Boarding Parties vs Security Stations

In stock? No, that's what we have balance mod for

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

Except when the mod's author forgets to put in a cheaper cost for said security stations.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Also, it's possible to mod in weapons which damage only boarding parties or only security stations (at least, it was in SE4) - so there is a slight difference; if you made a weapon that only hit boarding parties but no weapon that only hit security stations then the boarding parties would have a downside...

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

Crew killing weapons just kill the crew; they don't damage components. And since boarding parties don't require crew to function (OK, they might or might not work if you kill ALL the crew, but they won't deplete the crew if they are used and they don't require X number of crew to operate), the weapons will not do quite what you expect... (Heck, you can even put boarding parties on ships commanded by a master computer! ) What you could try, though, is to combine the "only boarding parties" and "kills crew" damage types into one - not sure if that's possible or not, but you could try...

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

I can think of another way to make boarding crews and security stations different. The race's natural ability for warfare in space and ground assaults combined into a single score would amplify or degrade an boarding crew. However, boarding crews are by default weaker than security stations unless the race that owns the ship with them has an bonus in space/ground fighting. Also, having the boarding crew being killed by anti-crew weapons is an definitely good idea I think, allowing for a better balance between the boarding crew and security stations.

The advantage of stations over regular boarding parties is that the stations are always on defense... i.e. they won't fly off to try and capture an enemy vessel... ever. You can mix stations and parties this way, and guarantee you retain defense even when the rest of your troops go off to conquer some enemy vessel.

The real issue with stock is that security stations just plain don't work. At all.

Its MUCH better to just have 2 more crew quarters than to install a security station, since the stations are utterly useless in v1.44, last time I checked. Typically it takes about 4 crew members to defeat 1 marine. Research psychology (for larger quarters) for the ultimate in boarding party defense -- forget researching security stations until they actually are fixed and work.

I think SE IV was better with them.
Boarding Parties had a strength of 20 per level, Security Stations had a base strenth of 60 plus 40 per level. So, while a lvl 5 boarding party has 100 strength, a lvl 5 security station has 220 strength.

Here is how I view it should be.

The boarding parties are marines, ones that have to be mobile, so there is a limit to what they can carry. They have training and a few items to aid in their boarding operations.

Security Stations are the defensive systems of a ship, they can have fixed elements such as blast doors or really large turreted auto-guns that have the advantage (and purpose) of being made to be more durable and packing serious firepower, and security stations and other positions specially designed for security personnel and crew so they can have cover while firing upon intruders.

The marines may have demolition charges to get through blast doors, but they take losses when a pair of auto guns deploy from the ceiling and take several down. When the marines finally blow the blast door, a hail of weapons fire peppers their armor as additional auto-turrets and security personnal coordinate fire on the breached door. With a hole only big enough for one or two people to get through at a time, and a pair of auto-turrets and a half dozen security guards on the other side, it becomes a choke point and a killing zone.

The marines take hefty losses before they secure the security checkpoint. Unless they got enough marines left, they will be stopped dead at the next security check point that is at the entrance to the bridge. Either that, or they get repulsed by security teams that have had time to break out their own heavy weapons and portable support weapons, or even their own heavy duty soldiers that have much heavier armor and weapons than the mobility oriented marines.

Toss in the defenders having knowledge of the ships laylout and even maintenance passage ways the attacking marines might not be aware of, allowing the defenders to pull off flanking maneuvers, launch sneak attacks, apparently disappear from sight by the time marines break down a barricade, etc.

Overall, the Security Station in SE V should be the same as in SE IV, and be better than the Boarding Parties, but a little less effective than the SE IV version since crew count towards boarding strength in SE V. (10 crew = 1 'marine' in stock?)

It just seems sort of retarted to to me think you would need a ship with few weapons and crammed full of security stations or tons of extra crew just to protect it from an equal sized ship crammed full of boarding parties...

Does anyone really use ship capture in the real time battles? I tried it a couple times, I couldn't keep my ships from destroying the ship I was trying to capture.

In other words, what's a good technique to capture ships? maybe only arm your capture ships with shield damaging weapons...

sorry to hijack the post

I guess I can give my 2 cents, security stations should be very powerful, they don't do anything offensivly, and they are basically a waste of space, the best defense is a good offense. I think I'd rather have another shield generator or another couple weapons.

SEV, more than a feeling.

If you're using a mixed fleet of ship types, you might want to set up a custom strategy where the priority is to attack ships until their shields are gone. Modifying the "Capture Enemy Ships" strategy is probably a good way to go about this.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Hey there, Rilo57. Always good to see you around.

I started a ship cap thread in the FAQs.

http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/3558

Capt. Kwok's right about reworking the cap strat. But don't get your hopes up too high. I haven't tested this under 1.44 yet, but they used to keep on shooting most of the time.

If you set up a sim where you have one ship with, say, 6 level 1 boarding parties, and attack another ship which has, say 50-100 crew and a couple security station components, you'll notice that the "number of security stations" actually counted after the on-board combat starts is a big "0". I think you could probably take over a cruiser loaded to the brim with security stations with just 5-6, or so, boarding parties from some frigate.

As such, capturing a ship in SE5 is really only a matter of getting your parties on the ship (about 20 marines per 50 crew is a sure-fire victory), and not getting the ship blown up in the meantime. Security stations don't appear to even work in v1.44, although boarding party defending marines may.

I've never actually tested crew killing weapons; what happens to the target ship when the entire crew is dead?

It slows way down, and it takes almost no time to capture with no crew. Crew killing weapons (Toxic Injector) are one of the coolest things for ship capture, because unlike a lot of the "destroys only X" weapons, they go through armor.

What about capturing ships with Master Computers? That should take no time at all -- should be a drawback of Master Computers -- but when I tried it, my boarding pod just circled the ship until the end of combat.

Couldn't capture a ship with a Master Computer?
Well, maybe a ship with a master computer is immune to capture by some freak of nature (no 'crew' value?) and caused it to glitch up?

Or maybe the boarding pod came in at a 'bad angle', 'missed' the target ship because it was turning, and the pod tried to turn to make another pass or to try and hit anyways, but couldn't turn fast enough and so ended up 'orbiting' their target.

From a certain PoV, it kind of makes sense if a ship with a master computer is hard to capture, being hard for marines to board and capture a ship that has only basic maintenance access passages, and no bridge to capture and secure. If there is crew also, then the master computer probably could simply 'disable' the bridge, making it so it cannot be captured.

Perhaps the Master Computer could use its own security value to represent such a ship being harder to capture, or otherwise make it harder for it to be captured, or even make it impossible for a ship to be captured while it has an intact maste computer.
It would bring in a use for a 'capture' ship to then have to carry the one computer virus weapon to disable the master computer so a marine group can safely board the ship, and take control.

It could add an extra bit of strategy to the game.

I see you use it for ship capture, but does it not also deactivate the enemy ship? Will it still continue to fire?

Ships with master computer can be captured by boarding the ship!
There are many reasons why a ship will not board the enemy (wrong strategy, shields of the enemy are not down, boarding parties have already been used), but master computer is not the cause.

Whew! That's good to hear. We don't need any more silly glitches.

I'll have to remember to test it. Just in case.

how about making capture shuttle gain sspeed depending on tech level (or propulsion techs)

I think "orbiting the ship" describes the behavior I was seeing, except it was more like a very tight circle right above the ship. If I ever have a problem capturing a Master Computer again, I'll save the game.

I thought Computer Virus was one of those useless weapons that doesn't skip armor. It's going to be so awesome when we get the patch and those weapons work the way I always wanted them to.

Orbiting does not have anything to do with master computer. It happend to me aginst non-computerized ships.