Easy Marine Veterans in ToA

[paiku]

Just a small thing i discovered today. you have a good chance to get veteran marines when buying(recruiting) them at the shipyard from RIP. This used to be the case for split marines, but the chance feels alot bigger this time with RIP. Just use a ship with alot of crew, like a builder or L freighter and buy crew at the shipyard. Transfer veterans to your boarding ship and sell all recruits to the shipyard. Reapeat as long as you want and you can easily go full veterans on your boarding ship. Didn't test RIP wharf or VIG shipyard/wharf.

[Imperial Good]

An alternative approach is to take people with already good morale, such as from a busy construction ship, and send them to the martial arts school teraforming project at your HQ. This lets you level up boarding to 4 star very easily and cheaply for 100 crew at a time (bulk transfer supported). The resulting crew are unlikely to take losses from even the hardest of boarding targets. As a bonus you can train piloting at the same time at the flight school so they can all be 4 star pilots as well to fly away your new acquisition in style.

[RedFlashyKitten]

Just a small thing i discovered today. you have a good chance to get veteran marines when buying(recruiting) them at the shipyard from RIP. This used to be the case for split marines, but the chance feels alot bigger this time with RIP. Just use a ship with alot of crew, like a builder or L freighter and buy crew at the shipyard. Transfer veterans to your boarding ship and sell all recruits to the shipyard. Reapeat as long as you want and you can easily go full veterans on your boarding ship. Didn't test RIP wharf or VIG shipyard/wharf.

Same for the HAT Trading Station in Hatikvahs Choice. There's plenty of marines with a lot of them being veterans.

[blackphoenixx]

The L miners you get as rewards from faction missions also always come with a handful of skilled marines.

[jlehtone]

Same for the HAT Trading Station in Hatikvahs Choice. There's plenty of marines with a lot of them being veterans.

Can you Upgrade a ship at HAT TS? paiku means the "add crew as upgrade/equipment" function that Equipment Docks, Wharfs, and Shipyards have. Not the "run on station and talk to strangers".

The "veterans" from Split have just one star. Better than nothing, but not by much. That said, an Asgard (which is a nice shopping cart for this activity) with 360 one-stars, is some serious cannon fodder. Are the RIP vets any better?

[alt3rn1ty]

Yeah I noticed this on stations in both Avarice and Windfall sectors, not sure if this is a ToA change or a change in general which 5.10 has brought along, but getting 2-3 star marines seems to be easy now for anyone without a Martial Arts school.

[RedFlashyKitten]

Same for the HAT Trading Station in Hatikvahs Choice. There's plenty of marines with a lot of them being veterans.

Can you Upgrade a ship at HAT TS? paiku means the "add crew as upgrade/equipment" function that Equipment Docks, Wharfs, and Shipyards have. Not the "run on station and talk to strangers".

The "veterans" from Split have just one star. Better than nothing, but not by much. That said, an Asgard (which is a nice shopping cart for this activity) with 360 one-stars, is some serious cannon fodder. Are the RIP vets any better?

I see. No, HAT just has good veterans running around. Tho to be honest if the ones mentioned are just 1 star I'd rather run around the dock for a while. They're expensive, but a dozen or so 3 star veterans are gonna capture anything anyway.

Gonna do exactly that today. My rattlesnake finally ran off the dock and I'm gonna use it to capture some of those Barbarossas the VIG keeps sending through TEL space.

[jlehtone]

3-stars tend to be 3 mil per head and lot of running. Asgardful of wannabes is couple clicks and quite cheap. They are much more expendable.

... getting 2-3 star marines seems to be easy now for anyone without a Martial Arts school.

That was already in 4.20. The 5.00 seemed to increase the number of 2-3 stars on NPC (SCA) ships.

[alt3rn1ty]

3-stars tend to be 3 mil per head and lot of running. Asgardful of wannabes is couple clicks and quite cheap. They are much more expendable.

... getting 2-3 star marines seems to be easy now for anyone without a Martial Arts school.

That was already in 4.20. The 5.00 seemed to increase the number of 2-3 stars on NPC (SCA) ships.

Stations in Avarice and Windfall with an abundance of 2-3 star NPCs (walking around the stations docks) .. were not in 4.20. How would you get to Avarice and Windfall stations in version 4.20 of the game?

What I am saying is in my game, NPCs walking around stations typically never went above 1-2 star Marines before 5.0 and ToA was released, now 2-3 star Marines are common especially in Avarice and Windfall stations. So common its unusual in my experience.

Maybe its just a settling in thing, and over time as these new sector stations mature they will have less occurrances of higher star marines.

[Bastelfred]

..., and send them to the martial arts school teraforming project at your HQ.

At this point in the game, you don't need any more marines. Because you can build any ship in the game.

Egosoft builds stuff into the game that you can't use until you're guaranteed they're obsolete.

-martial arts school
-Prometheus
-Erlking upgrades
-Several ships behind walls of prestige, which are already no longer good at that point...

[jlehtone]

What I am saying is in my game, NPCs walking around stations typically never went above 1-2 star Marines before 5.0 and ToA was released, now 2-3 star Marines are common especially in Avarice and Windfall stations.

What I tried to say was that in my game NPCs Marines walking around stations were 2-3 star Marines already before 5.0. I have walked in Windfall/Avarice only very recently; most of my hires are from elsewhere.

[alt3rn1ty]

What I tried to say was that in my game NPCs Marines walking around stations were 2-3 star Marines already before 5.0. I have walked in Windfall/Avarice only very recently; most of my hires are from elsewhere.

Ah right I see, I guess the occurrence is variable and probably a few factors involved, how far the game has progressed / economy / demand for NPCs by ships etcetera.

[taronas]

The L miners you get as rewards from faction missions also always come with a handful of skilled marines.

What kind of missions would that be? Where to find?

[blackphoenixx]

The L miners you get as rewards from faction missions also always come with a handful of skilled marines.

What kind of missions would that be? Where to find?

You get an invitation to join a faction guild after reaching reputation 10 with a faction. Argon vs Holy Order, Holy Order vs Godrealm and so on.
After joining you get mission offers while in the area of that faction.
Some of those (usually fleet assembly and station building missions) reward that factions L miner, and that L miner always comes with a blue engine mod, a purple shield mod, 2500 Nvidium in the cargo hold and a skilled captain and crew - and a bunch of those are always marines.

[NightmareNight91]

Great now everyone knows...lol hopefully egosoft doesn't nerf this like they did the split

[taronas]

You get an invitation to join a faction guild after reaching reputation 10 with a faction. Argon vs Holy Order, Holy Order vs Godrealm and so on.
After joining you get mission offers while in the area of that faction.
Some of those (usually fleet assembly and station building missions) reward that factions L miner, and that L miner always comes with a blue engine mod, a purple shield mod, 2500 Nvidium in the cargo hold and a skilled captain and crew - and a bunch of those are always marines.

That's interesting. I did a couple of "build factory/defense station" for Split and Telady already but there was never a ship reward. The only two ships I got are from "Enter" missions. And there are of course no marines left after entering ...

[jlehtone]

Build factory/defence platform are "generic missions" offered at Stations. Generic missions do not offer Miners as rewards.
The "Guild missions" are never shown on map, only in the "Available missions" tab.

Guild missions tend to have multiple subtasks. Mission has main reward and each subtask has additional rewards.

A "Construction" mission can have "Assemble Fleet" and "Build Military Base" subtasks.
The Base is trivial compared to factory/defence platform builds.
ARGvsXEN and ZYAvsARG Assemble Fleet missions at least used to request ships with modifications.

PS. If you take a Guild mission while you already have mission from that same Guild, then the previous mission will abort instantly, without warning.