Boarding Split is impossible.

[Dreez]

I just spend the last 6 hours trying with varied methods and ships to board a Rattlesnake with 34 crewman and 16 marines,
i used the complete high-morale crew from my first builder = 200+ marines, and then another 70 from a hauler.
And with the new boardingsystem where you can't send reinforcements (which is FKing stupid), you have to wait
for each wave to get dwindled down and slaughtered before you send in the next lambs for slaughter.

I've also noticed that since we now don't have any "traning station" for marines, they almost never ever rank up.
My first hauler i used for several boardings with same marines, they're barely over 1star in anything,
despite taking several capitalships and large haulers.

I would probably have made more money NOT buying a carrier to carry 200+ troops, and just simply bought a Rattlesnake.

WHY are they so damn hard to capture and ... how do you do without spending DAYS trying to train marines ?.

[GCU Grey Area]

I get all of my marines from guild missions - the sort where the reward is an L miner with experienced crew, a couple of ship mods & million credits worth of Nividium in the hold. One of my favourite mission rewards by the way. Among the crew there's always a handful of Veteran marines.

Veterans are a LOT more useful in a boarding op than the cannon fodder you can get from a shipyard (or ex-engineers from a builder ship for that matter). Can be order of magnitude differences in the amount a Veteran contributes to boarding attack strength compared to a recruit that's never done the job before.

Because I start out with more experienced marines many more of them survive each boarding op, so there's a snowball effect in how they gain experience. Compared to sending a wave of raw recruits into a meat grinder from which only a handful survive (if you're lucky) to be reinforced by yet more raw recruits for the next op, so the overall boarding strength of the marines remains very low for a long time.

[Dreez]

How do you gain access to those missions, which type are they ?.

[GCU Grey Area]

How do you gain access to those missions, which type are they ?.

They're just one of the standard guild mission chains from factions which are involved in a war (e.g. ARG, HOP, PAR, TER). Think they become available when you have +10 rep with one of those factions. This is an example:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/arql91eno7v4m ... 1.jpg?dl=0

[Dreez]

Ahh... the wars. I haven't started any yet. Gonna need to setup a defense platform at a certain gate towards HOP.
Besides that, i think i'm just going to focus on building my megastation at the HQ to supply all the money and resources
i could ever need... instead of futile attemps on Split ships.

[al_dude]

If you have a defense station, they generate 2 / 3 star marines when you teleport on it.

Easy to get veteran marines that way. I've captured rattlesnakes easily with those.

Typically, boarding resistance of a free families rattlesnake is around 1,100 ~ 1,300. You need around 30 ~ 40 veteran marines to cap it. Or you can grind it down to lower the bar.

[grapedog]

Rank your marines up by boarding SCA pirate destroyers, or L miners and freighters, which are much easier than Rattlesnakes. You also don't need 200 marines either. Get two cobras to start, each can hold 25 marines, and use those to board easier ships.

Ive had single rattlesnakes chew through almost 50 vet and elite marines sometimes. The rattlesnake is one of the hardest ships to board because they almost always have decent crew and marines.

[GCU Grey Area]

Ahh... the wars. I haven't started any yet. Gonna need to setup a defense platform at a certain gate towards HOP.
Besides that, i think i'm just going to focus on building my megastation at the HQ to supply all the money and resources
i could ever need... instead of futile attemps on Split ships.

Well it's up to you. However they're usually easy missions to complete, much of which can be delegated to other ships (won't personally be doing either of the steps in the mission in that screenshot) & often provide good rewards. They don't require you to be an enemy towards either of the factions involved. Can work for both sides in the Paranid civil war, for example.

[Alan Phipps]

There is a trick for boarding high-crew and defence Rattlesnakes using just 20 good marines from your M ship, but only if in isolated locations where NPCs will not interefere and if you don't mind spending a long time doing it and perhaps losing a fair amount of rep with the owner faction.

Destroy engines, L shields and any turrets (usually 3-5 nearby turrets) that threaten your ship position close under and towards the rear of the Rattlesnake (this destruction loses rep). Suit bombs are good for that job. Scan the target but do not issue any boarding order yet.

Bring the target hull slowly down to about 10% while watching the ship crew number to see if any bail out. (This low unshielded hull is why you don't want NPCs interfering.)

Let the hull regenerate to 40% (this is the long bit) while keeping L shields and engines out of use (losing a bit more rep if you have to do this). Destroying engines has two benefits, it means the boarding pods will land quickly when launched, and it keeps any lasertowers the target launches stuck above it while you are sheltered underneath it. Destroying lasertowers loses more rep.

Repeat the slow hull damage down to 10% looking for more crew bails. Rinse and repeat the last 2 steps as necessary.

When the target crew/defence is down to manageable figures for your 20 marines, send them in (use strong + medium options) and hopefully watch the remaining target crew start to dwindle and then get the green success screen (20 crew shown would be really nice).

[al_dude]

Post CoH (4.0), the hull no longer regenerates with heavily battered pirates destroyers.

[jlehtone]

I just spend the last 6 hours trying with varied methods and ships to board a Rattlesnake with 34 crewman and 16 marines,
i used the complete high-morale crew from my first builder = 200+ marines, and then another 70 from a hauler.

How does one convert 200 Service Crew into Marines?


I just had an evening with FAF Rattler. They had 12 Marines. One Elite and 11 Veterans. The latter 2+ to 4 stars, average probably over 3. Admirable. I've seen TER Asgard with 100+ Marines. Alas, their best were mediocre. Still enough to slay tens of Veterans and some Elites.


I have filled big ship at FRF Shipyard with marines. When you get 200+ at a time, some tens are (barely) Veterans.

[Alan Phipps]

"Post CoH (4.0), the hull no longer regenerates with heavily battered pirates destroyers." It does for capitals with a good captain and many high skill engineers with several repair drones (high-crew Rattlesnakes will usually have all those), but just takes far longer than it used to because most repair effort now goes into surface elements. This is a patience game strategy and is really more in response to the thread title where such boarding was said to be impossible!

[al_dude]

Pirate destroyer boarding is generally not a patience game. Rarely you are left alone while grinding down a ship. Sooner or later, patrol police locate it.

There are some sectors that make it easier to play a patience game but that's down to pure luck.

[Maebius]

If you spend so many hours boarding a single ship, then might as well spend half an hour on its tail, slowly poking it so that its marines go into escape pods (they go 3 at a time, so time spent depends on the starting crew).

The Cobra is very good for this as it can carry 25 marines, but it's kinda fat so you might need to shoot a couple of turrets to avoid getting hit while on a Rattlesnake backside

Phoenixes are super easy, they got biiiig blind spot and Behemoths too.
I haven't seen any Pirate Odysseuses, I suppose SCA doesn't buy those.

If you're patient, you can get all the crew to bail, leaving only the captain vs your marines, but that's not really needed later on (I did that at first, until the crew of HMS-CobraCapture was trained up a bit)

[Feloidea]

How do you gain access to those missions, which type are they ?.

They're just one of the standard guild mission chains from factions which are involved in a war (e.g. ARG, HOP, PAR, TER). Think they become available when you have +10 rep with one of those factions. This is an example:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/arql91eno7v4m ... 1.jpg?dl=0

I'm now a bit over 300 ingame hours worth of playtime in X4 and had access to a variety of guilds for the majority of it and have **NEVER** come across a mission with such a reward. What I see is a bunch of low quality modding materials (mission chain for 1x Nividium Oxide, yay), 2-star seminars, rarely a 3-star seminar and once or twice I've seen a 4-star seminar, plus the usual credits. Even the big missions where you build a station and supply an entire fleet of ships only comes with credits (a LOT, granted, but just credits all the same).

Do you need specific requirements to get these kinds of payout missions, like doing/finishing some of the plots (Hatikvah, Split, Paranid, Terran) first in order to get better rewarded missions or something?

[Mondgnomes]

Capture some Yaki M Ships, i got several prisoners that where able to convert to marines and some where hightly trained 4 stars. Only works when the pilotr is leaving the ship before the crew

[grapedog]

How do you gain access to those missions, which type are they ?.

They're just one of the standard guild mission chains from factions which are involved in a war (e.g. ARG, HOP, PAR, TER). Think they become available when you have +10 rep with one of those factions. This is an example:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/arql91eno7v4m ... 1.jpg?dl=0

I'm now a bit over 300 ingame hours worth of playtime in X4 and had access to a variety of guilds for the majority of it and have **NEVER** come across a mission with such a reward. What I see is a bunch of low quality modding materials (mission chain for 1x Nividium Oxide, yay), 2-star seminars, rarely a 3-star seminar and once or twice I've seen a 4-star seminar, plus the usual credits. Even the big missions where you build a station and supply an entire fleet of ships only comes with credits (a LOT, granted, but just credits all the same).

Do you need specific requirements to get these kinds of payout missions, like doing/finishing some of the plots (Hatikvah, Split, Paranid, Terran) first in order to get better rewarded missions or something?

From what i have seen, only HoP, ARG, and PAR offer ship rewards from missions. I've probably got a solid 15-20 L miners from missions in my current save. I don't know the trigger for them though, they just appear randomly from time to time. Not rare though i feel. Though i also get lots of mission offers for 3 star seminars and exceptional mod components... not sure where the difference is.

Probably tied to something like trade and/or fight ranks.

[Maebius]

Do you need specific requirements to get these kinds of payout missions, like doing/finishing some of the plots (Hatikvah, Split, Paranid, Terran) first in order to get better rewarded missions or something?

I've gotten several Hokkaidos and Magnetars by doing Hard missions for Terran / Argon vs Xenon campaigns. (The only war campaigns I have active now)

They usually come with 2500 nvidium and sometimes a nice crew. (Could be wrong, but they always have crew, even though it might not be listed as a reward)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z7b5gqy2z3zui ... e.JPG?dl=0

I'm also "pretty sure" I've gotten one from a station building mission for HAT, which is also "hard" difficulty, so I suppose many Hard missions can have those?

(I never have any hard missions from Trade Leagues, don't know if I should have)

[Ezarkal]

How does one convert 200 Service Crew into Marines?

From the map, load your ship's info panel and go to the crew tab.
You'll see somewhere the total number of crew on each assignments. These numbers are actually sliders, and you can use them to quickly reassign service crews to marine and vice-versa.
Meaning, you could have kick-ass marines that board a ship, then reassign them into kick-ass repair crew to fix the ship in record time, then transfer/reassign them back.

[jlehtone]

These numbers are actually sliders

Why do they hide GUI in plain sight?