[gratuitous suggestion] boarding ships

either little fighter-sized ships that try to latch on to cruisers, or frigate-sized APCs. they either take control of the enemy ship, or something goes wrong and the ship blows up, along with the APCs/boarding ships. any comments? anyone agree that there should be one?

As I recall, the game is called Gratuitous Space BATTLES, not Gratuitous Space CAPTURES.

By the way get on AIM I need some help.

With the current game mechanics, I don’t like it. Ships don’t really avoid each other until they shoot each other, and only when instructed to- otherwise they just charge straight at each other.

I played a lot of Homeworld; I love capturing ships; I just don’t think it fits GSB.

The reason it wouldn’t fit would be two things, it isn’t homeworld where you build a fleet, you just pick what you send to fight and what their orders are. This brings to the second reason, you have no control of the battle when it is happening. Also what would the use be of capturing a ship, when you can hardly handle your own?

And how would you make captures grapphicaly gratuitous?

grrr. i’d have thought it would have a much better response. i mean, they could launch at a certain time, like a new order, like set a time for the boarding ships to try to capture an enemy ship. when the timer goes off, your boarding ships set out on their mission. and as for Jukelo’s question? The APCs/boarding ships would try to race towards the enemy, under fire all the way. perhaps some new radio chatter for when the boarding ships are being launched? seems like a good idea to me. who doesn’t like boarding ships? (unless you’re the one being boarded)

You’d really need to be able to disable any target ship for this to be feasible. That means no maneuver, no weapons. This is ard in game since your boarding ships might close the target, then some ship far away fires a single missile and blows it up.

In order to do this, they’d need to only target disabled ships. Then it would have to resolve the boarding action based on relative crew to boarders, and perhaps have a “Marines” module.

The gameplay benefit would be honor for taking prizes. I suppose you could also make disabling weapons, too.

While it’s not entirely “gratuitous” having the code would allow some cool mods.

“boarding modules”: heavy, very heavy, adds a small number of crew. weapon slot, it’s a drop pods hangar.
how it works: extremely small range and high tracking (they can be counted like missiles) tiny vessels are seen being thrown toward the enemy ship, slowly doing damage straight to the hull (simulates direct damages and sabotages spread through the ship).

basically you have to build these expendable engine-toting ships which have no raw firepower but which can seriously worry enemies without short range weapons and armor repairers.

should make everybody happy :stuck_out_tongue: and this without adding any mechanic to the game.

in a similar way: “ramming module”, does damage (after all you’re already past the shields) proportional to ship’s max speed

yeah, that’s the other thing i was going to post. sabotage ships. :smiley:

I’m really on the fence concerning ship captures and marine activity in general. My viewpoint tends to lean more in favor of a limited marine capacity that’s used to do hit-and-run attacks on ships, causing sabotage, mayhem, and awfulness to key ship systems. I feel that such would preserve much of the excitement of deploying teams of space marines while avoiding the complexities of full-scale captures. I’m not a fan of Stalingrad in space…but I can applaud the use of stealthy commandos to sting the enemy in a tender spot.

Ramming is a little cliche, and similar to capturing, the current AI just doesn’t know how to avoid it, what specific ships to capture or ram, etc.

How about something close-ranged but that fits more with the current game… for example, what if tractor beams damaged capital ships?

oh come on. we already have enough capital ship-destroying things. you haven’t forgotten about the megaton missiles, have you? :smiley:

How about boarding capsle (fired like missiles) which (if they hit) take controll of one random weapon mount (to a maximum of 50% of all mounts) and fire at enemy ships for some time based on how much crew the enemy ship got (the more crew the faster they can kill the “intruders”)

I would agree with this. There’s no long term benefit to capturing enemy ships since you’re only fighting a single battle. And even if you did capture a ship, wouldn’t all the nearby enemy ships simply open fire on it and blow it up immediately? Boarding just doesn’t seem to fit very well in GSB.

that’s the reason why it WOULD fit. what’s better, almost everyone going insane and blowing up one of their ships, or that ship being turned to the enemy side? :smiley:

I suppose this does add another weapon to the arsenal. It would have to be properly balanced and expensive enough so that we don’t wind up with challenge fleets that spam boarding parties against each other all day. And it shouldn’t be so weak that it’s just another useless Quantum Blaster either because then it’s just a waste of space.

And if you’re going to create a super-weapon that spells certain doom for a ship, cliffski’s upcoming Death Star converging mega-laser seems much cooler. You can’t really see your little boarding party soldiers from the space admiral command chair but you can see massive laser beams that fire across the map. But if there’s an argument for how this improves the game’s core mechanics, it could be a good addition…

However there might have to be a module, like a security team module that counters similar to how the ECM shield works though. I’m not I want to managing another defensive module though. So it’s sort of a like an uber-weapon, and sort of like the ECM shock, but not exactly so it could be slightly redundant. But anyway, real space admirals with hair on the chests save their module slots for big freaking guns :wink:

Worse yet, when you capture a ship in the middle of the fleet (since they were all too busy attacking your frontline tank craft and ignoring the ships making a bee-line directly at them), all of their ships will grind and twist away from their own heavily-damaged weaponless hulk in an attempt to target and kill it, ignoring your fleet in the process…

that’s another use. most of the “problems” you talk about with the module could be turned into cool things. like, it could be called a “disruptor module”. it has the same effects, but it disrupts the enemy fleet’s attention and they attack the now-captured ship (and it dies quickly; no surprise) whilst your fleet attacks them. the thing that could block this, though, would be the “retaliation” order. the enemy fleet opens fire upon both your fleet and your new ship. :smiley:

have you ever thought that maybe the game ai can’t support switching sides?

no, i have not thought that, because the game can support a very large amount of AI as it is (except for thousands of fighters or something like that). so don’t worry about that. :smiley: