacking strength depends on the tech bay’s system power/health. As far as the attackers are concerned, the Nemesis has a hacking strength of 0-150% (with tech power 15 it's 75%), the Phobos 0-165% (15 = 86%), and for Wardrivers, it’s unkown (they have no subsystem menu, so you can’t tell). As for the defence, you can look up the values for all ships in the ship guide.
  
• Once the fire wall has been breached (reached 0), the targeted subsystem will start taking damage while the fire wall recovers (based on the defender’s regeneration stat). Only when the fire-wall has regenerated to 100% will the hacking attack switch back to damaging the fire wall rather than the subsystem(s). Again, the speed at which hacking inflicts damage to subsystems might depend on the hacking strength.
  
• Once a subsystem has been reduced to 0 health, another, still intact subsystem is chosen randomly as the new target.
  
• The effects of stacking several hackers against one ship are unclear to me. What is certain is that you can target one subsystem with each ship. So, when the firewall gets penetrated, damage can be inflicted to two subsystems simultaneously? I’m not sure if the fire wall itself is breached faster with two hackers.

CYLON-BOARDING

• Heavy raider squadrons can board enemy ships.
  
• Each heavy raider trooper that lands on the target unloads 50 centurions (soldiers) onto the enemy ship.
  
• Once landed, you can safely recall the heavy raider squadron back to their parent ship in order to recharge/reload more centurions.
  
• However, you can run out of centurions somehow. I once tried to order a boarding mission and an error message (“No centurions left” or something along those lines) popped up.
  
• The effects of boarding are a big enigma to me. All kinds of weirdness happens. Centurions are somehow pitted against marines. The color in which the number of centurions/marines are shown seems to indicate something. A variable number of subsystems takes damage at various speeds.
  
• The tech-bays (of both sides) influence the power of soldiers. There are two stats – strength and armor. Nothing is known about how they work in detail. Also, I suppose that adjusting tech-bay power will influence the ship’s centurions regardless of where they are? The same is true for squadrons (increasing tech power will increase their evasion - I can't tell as the evasion stat is not displayed for squadrons)?

[VanguardMk1]

From what I've seen the firewall isn't breached faster when there's 2 ships hacking it. Once the firewall is down however, 2 ships can of course deal double the damage. You can focus on a single subsystem and bring that one down very quickly, or spread it out over multiple if you want to do that for a reason. If you want to prevent your enemy from regaining their firewall, target the Tech Bay once you get through, as that will keep it down for much longer.

Each ship has a number of marines, and these will fight the boarders until either side runs out of soldiers. Once a ship's marines have been killed, the boarders will deal damage to random subsystems, and will attack the CIC only after every other subsytem is at 0 health. It can take a very long time to kill off a ship's subsystems with just boarders.

I haven't been in a situation where the Heavy Raiders (or Raptors, if you use those for boarding) couldn't restock on boarders for their next boarding attempt. Are you sure they fully docked at their mothership before you sent them out again?

The Armory determines the strength of the marines on the boarded ship, not the Tech Bay. As far as I know, no subsystem has any effect on the boarders it has sent out and are on another ship. Increasing tech power to the Hangar will boost the evasion stat of the squadrons from that ship, which is the actual percentage of shots that will miss your fighters. For example, a Hangar at 0 power gives +0 Evasion, which is 0% chance to dodge incoming shots, and the Cerberus Hangar at full power will give +30, which is a 30% chance to dodge incoming shots.