Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

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LameFox
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Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by LameFox » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 09:32

Boarding is one of the main activities I have performed in this game from launch thru all updates, and one consistent thing I have noticed is that this calculation it gives about the strength of your boarding party and that of the defending crew is completely, utterly useless at determining your chance of success. It gives unskilled marines FAR too much credit, when in reality they are worth essentially nothing, and may even take multiple capped out waves to succeed if a ship has a lot of veterans on it. As an experienced player I know to ignore it, but I think it is just so entirely inaccurate that anyone who bought this game and tried to get into boarding would end up being misled rather than aided by this readout. It is so bad that boarding might even be easier to learn if it didn't exist, because at least then it wouldn't give you such a wrong notion of what is stronger!
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GCU Grey Area
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by GCU Grey Area » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:00

It's useful in some circumstances. Do my boarding more or less exclusively with HQ trained 4-5* veteran & elite marines. In that context I find it's a fairly useful indicator of whether I'll have a reasonable chance of success with the small marine complement aboard my usual M ship, or if I'll need to call in something bigger which can carry more marines.

Alan Phipps
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:05

Or another way of looking at it is just to use it as an indicator of whether you bother to check and assess the target ship's crew list, or not. Since you need to have scanned the ship anyway (or be on very good terms with the faction) to get its defence strength, checking its crew is not a great burden.
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LameFox
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by LameFox » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:10

The problem is that by the time you know when you can trust it or not, you have already pretty much learned the system. I think the greatest frustration will be for new players, who don't know how the skills matter, probably are buying some marines at an EQ dock or so and looking at this readout expecting it to be truthful. And that's perhaps the worst time to use it because those marines they have bought are essentially children with nerf guns, and any random ships they try to board will usually by default have some veterans on board that flatten them. Particularly if they go after things like SCA that are quite misleading because there's nearly nobody on them, but most of those who are there are veterans.
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LameFox
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by LameFox » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:19

Alan Phipps wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:05
Or another way of looking at it is just to use it as an indicator of whether you bother to check and assess the target ship's crew list, or not. Since you need to have scanned the ship anyway (or be on very good terms with the faction) to get its defence strength, checking its crew is not a great burden.
That's not really my point. I know you don't need it once you learn the system. Actually, I think if they can't make it accurate it would be better if it wasn't there at all.

X games are notoriously difficult for new players to pick up, so I think things like this should really be reviewed. If a game tells a new player 'you can do this' they are probably going to assume 'well, okay, I can probably trust this thing which exists to tell me whether I can do this'. Then it's just going to annoy them when it turns out they cannot in fact trust it. Better that it is either reliable, or not there, so they rely on looking at the crew in the first place.
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:37

I take your point, but the reality is that the RNG is heavily involved in determining what boarding strength encounters what defence strength, and then the outcome and losses, in *each* of the perhaps many phases of the fight-though. Also, taking early boarding party losses in initial phases can make subsequent phases that much more punishing. Therefore, any score-based prediction system is bound only to be a rough indication of likelihoods. Yes, new players will not know all that, but then what else could Ego do? If there were no prediction system at all then players would be shouting for one.

If it were just maths-determined (I pre-score more than you, so I win) then boarding would be even more unrealistic.
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Raptor34
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Raptor34 » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:06

I find it's generally a good indicator. Couple patches ago.
Just this patch though I was boarding a ship with a bunch of vets and maybe elites iirc and they for some reason had an abnormally low combat score. Think it was a VIG Barbarossa. Or a ZYA Raptor.
Iirc they showed them with like a sub-1k combat score which is clearly bull.
So is this problem new? Or is there a bug somewhere in their calculations?

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by dtpsprt » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:10

Alan Phipps wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:37
..................
Yes, new players will not know all that, but then what else could Ego do?
..................
They could (and really they should) explain the logic used in calculations in the Wiki and not having it coaxed out with pliers like teeth in the forum. The same goes for most functions of the game...

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Imperial Good » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:11

I keep having to post the mechanics of how boarding works. I wish people would search rather than posting speculation.

This is what I mentioned in a previous topic...
It decides to create between 1/4 and 1/2 of the marine count attack teams. These are then assigned random marines as their leader so each attack team has at least 1 person. Then for the remaining marines it assigns them to a random attack team. This process is repeated for the defenders as well, except they might get a few service crew thrown in to pad out teams, not like it matters at all given that most service crew still do not fight and how weak service crew are at fighting. Then the list of attack teams is paired off for combat. Each combat round has each pair dealing damage to each other by randomly selecting a target and dealing a random damage roll based on skill, biased towards larger numbers than smaller ones. Service crew do not have this bias, can roll a 0 and still depend on boarding skill for performance, hence they are usually less effective than 0 star marines. After the round ends any dead marines are removed, and any empty attack teams removed from their lists which cause all engagements to shuffle up. This repeats until one side does not have any attack teams left.

What one can take from this is that there is no bias towards losing skilled marines, that throwing more marines than the enemy does not necessarily improve performance and that losses are very likely to occur to the unlucky attack teams at the front of the list.

Also that RNG can pull a number on you in at least 6 locations....
Your attack team count. More attack teams means fewer average marines each meaning less damage per round and less total health to absorb the randomly fired damage before losses occur. Worse still is any attack teams without an enemy pair do not even get to fight in rounds so are effectively wasted.
Your attack team marine distribution. If the lead group ends up with only 1 marine in it then that marine is very likely to die. Although unlikely, can potentially lose 50% of your marines this way if you get 50% of your marines in your tailing attack team with maximum attack team count.
Enemy attack team count. Fewer enemy attack teams is worse for you as it means they deal more damage per round and more attack team health to absorb the randomly fired damage before losses occur.
Enemy attack team marine distribution. If the enemy lead attack team ends up with 3/4 of the marines in it then it will systematically murder your entire boarding crew 1 attack group at a time. This is unlikely to happen.
Your damage rolls. Lower and less focused rolls kill enemy marines slower. Due to damage roll bias this has significantly less relevance than the top 4 points.
Enemy damage rolls. Higher and more focused rolls kill your marines quicker. Due to damage roll bias this has significantly less relevance than the top 4 points.
By far the largest killer of marines would be attack team counts. All it takes is you to have the bad roll of 1/2 against a good roll of 1/4 and even with significant skill advantage you are likely to suffer some losses. Marine distribution is less likely to get marines killed due to the number of independent rolls encouraging results more around the average than extremes. Damage rolls can in theory cost you marines, but at this stage you might as well blame the bigger killers since if they had rolled better it likely would not have made a difference.
Between launching the pods and hull cutting completing the only marine losses are due to boarding pods being destroyed. Once hull cutting completes the above logic applies. At no time is the boarding strength numbers used at all during the calculation, as such they are made up numbers. I would hope boarding strength formula is somewhat related to actual outcome chances using the logic explained above.

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by dtpsprt » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:14

Raptor34 wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:06
I find it's generally a good indicator. Couple patches ago.
Just this patch though I was boarding a ship with a bunch of vets and maybe elites iirc and they for some reason had an abnormally low combat score. Think it was a VIG Barbarossa. Or a ZYA Raptor.
Iirc they showed them with like a sub-1k combat score which is clearly bull.
So is this problem new? Or is there a bug somewhere in their calculations?
It's not really... never forget what Stalin said (brrrrr): "There is quality in numbers"

Boarding with 20 elite 4*plus Marines with a strength of 1500+ against 100 defenders with 700 strength is bound to fail because of the inevitable attrition to the veterans...

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Imperial Good » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:17

dtpsprt wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:14
Boarding with 20 elite 4*plus Marines with a strength of 1500+ against 100 defenders with 700 strength is bound to fail because of the inevitable attrition to the veterans...
Depends on how much above 0 star the defenders are. 0 star marines are practically useless as they only deal 1 damage per round as opposed to the 15 damage per round a 5 star marine can deal. If these are service crew they might even deal 0 damage per round. Marine health is 100 + skill level for a minimum of 100 health and maximum of 115 health.

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by LameFox » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:38

Alan Phipps wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 10:37
I take your point, but the reality is that the RNG is heavily involved in determining what boarding strength encounters what defence strength, and then the outcome and losses, in *each* of the perhaps many phases of the fight-though. Also, taking early boarding party losses in initial phases can make subsequent phases that much more punishing. Therefore, any score-based prediction system is bound only to be a rough indication of likelihoods. Yes, new players will not know all that, but then what else could Ego do? If there were no prediction system at all then players would be shouting for one.

If it were just maths-determined (I pre-score more than you, so I win) then boarding would be even more unrealistic.
In this case I am ignoring any losses prior to fighting within the ship, since the score does update along the way as you lose units.

Regarding RNG... I have sometimes tested this in creative starts where I would save/load a lot of times and don't notice it being reliable over time either really. But if they feel they need the system to predict an outcome, but also cannot make it very reliable, perhaps it would be best if what actually occurred in the ship was displayed in-game. I don't mean just the mechanics of how it happens written in an encyclopedia entry or something, but so you can actually see, in real time, 'oh we got a bad roll there' or something along those lines. Otherwise all they see is each side's losses with no accounting for why and how.

This is actually a widespread problem in this game IMO: it never, ever tells you what your crew are doing, not only in regards to boarding but how their skill is affecting ships performance, etc. You are expected it seems to simply think 'more stars good' without ever being able to tell precisely when and how it has an impact. I've seen posts in here before with people wondering if they should put ANY crew on their ships at all, because the system is just that opaque they can't tell from playing the game.
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 15:44

No, I said early losses in phases of the fight-through. I didn't mean any largely avoidable losses in the pods or on the hull. The fight-through is made up of a series of encounters until one side has nobody left, and those encounters are what I meant by the phases for this discussion and how early losses can make the remaining encounters even harder. Imperial Good tells you what the encounter mechanism is and how the RNG plays a part in it above.
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by dtpsprt » Mon, 27. Jun 22, 18:40

Imperial Good wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:17
dtpsprt wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 11:14
Boarding with 20 elite 4*plus Marines with a strength of 1500+ against 100 defenders with 700 strength is bound to fail because of the inevitable attrition to the veterans...
Depends on how much above 0 star the defenders are. 0 star marines are practically useless as they only deal 1 damage per round as opposed to the 15 damage per round a 5 star marine can deal. If these are service crew they might even deal 0 damage per round. Marine health is 100 + skill level for a minimum of 100 health and maximum of 115 health.
700 strength devided by 100 Crew+Marines is 7 damage per person on average right? I have seen (rarely) 100+crew with strength less than 200 and it is no problem overwhelming them...

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Imperial Good » Tue, 28. Jun 22, 01:31

dtpsprt wrote:
Mon, 27. Jun 22, 18:40
700 strength devided by 100 Crew+Marines is 7 damage per person on average right?
I do not know. As I said before, the number is not coupled to the actual boarding mechanics and is effectively made up. I hope it has some sensible meaning but without knowing units it is hard to tell.

I somehow doubt this is the metric as 182x 4 star marines can easily have a "boarding strength" of ~15,000. Using your suggested meaning this would give them a damage of ~82 each which is not possible as the logic caps out at most at 15 damage when the marine is perfectly skilled.

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Irushian » Mon, 11. Jul 22, 19:06

I have a question for anyone that may have tested this... It's mostly a curiosity question than a practical one though I suppose it has a niche use case.

If you have 5 star elite marines but turn them in to service crew and then board an enemy ship with them, do they still use their boarding skill with the fight or do they get gimped due to their designation as service crew?

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Nanook » Mon, 11. Jul 22, 19:11

Easy answer - you can't board with 'crewmembers', only 'marines'. So they have to be changed to marine status before you can board. And no, changing them back and forth doesn't damage their skill levels. In fact, many of us change them to crew so they can get experience in morale while repairing any damage to their ship. Morale then adds to their boarding skills as marines.
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Irushian » Mon, 11. Jul 22, 19:21

Ah yes, of course! With the heatwave I'm unable to play as I don't like my temps going so high but I should have realised before posting.

Thank you for your very quick response! =)

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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 11. Jul 22, 20:26

I briefly cycle my less-than-elite marines as service crew on my construction ship while building station modules. It does wonders for their morale score and hence improves their boarding too. (ie what Nanook said.)
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Re: Boarding strength calculation is so bad it's actively misleading

Post by jlehtone » Mon, 11. Jul 22, 21:48

Irushian wrote:
Mon, 11. Jul 22, 19:06
I have a question for anyone that may have tested this... It's mostly a curiosity question than a practical one though I suppose it has a niche use case.

If you have 5 star elite marines but turn them in to service crew and then board an enemy ship with them, do they still use their boarding skill with the fight or do they get gimped due to their designation as service crew?
A parallel niche since NPC does not board player ships, is to ask what if the NPC defenders have Service Crew that happen to have some Boarding Skill (although RNG is probably not permitted to spawn such characters)?
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