boarding ships should not be an easy task. I would set a parameter of xperience. Your ship has to hove a certan amount of xp to be able to board an enemy ship, regardless to your upgrades. Investing money in developing boarding technology is the first part, your ships crews must be trained ( enough xps) to board ships. After enough combat xps your ship crew unlocks the capibility of boarding. A ship that is light in combat mode , after enough xps , can be alterd to boarding mode.

Maybe, create a new small spaceship which can be improved.



It will be difficult to communicate with the men in the enemy spaceship (if we want change their objectives).



We can obtain information from enemies who have invaded us.



But if, in this game, there are shields, we can invade spaceships only if the shields are switched off (outside of a battle) or break down (in a battle).

Well perhaps the chance of tripping the self destruct would lessen if your crew had invested in "engineers" of some sort... as an outfit to your ship... thus making boarding another ship not just a click of a button or key but rather something you have to invest time and money into. I know from past games, once you're able to board ships, its really easy to get into the habit of just pirating the galaxies and forgetting about the rest of the ways in which to earn a living, amass an empire...

Or, just not have a self destruct. Bear in mind, i really oppose this idea, because even if you lessen the odds, there will always be a chance of blowing up for no reason. I do think it should be difficult to board, and i stick with my idea of troop carriers.

So long as there are counters like security stations, options to add extra marines to a ship design, and so on, I think boarding actions will be a great feature.



I'd go so far as to add I would love seeing some minigame/detailed boarding action added ... ala Star Fleet II, though admittedly, that's getting a bit more into the ship simulator side of things rather than strategy.

If you're going to have boarding by enterboat, direct connection of two ships, perhaps even teleport and are going to have internal automated and manual defenses and external defenses like shields, then don't you need some kind of external weaponry to ease your way inside?

MOO2 had some weaponry like the neutron blasters designed for killing the crew before destroying the ship. From torpedoes with toxic gasses to radiation warfare and even nanite boarding you'd basically have a very wide range of options to soften your target even internally before boarding.

The catch might be that toxic gasses and radiation won't work against very large ships effectively. Too many airlocks and armor between the outer hull and the crew in the core parts.

Zep' wrote:
Is there any 4X that is this feature ?



In X3:TC you can actually board a ship, but it's a really difficult move.



And the shield. I do not think your little soldiers will love being shocked by an high-density energy field

As it should.

Space is a harsh enviroment and boarding a military ships is next to impossible. Not only considering all the hazzards once you actually get there(venting the room, internal automated defenses or god-knows-what), diffculty in geting there (your boarding pod getting easily shot down by point-defense systems), and the whole thing about enemy knowing their ship and having the means to blow it up rather than surreneder it....

No matter how difficult it should be in the middle of combat, it should still be an option to undertake, especially if you want to capture the ship or even just parts of it intact after a fleet action. Not everyone wants to die like that, and I'd wager that more than a few would sooner surrender their ship if it meant they lived than willingly blow it up in spite.

Strobe wrote:
No matter how difficult it should be in the middle of combat, it should still be an option to undertake, especially if you want to capture the ship or even just parts of it intact after a fleet action. Not everyone wants to die like that, and I'd wager that more than a few would sooner surrender their ship if it meant they lived than willingly blow it up in spite.

So you think any chance of the crew self-destructing the ship should scale with sth. like nicety? If you're playing the good guy, always letting the enemy soldiers free instead of executing or enslaving them, the message will go around and ships boarded by you will be more likely to surrender?

Or something like the faction being boarded, as well. The pirate captain isn't going to blow up his ship as a screw you to the boarders. The fanatic religious captain probably will.

Boarding ships would be nice, not only to capture but also to reduce the efficiency of the enemy ship. But as I can see it in few vs few battles, I somehow cannot imagine it as hundreds of ships send marines to board hundreds of ships

any boarding/self destruct options should only be available in multipule vs multipule battles, any side with one ship could be some what pointless to have option as no one would want to blow up there ship without any spares.



I would agree with NO to boarding forces being able to trip a self destruct option. But I would raise the idea of the force who controls the ship that is being boarded having the option to send a comms to activate a self destruct option. For example, the ship that is being boarded could be a decoy and be rigged to blow from the start, you could lure the enemy to try and board your ship and once they are close enough blow them up and take them out. Possibly have the option to put additional skills into this "decoy" option to increase the blast radius to damage/take out surrounding ships/units

Maulka wrote:
I would agree with NO to boarding forces being able to trip a self destruct option. But I would raise the idea of the force who controls the ship that is being boarded having the option to send a comms to activate a self destruct option. For example, the ship that is being boarded could be a decoy and be rigged to blow from the start, you could lure the enemy to try and board your ship and once they are close enough blow them up and take them out. Possibly have the option to put additional skills into this "decoy" option to increase the blast radius to damage/take out surrounding ships/units

If there's to be any kind of "crew morale" and an externally triggered triggered self-destruct button, I'd like there to be a severe malus on morale for installing such a device, unless we're talking about a hivemind-crew or robots.