[TC] Can 5 Marines win an M7 Carrack?

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DevHyfes
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[TC] Can 5 Marines win an M7 Carrack?

Post by DevHyfes » Tue, 13. Mar 12, 23:51

Hi There-

I was wondering if there is ANY chance (with multiple reloads) that 5 marines will take a pirate carrack. I'm using the latest patch. The carrack has no marines or special equipment (internal lasers, etc). The marines' fighting skills are 1 3*, 3 1*s and one 0*

I've been playing off and on for a couple of months, and ended up on the Poisoned Paranid start with a Hyperion Vanguard tuned up to 230 m/s. It also had a couple marines in it, so I figured it would be a good time to start doing some boarding. I read through the "capping, boarding, carjacking" thread on this site, and set to hiring up my full 5 man marine contingent.

Anyway, flash forward to some evening when I'm passing through paranid space and I see a lightly escorted Carrack. With a boatload of salvage insurance in hand, and a good evening of work, I managed to progressively clear out the escorts and get myself positioned under the carrack where only a single turret (PACs) could hit me. I spent another evening trying different tactics for spacewalking, and finally figured out the best way to get my marines onto the ship.

After all that work, I have a save with all marines on the hull cutting in, and after about a dozen tries, it seems pretty consistent that 3 - 5 of the 5 die on the 1st deck (and all dead on deck 2). It was at this point that I dug deeper to see that the carjacking thread may not be accurate after recent patches- and that it only talks about using M6's to capture M7Ms, not M7's (I didn't realize there was a difference...)

So anyway, that's my dilemma. I still have a save from before I launched my marines and if it is hopeless, I'll just revert to that. On the other hand, if there is even the SLIGHTEST chance I can win the ship, I'd be inclined to keep reloading until my 3 nights of work is rewarded.

Any thoughts?

Devhyfes
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Lord0bsidian
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Post by Lord0bsidian » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 00:01

no chance. less than 2 star fighters are worthless. plus you can put 20 marines into an m7. you're going in with 5.

goslin
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Post by goslin » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 00:09

Just in case you weren't sure if you could trust a single response. Its true, there is literally no way it will ever happen. Work your way up, start with TMs.

sadron
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Post by sadron » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 00:15

Maybe if they were 100 in everything...

DevHyfes
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Post by DevHyfes » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 00:52

plus you can put 20 marines into an m7
Just for the record, there are no enemy marines on the Carrack (i've scanned it).

So what CAN you reliably get with M6's? just TM's?

Edit: Let me rephrase that last question...Is it still possible to get an M7 or M7M with only 5 marines, even if they are trained up, or do you pretty much need to use 10?
Last edited by DevHyfes on Wed, 14. Mar 12, 01:28, edited 1 time in total.
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martimus
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Post by martimus » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 01:27

DevHyfes wrote:
plus you can put 20 marines into an m7
Just for the record, there are no enemy marines on the Carrack (i've scanned it).

So what CAN you reliably get with M6's? just TM's?
It depends on what game you are talking about. Comonwealth M6s are pretty easy to board with just 5 marires in AP but TMs are tough. I hear it is the opposite in TC.

Lord0bsidian
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Post by Lord0bsidian » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 01:34

i know dude. i read your first post. you still need fighting even if there's no enemy marines. the enemy ship has a crew remember? also the problem is your marines. i'd eject the 0 and 1 star ones unless they have like 3 or higher in a skill and go around to military outposts and buy some ones with 2 or higher fighting. then train them up to 2 or 3 stars in the other skills if you have the money and time. otherwise you can try boarding m6 and tm if you can get some marines with a decent combination of skills. you can also board m7ms from m6, but it'll probably be easier if you load 20 into a tp since m7ms don't have any guns. you'll still need skills to get in and you need a hacker to be able to survive to the end.

goslin
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Post by goslin » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 02:01

Unless you plan on going hostile with one of the major commonwealth factions there is no place I am aware of to farm M6s for training, other than Springblossums, which is not going to be possible without some ships setup specificly for it.

DevHyfes
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Post by DevHyfes » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 02:54

Lord0bsidian wrote: also the problem is your marines. i'd eject the 0 and 1 star ones unless they have like 3 or higher in a skill and go around to military outposts and buy some ones with 2 or higher fighting.
So are you saying that 5 Marines can take an M7 as long as they are 5* fighters?
you can also board m7ms from m6, but it'll probably be easier if you load 20 into a tp since m7ms don't have any guns.
Uh, what? Which TP's have capacity for 20 marines...?
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delray
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Post by delray » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 03:11

My TP can carry 40...
Where is it?

martimus
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Post by martimus » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 03:21

DevHyfes wrote:
Lord0bsidian wrote: also the problem is your marines. i'd eject the 0 and 1 star ones unless they have like 3 or higher in a skill and go around to military outposts and buy some ones with 2 or higher fighting.
So are you saying that 5 Marines can take an M7 as long as they are 5* fighters?
you can also board m7ms from m6, but it'll probably be easier if you load 20 into a tp since m7ms don't have any guns.
Uh, what? Which TP's have capacity for 20 marines...?
Through a lot of trial and error, I learned that 15 can board an M1 (Zeus) while 10 usually can't (5 has never been successful for me). this is with all of the marines being 5* in all aspects.

Unfortunately, I generally pass on any capital that is not an M1 or M2, so I don't have enough experience in boarding M7's. I have boarded multiple Carracks, but I think the number is only 3-4. I have boarded some Terran M7's too, but that was only because they didn't have any larger capitals to board.

Burnt Pies
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Post by Burnt Pies » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 03:21

delray wrote:My TP can carry 40...
That's because you're playing AP. He's in TC, where TPs are 10 marines.

Vyrebird
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Post by Vyrebird » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 03:29

The issue is less that it's five marines, it's that it's they have abysmal fighting skill and only five marines.

You *can* take M7s/TLs/M1/M2 with 5 marines if they've got good fighting (ie 90-100 or so) and you're willing to do a lot of deck-by-deck reloading (and maybe lose one or two marines anyway).

You also can take those capital ships with 20/21 marines with 0-2 stars worth of fighting each (though you might lose half of them or so, even with several reloads).

But trying to take a 20-marine ship with 5 minimal-fighting marines is going to require an astronomical amount of luck :/

--

The 5-marine targets are mostly M6s, though some people also go after TMs. M6s are much more maneuverable than the larger 20-marine ships, though, which makes spacewalk boarding them much more challenging imo. Also, M6s in TC are unusually hard in terms of the Fighting required, even if you use the full 6-marine party. For perspective, in AP M6s now hold 8 marines but still have the same total fighting requirement (I think...), so in TC you're essentially 3 marines 'short' even with a full boarding party.

The easiest initial marine-training targets are "Return Ship"/"Abandoned Ship" missions, if you get lucky and the target is something boardable (ie M6 or M7, since it never spawns M1/M2) instead of something small (M3/4/5, TS/TP). Those ships usually have a lot of hull damage, which can be an issue for marines without much Engineering training, but they're a nice, stationary target to practice some parts of spacewalking with, and you don't have to worry about combat or faction loss.

The other favorite training target is civilian TLs - many core sectors will have "Hospital", "Casino", or "Arena" ships, and those ships often spawn as TLs. They have shields but no weapons, and using a full 21 marines gives you a good chance of success and trains a bunch of marines simultaneously. The downside is that it *is* a core sector so there will be police and possibly military ships to deal with (either by destroying, apologizing, or something else), and that TLs require 5-star mechanics to enter (so you'd need about 14 of those marines to be 5-star mechanics if you spacewalk, or about 8 to be 3-star if you use boarding pods fired from a M7M).

--
DevHyfes wrote:
Lord0bsidian wrote:you can also board m7ms from m6, but it'll probably be easier if you load 20 into a tp since m7ms don't have any guns.
Uh, what? Which TP's have capacity for 20 marines...?
delray wrote:My TP can carry 40...
Both of them were probably thinking of AP, where TPs hold 40 marines. In TC (which this post is about), TPs only hold 10, so you need 2 TPs for a 20-marine boarding op, or 3 TPs (or 2+M6, etc) if you're going for a 21-marine boarding.

--

Gah, lotsa ninja posts ><

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Post by kurush » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 04:02

Lord0bsidian wrote:no chance. less than 2 star fighters are worthless. plus you can put 20 marines into an m7. you're going in with 5.
I always train marines from <2 star in fighting and they work just fine, if you use them in sufficient numbers, meaning 20 or 21 for capital ships and 8 or 9 for M6/TM. 5 marines for M7 probably won't work. With 5* and multiple reloads - may be.

chibajoe
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Post by chibajoe » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 18:43

There is absolutely no chance that five marines with the skills you listed will be able to take am M7. You can reload 10,000 times, and they will always fail because they will never make it past the hull. There is a small chance that they will be able to take an M6 if you're patient and are willing to reload a few hundred times. Even with 5 5* marines, I was never able to get them past the hull, much less on board and fighting (although it's possible I just wasn't patient enough).

For TC, you need at a minimum 10 marines with 4 or more 4* fighters to take an M7. And when I say 10 marines, I don't mean 10 marines that you kick out an airlock, I mean 10 marines who are on the ship fighting.

Triaxx2
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Post by Triaxx2 » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 19:06

It is possible to get them on board with low fighting. Mechanical is the skill you need. Getting them to survive is another matter altogether. If you can get them on board, I'd suggest purchasing some boxies (fresh out of the box) marines to use to bolster the numbers. 15 is a much nicer number and even if you suffer 2/3 casualties, you should still get the ship.
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Post by jkjklkl » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 20:06

Triaxx2 wrote:It is possible to get them on board with low fighting. Mechanical is the skill you need. Getting them to survive is another matter altogether. If you can get them on board, I'd suggest purchasing some boxies (fresh out of the box) marines to use to bolster the numbers. 15 is a much nicer number and even if you suffer 2/3 casualties, you should still get the ship.
This. And while you're out buying marines you might as well find some with decent fighting. I've bought some fresh marines with 4* fight before. Remember to have a Bioscanner so you can check the marines' skills before buying. However, to get more than 5 marines onboard at a time, you'll either have to fly the TPs yourself, fry all the weapons off the Carrack, or use an M7M.

delray
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Post by delray » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 21:17

Starting AP I did a round around the universe using my Angel, Phantom, Kraken and Cobra and gathered around 40 marines, all of which had 3 or 4 stars in fighting initially.

If you keep doing that every once in a while, visit all barracks and outposts, you shouldn't have a problem gathering a proper commando. Then it's just a question of finding softie targets to train them up further.

My plan involves hired TLs. :-)
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Panzerman
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Post by Panzerman » Wed, 14. Mar 12, 21:48

From the testing I've done, it looks like TC calculates the total fighting skill of your boarding party vs some threshhold related the marine capacity of the ship you're boarding (this may not be exactly the case, but it bears out fairly well in predictions).

I.E. 5 marines with 100 fighting skill will take casualties at about the same rate as 20 marines with 25 fighting skill - in other words they'll probably all die on deck 1.

Large numbers of lower skill marines are actually better than just a few elite ones because the losses at each check don't impact the total fighting skill pool so dramatically.

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Post by Vyrebird » Thu, 15. Mar 12, 00:26

Panzerman wrote:From the testing I've done, it looks like TC calculates the total fighting skill of your boarding party vs some threshhold related the marine capacity of the ship you're boarding (this may not be exactly the case, but it bears out fairly well in predictions).

I.E. 5 marines with 100 fighting skill will take casualties at about the same rate as 20 marines with 25 fighting skill - in other words they'll probably all die on deck 1.

Large numbers of lower skill marines are actually better than just a few elite ones because the losses at each check don't impact the total fighting skill pool so dramatically.
That's what makes "elite few plus loads of trainees" such an effective strategy, both for training and for 'normal' boarding ops. The elite few get your total fighting high enough to minimize casualties, while the hoards of newbies do help your total fighting somewhat, plus mean any casualties are less likely to kill your elite few. In the end, you get the ship, *and* you get fighting training for a lot of marines at once. In TC my "elite few" was usually about 5 100-fighting marines, though in AP I've found I need a higher proportion of high-fight marines, since Sentry Lasers and defense marines are so common there.


One recent post (wish I could find it again) indicated that each ship+faction has a composite base "fighting". If your boarding party's total fighting is above the ship's fighting (ship's base fighting + sentry lasers + defense marines), you'll take minimal or no casualties; if your boarding party's total fighting is lower than the ship's, you're much more likely to take significant casualties. That explanation jives with Panzerman's testing, too.

(the "ship+faction" bit means that, for example, a Pirate M6 is easier to capture than a Military M6, and a Xenon ship is going to be harder than a non-Xenon ship, etc)

---

Edit- Found it; two posts by Ripscar, the one this links to and the one a little later in the same thread.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 39#3836339

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