1.6B2 How to tell your boarding ships to stop shooting?

[VincentTH]

OK, my boarding Wing always kill the target, no matter how I set the threshold for target hull in the boarding menu.
Title says it all: How to stop my wing from attacking the target once the target hull level is reached and the pods have been launched?

If I tell the Wing to disengage, they would also withdraw the marines, and the boarding op fails.

I was successful in Boarding pre-1.5 (minus the hang), but now the hang is gone, but also does the boarding op.

Anyone who have tried boarding in 1.5B1 or 1.6 B2 have any tips for me?

[caltrop]

What does your wing consist of?

I use a Sonra Vanguard (which uses turrets) so when the time comes to ease up I set all the turrets to hold fire

[lordmuck]

IMO they should not stop, they should however keep shooting to drop the hull to 45 - 50%.
What ships were you using ? weapons and how many?

I do agree with you! Most times our own ships kill the target in question even with the S bolts and 2 per ship! They completely miss the turrets to destroy them.

So the safest way I know of that should work in 1.6 is you have your wing of boarders with useless weapons and you do all the work. Set them on weak I believe or medium turrets and weak on the hull. I have to double check, but the main one would be to have the KEEP YOUR DISTANCE in the drop down selected.

Cant disengage but try to give them a fly to command and in behaviour tab of the ship hit the Arrow thats pointing up by the fly to command to increase priority above the boarding? I am really sorry I am not infront of the game right now which is why things are a little vague

[VincentTH]

IMO they should not stop, they should however keep shooting to drop the hull to 45 - 50%.
What ships were you using ? weapons and how many?

I do agree with you! Most times our own ships kill the target in question even with the S bolts and 2 per ship! They completely miss the turrets to destroy them.

So the safest way I know of that should work in 1.6 is you have your wing of boarders with useless weapons and you do all the work. Set them on weak I believe or medium turrets and weak on the hull. I have to double check, but the main one would be to have the KEEP YOUR DISTANCE in the drop down selected.

Cant disengage but try to give them a fly to command and in behaviour tab of the ship hit the Arrow thats pointing up by the fly to command to increase priority above the boarding? I am really sorry I am not infront of the game right now which is why things are a little vague

Wings: 6 Osprey.
Boarding with 59 marines (mostly new recruit)
Target strength: 38 marines on a Helios.

Target Hull is Medium, but they would kill it, and would not stop shooting once the threshold is reached.

My boarding attack strength at start of boarding 466
Boarding resistance: 126

Where is the drop down to have my distance kept specified?

[lordmuck]

IMO they should not stop, they should however keep shooting to drop the hull to 45 - 50%.
What ships were you using ? weapons and how many?

I do agree with you! Most times our own ships kill the target in question even with the S bolts and 2 per ship! They completely miss the turrets to destroy them.

So the safest way I know of that should work in 1.6 is you have your wing of boarders with useless weapons and you do all the work. Set them on weak I believe or medium turrets and weak on the hull. I have to double check, but the main one would be to have the KEEP YOUR DISTANCE in the drop down selected.

Cant disengage but try to give them a fly to command and in behaviour tab of the ship hit the Arrow thats pointing up by the fly to command to increase priority above the boarding? I am really sorry I am not infront of the game right now which is why things are a little vague

Wings: 6 Osprey.
Boarding with 59 marines (mostly new recruit)
Target strength: 38 marines on a Helios.

Target Hull is Medium, but they would kill it, and would not stop shooting once the threshold is reached.

My boarding attack strength at start of boarding 466
Boarding resistance: 126

Where is the drop down to have my distance kept specified?

the maintain distance is in the boarding window where you see "ship behaviour while engaging target" Click on the text under it its probably "target engines" change to "Maintain distance" it "may" help but you would have to do all the work, remove turrets to your liking or specified number, take hull down to 50% or less! and then do the boarding command. Doing all this while the wing is not in shooting range of your target / out of range so they dont interfere

[VincentTH]

IMO they should not stop, they should however keep shooting to drop the hull to 45 - 50%.
What ships were you using ? weapons and how many?

I do agree with you! Most times our own ships kill the target in question even with the S bolts and 2 per ship! They completely miss the turrets to destroy them.

So the safest way I know of that should work in 1.6 is you have your wing of boarders with useless weapons and you do all the work. Set them on weak I believe or medium turrets and weak on the hull. I have to double check, but the main one would be to have the KEEP YOUR DISTANCE in the drop down selected.

Cant disengage but try to give them a fly to command and in behaviour tab of the ship hit the Arrow thats pointing up by the fly to command to increase priority above the boarding? I am really sorry I am not infront of the game right now which is why things are a little vague

Wings: 6 Osprey.
Boarding with 59 marines (mostly new recruit)
Target strength: 38 marines on a Helios.

Target Hull is Medium, but they would kill it, and would not stop shooting once the threshold is reached.

My boarding attack strength at start of boarding 466
Boarding resistance: 126

Where is the drop down to have my distance kept specified?

the maintain distance is in the boarding window where you see "ship behaviour while engaging target" Click on the text under it its probably "target engines" change to "Maintain distance" it "may" help but you would have to do all the work, remove turrets to your liking or specified number, take hull down to 50% or less! and then do the boarding command. Doing all this while the wing is not in shooting range of your target / out of range so they dont interfere

Thanks for the help. I finally got it. Out of 59 marines attacking, only 6 survived and took the ship!!!!!

[EDIT] Actually 50 survived (None levels up), The report of 6 happens when I move down the board command for each member of the boarding op for Move-To's.
What a learning experience. I think this new boarding mechanism requires a lot of tending too. That's not good. The member of the boarding party should know when to stop shooting the target.

[lordmuck]

Yeah the AI is very badly made and bugged most times it needs to be hand held which is very bad in terms of programming and quality

[VincentTH]

Now I have another problem: I got the ship with 50 marines on board. No Repair Drones, and I cannot re-assign any of the marines to be an engineer to fix the ship. When I got on board the capped ship, the HOP engineers are still there, but does not look like they will fix the engine so I can move it to the nearest station, nor is there a way to transfer Engineer/Repair drones over (or re-assign marines to Engineer).

Do I have to spacewalk and fix the engines?

[Mordhar]

Now I have another problem: I got the ship with 50 marines on board. No Repair Drones, and I cannot re-assign any of the marines to be an engineer to fix the ship. When I got on board the capped ship, the HOP engineers are still there, but does not look like they will fix the engine so I can move it to the nearest station, nor is there a way to transfer Engineer/Repair drones over (or re-assign marines to Engineer).

Do I have to spacewalk and fix the engines?

Did you tried to re-assign them using sliders in “total crew” overview? NOT by comm-call to each one.
Try to set number of marines to zero. You will have “unassigned” crewmembers. Then add them as engineers and press “accept” button (grayed out if you have unassigned crew).

[VincentTH]

Now I have another problem: I got the ship with 50 marines on board. No Repair Drones, and I cannot re-assign any of the marines to be an engineer to fix the ship. When I got on board the capped ship, the HOP engineers are still there, but does not look like they will fix the engine so I can move it to the nearest station, nor is there a way to transfer Engineer/Repair drones over (or re-assign marines to Engineer).

Do I have to spacewalk and fix the engines?

Did you tried to re-assign them using sliders in “total crew” overview? NOT by comm-call to each one.
Try to set number of marines to zero. You will have “unassigned” crewmembers. Then add them as engineers and press “accept” button (grayed out if you have unassigned crew).

Ah Thanks, will try that.
But the real chore is to get the marines back to the boarding fleet!!!!

[lordmuck]

Now I have another problem: I got the ship with 50 marines on board. No Repair Drones, and I cannot re-assign any of the marines to be an engineer to fix the ship. When I got on board the capped ship, the HOP engineers are still there, but does not look like they will fix the engine so I can move it to the nearest station, nor is there a way to transfer Engineer/Repair drones over (or re-assign marines to Engineer).

Do I have to spacewalk and fix the engines?

Did you tried to re-assign them using sliders in “total crew” overview? NOT by comm-call to each one.
Try to set number of marines to zero. You will have “unassigned” crewmembers. Then add them as engineers and press “accept” button (grayed out if you have unassigned crew).

Ah Thanks, will try that.
But the real chore is to get the marines back to the boarding fleet!!!!

Yeah we have been begging for a new feature to be implemented by the devs as a move all command :/ Obviously its not on the priority list due to bug fixes first. Can only hope it may be with 2.0

[RainerPrem]

[EDIT] Actually 50 survived (None levels up), The report of 6 happens when I move down the board command for each member of the boarding op for Move-To's.
What a learning experience. I think this new boarding mechanism requires a lot of tending too. That's not good. The member of the boarding party should know when to stop shooting the target.

Did anyone notice Marines levelling up since 1.50? I boarded around 10 ships in the meantime, and no recruit ever got promoted to veteran.

[darrund]

[EDIT] Actually 50 survived (None levels up), The report of 6 happens when I move down the board command for each member of the boarding op for Move-To's.
What a learning experience. I think this new boarding mechanism requires a lot of tending too. That's not good. The member of the boarding party should know when to stop shooting the target.

Did anyone notice Marines levelling up since 1.50? I boarded around 10 ships in the meantime, and no recruit ever got promoted to veteran.

Yes it seems that marines take a long time to advance in boarding but they do. I now have 30 or so veteran marines (1.5) and it seems that they gain more experience when they board merchant ships and Builders but it may be coincidental.However it seems like they need quite a few boarding attemts before they get experience I have something like 12 destroyers, 2 builders and a couple of L merchants boarded so far.I would have had more but its a pain to have to talk to every marine individually after every boarding operation and in some cases (builders and some merchants mainly) you need to use a lot of them (in one occasion I had to use over 150 marines because the target vessel had 125 crue + marines in it).
So the aftermath was a pain having to spend hours to get them back to their boarding ship(s) and listen to that stupid dialogue 100+ times .

[darrund]

Also to answer the OP question nowadays, I use a single L freighter loaded up with lots of marines (175 I think) and my playership Nemesis, All the freighters turrets are set to "hold fire" and after the marines make contact I keep the target vessel pined down and send the boarding ship away, because you never know what the AI will try ro do next(!!!). That way you have to do most of the shooting yourself to keep engines and turrets not working but you are in control of the damage the target gets.Also you don't have to wait for some stupid AI to do whatever it wants to do and go back and forth to finally decide to launch each marine. I had lots of cases when using multiple ships some where just coming back and forth and never launch or at least delayed a lot before launching their marines even though the target was just sitting there without any engines,turrets or drones.Not to mention shooting (then I simply dismantled the guns on them).Now however things are much better with the boarding freighter.

[ApoxNM]

Yes it seems that marines take a long time to advance in boarding but they do. I now have 30 or so veteran marines (1.5) and it seems that they gain more experience when they board merchant ships and Builders but it may be coincidental.However it seems like they need quite a few boarding attemts before they get experience I have something like 12 destroyers, 2 builders and a couple of L merchants boarded so far.I would have had more but its a pain to have to talk to every marine individually after every boarding operation and in some cases (builders and some merchants mainly) you need to use a lot of them (in one occasion I had to use over 150 marines because the target vessel had 125 crue + marines in it).
So the aftermath was a pain having to spend hours to get them back to their boarding ship(s) and listen to that stupid dialogue 100+ times .

Holy ****, why did you even bother?

Just download the mod "Mass move marines". I wouldn't play the game if it wasn't for these kinds of mods.

[VincentTH]

Also to answer the OP question nowadays, I use a single L freighter loaded up with lots of marines (175 I think) and my playership Nemesis, All the freighters turrets are set to "hold fire" and after the marines make contact I keep the target vessel pined down and send the boarding ship away, because you never know what the AI will try ro do next(!!!). That way you have to do most of the shooting yourself to keep engines and turrets not working but you are in control of the damage the target gets.Also you don't have to wait for some stupid AI to do whatever it wants to do and go back and forth to finally decide to launch each marine. I had lots of cases when using multiple ships some where just coming back and forth and never launch or at least delayed a lot before launching their marines even though the target was just sitting there without any engines,turrets or drones.Not to mention shooting (then I simply dismantled the guns on them).Now however things are much better with the boarding freighter.

Good advice. I did not know you can use a freighter to board!!!! But another problem remains, "How to transport those 150 marines back to the original boarding ships", without doing the transfer 150 times!!!!

[RainerPrem]

... But another problem remains, "How to transport those 150 marines back to the original boarding ships", without doing the transfer 150 times!!!!

Just don't do it. At the moment there is simply no reason to reuse people as marines. I haven't seen a single point where quality can't be replaced by quantity. I too had a contingent of 40 marines I trained in the beginning and transferred onto boarding ships over and over. None of them who made veteran then did rise to elite after 1.50. None of the recruits did rise to veteran. Fill your freighter to the rim with people and have it follow a destroyer. After successful boarding use them as the crew of your new ship.

[darrund]

... But another problem remains, "How to transport those 150 marines back to the original boarding ships", without doing the transfer 150 times!!!!

Just don't do it. At the moment there is simply no reason to reuse people as marines. I haven't seen a single point where quality can't be replaced by quantity. I too had a contingent of 40 marines I trained in the beginning and transferred onto boarding ships over and over. None of them who made veteran then did rise to elite after 1.50. None of the recruits did rise to veteran. Fill your freighter to the rim with people and have it follow a destroyer. After successful boarding use them as the crew of your new ship.

Wrong
If you have noticed earlier I said that 30 of my marines are now veterans and I started with rookies only.So they do advance,slowly but they do.In my case I don't want to lose veteran marines

[ThomasAH]

Did anyone notice Marines levelling up since 1.50? I boarded around 10 ships in the meantime, and no recruit ever got promoted to veteran.

Yes, just yesterday (1.60) one of my 25 marines got promoted to veteran. This was while boarding a PAR Odysseus Vanguard, which I defended from a Kha'ak attack earlier, but which became hostile after my very small fleet (1 Odysseus, 2 Gorgon, 1 Eclipse) accidentally hit it about three times.

This was only my second boarding operation, and the first one was against the abandoned Odysseus Vanguard in one of the Xenon sectors. Some other marines (about a dozen) had their boarding skill at 1 now, but morale was still below 1 (e.g. 2/3, as I was able to see when they were on the bridge on the just boarded vessel).

[Pichu0102]

Ships in a boarding operation appear to follow their orders regardless of hull level. If you tell them to attack turrets, they will attack the turrets until all the turrets are dead, and only open fire if a turret is repaired back to operational status. Same for engines.
Disable target is where things get dicey: Ships will attempt to destroy all external parts on the ship. Most ships can't survive that.