Hello folks. Frustrated player reporting in.
First off, this whole quest started when I was nowhere near affluent enough that I could afford sinking the 40 mil + necessary to acquire and fully outfit an M7M with trained marines and weapons. Boarding pods were out of the question. I turned to spacewalk, a *much* cheaper alternative on the whole. After reading a very helpful guide, I set to work.
After chucking a cargo life support system on my Vidar, I acquired 5, 3-4 star fighting marines and put them through the [very lengthy] advanced training in all skills. I've already begun amassing more marines to put through training so that in the near future I'll be able to challenge some M7s, M2s, M1s. For now, though, my crack team of five is with me, ready to go. Their mechanical is high enough to breach the hull of an M6, their engineering is high enough that I'm not seeing the enemy's hull plummet, and their hacking... well, bear with me.
I try my first boarding attempt on a Xenon P. Scanned, no marines, no internal defense systems, great! But when my marines hit the first deck, suddenly all of them are dying... doesn't make a whole lot of sense given that they're the best I could find in the universe, and how else is their fight skill going to go up? If even the very best of mine can't tackle the very worst of there's, I should go back to just blowing them out of the sky and saying "to hell with it, there are purchasable M6s." So, slight frustration, but I've learned that this game rewards persistence. I do a little research and find out that Xenon ships are the toughest to board out of any in the game, so much so that it's really more of a gamble than a numbers game. Okay cool, I'll find another target.
Bemused but determined, I look all over for station defense missions, and finally settle for patrol. A pirate centaur shows up (as expected given my fight rank), so I go after it. Scan, 5 marines, exponentially lower total fight skill, no internal defenses, piece of cake! A little to much help from my friendly neighbors in Omicron Lyrae, though, so I kite my centaur friend off the eliptic where we can do our dance in peace.
So here I am, and here's where I've stopped out of frustration. Every time I lower his shields and keep them at 5%, my marines can't catch up to him. The centaur has these annoyingly place side turrets, and it maneuvers to fire at me by strafing around like an old fashioned pirate ship with cannons. All well and fine, my shields can take its HEPTS, but my marines can't catch up! I get them to within something like 20 meters of him and they just sit there dumbly. STOP GAWKING! Do you want the ship or not?
Anyway, I've tried just about everything that I can think of. I'm faster than he is, so I can fly in front of him and abuse his avoidance programming to cause him to slow down. Then, though, when I give the autopilot command to board, Betty flies me 2 kilometers away and 2 kilometers back as if she expects him to still just be sitting there. Then she refuses to let the marines disembark.
I apologize for the huge wall of text; any information that I included is meant to be relevant, rather than extraneous fluff. I thought that the entire story would be helpful, but I'm also curious if anybody else more experienced than I has encountered a similar problem in the past. At this point I am affluent enough that I could pretty easily buy the missile frigate... but where's the fun in that?
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My key questions:
-Is this problem specific to the centaur? I had no trouble with boarding the P, it's just that I don't want to deal with Xenon ships right now.
-Any commonwealth craft I should take a stab at instead? Preferably ones I'd be likely to encounter on a mission.
-Any way to just release the marines manually, wherever *I* want to, and still have them path toward the ship?
-Any other advice more seasoned space sailors can give me (based on my current positioning issues, or just the entire boarding issue as it stands).
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Normally I feel like this game balances player skill and game mechanics very well, and after attempt this multiple times in multiple, methodical ways, I feel like I must be missing some crucial info.
Spacewalk Boarding Problems [X3:TC]
Moderator: Moderators for English X Forum
Don't use the autopilot board command--there's a manual command to deploy your marines (I think it's in Additional Ship Commands from the command console); use that when you're spacewalk boarding. Either that, or have some other ship carry the marines and give that one the auto-board command while you run interference (and suppress shields, obviously) in your own vessel.
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johnfrancisv
- Posts: 12
- Joined: Mon, 8. Jul 13, 21:23
