Yes, I started another vanilla AP playthrough. Please send help. After repeated testing I can finally write something like a, urgh, guide.
1) You need an M7M or PSG mounted capitals. Unless you're confident about camping behind an obstacle to dodge enemy missiles. But then you'll be in a hurry to get back to within 5km of the RRF M7M.
2) Find an RRF M7M, keep it on one of your monitors, follow & stay ~5km behind, aggro it with flail to waste all it's mosquitoes. Clear nearby police/military fighters if you want.
3) Now it should fire all missiles at you, first hammer torpedo then flail. Don't save while there are missiles flying, for some reason their hit box changes upon reloading so your mosquitoes will just dance around.
4) As soon as they have nothing other than boarding pods, disable any kind of missile defense on your ship, drop your shields, and poke your target with a couple of mosquitoes. If you're close enough (<~5km) the M7M should fire boarding pods at you. Don't shoot them down as soon as they leave the RRF ship otherwise the scattered marines will just go back in. Shoot them down manually with mosquitoes while they are half-way through.
5) Collect all the floating marines. If you're fast enough the RRF M7M should fire all its marines before it jumped away. You should get 12-16 marines.
6) Not done yet? Find out where the ship has gone to and go after it. It has "restocked" all its missiles and marines, except this time it can't teleport away so there's no rush in waiting for its boarding pods. You can even fire your newly capped marines back to cap the M7M.
On last playthrough I spent the first 50 hrs just waiting for marines to finish their training. This time, not even an in-game day and got 100m in my account. Lol.
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Last night I tried to steal a kill (Xenon Q) from teladi RRF, half way through blasting the hull I heard the boarding music, after the Q was destroyed there were 3 marines floating around. So the only logical explanation is the teladi RRF M7M fired a boarding pod.
And now I'm exploiting this.
A moment ago I found a minotaur with almost no Ecell. I aggro it, it jumped twice, ending up in aladna hill flying to home of light. I jumped ahead to the west gate, hid behind an asteroid and ejected my shields. It flew by, viola, it fired boarding pods at me. The pods hit the rock or were shot down by mosquitoes. I ended up having 13 marines floating around, all 4-5 stars all around.
If I'm ever having another vanilla AP playthrough I'll do this asap. There's even an easier way to do this, grab a terran/Xenon M1/2, transfer an HPD onto it and wait for the boarding crew to fail.
Funny it even played an audio message "warning, your ship is being boarded <sector name>" "warning, your ship has been boarded <sector name>" which should never been heard under normal conditions. I wonder what happens if your personal ship gets boarded, do you just explode in your cockpit or what?
