Boarding Ships

[atroces]

What ships do you use to board, and why?

Throughout the ages, I've used a variety of ships to board, and found that sometimes, my preferences and priorities change. For example, in AP I really enjoyed hostile sector boarding with a Cobra + support ships. The flacks in the rear really lent to the defense against surprise missiles. I have also used Akurei in the past for speed and weaponry. How about y'all?

[FankX]

Here is my post of how i did it: viewtopic.php?f=199&t=439768&p=5062201#p5062180
But i recommend you to check the whole thread.

[atroces]

Here is my post of how i did it: viewtopic.php?f=199&t=439768&p=5062201#p5062180
But i recommend you to check the whole thread.

I do recall this thread, but you never did explain the Shrike like you promised!

[Betelgeuse97]

Here is my post of how i did it: viewtopic.php?f=199&t=439768&p=5062201#p5062180
But i recommend you to check the whole thread.

I do recall this thread, but you never did explain the Shrike like you promised!

Shrike has four things:
- It's great at QUICKLY killing fighter escorts and other capitals you don't want to capture.
- It carries fighters.
- It carries (more than) enough marines to board a capital ship (though if you have a sirokos you have more than enough space on that).
- Its high firepower means you might accidentally damage your target more than if you were flying an M6. It's trickier to use when you have to keep shields down on targets that recharge their shields very qucikly.

I'm about 4 in-game days in and I've not obtained a sirokos (I'm enemies with OTAS), but I have my own M7M. You can still use any other M7M (and it's sufficient even if you're boarding Xenon), but it's quite costly to use a pod at ~200k credits per pod!

Below is my setup. If you're on a budget, you can also use this setup:
- 1 TP+ (with the highest shield preferred, though any will do). If you're up against tougher targets like M1/M2 or Terran ships, use a ship that fires pods instead.
- Fighter drones
- 1 M6 (a heavy hydra or heavy centaur will do; prototype variants preferred but any M6 is fine as long as it can disable equipment with minimal hull damage and kill escorts quickly)
- 1 TM to carry the extra jumpdrives

Because this relies on spacewalk boarding, the tricky part is getting your marines safely into the ship and all in sync, but if you get that in you've saved yourself a lot of money than if you've used pods every time. But this setup is cheap: you just need to find an M6, get a few fighter drones, a TP, and a TM for boarding anything you want. You can get all of this early in the game and they can still be used even in late game.

[Jimmy C]

but it's quite costly to use a pod at ~200k credits per pod!

For the capture of an M7-class or larger ship, that's 1 to 1.2 million for 5 or 6 pods. Consider that even an M7 can be sold for 16 million at a shipyard (and M1 and M2 for 60 million) it's a worthwhile expense.

At least, those were the prices back in AP. I hope they haven't changed much in FL.

[FankX]

I do recall this thread, but you never did explain the Shrike like you promised!

I did, secretly.
I used it to transfer the jumpdrives between the docked ships.
But the whole idea got obsolete since you can buy the jumpdrive installation kit, which you can store on a tern and just activate it.

And shirke is so far my favourite multi purpose ship, can do everything.
My most used advantage of it to have a starburst or arrow docked on it, and switch to it anytime you want to explore something.
If you want to go further, dock at your shrike, jump and undock again.

[FankX]

I'm about 4 in-game days in and I've not obtained a sirokos (I'm enemies with OTAS), but I have my own M7M. You can still use any other M7M (and it's sufficient even if you're boarding Xenon), but it's quite costly to use a pod at ~200k credits per pod!

You can use any kind of M7M i only recommend the shiroko, because of the high speed (210m/s), the second fastest is only 98m/s.
So its just perfect to call at anytime and catch up with your location quickly.

[Hwitvlf]

I use an M7M from a distance while using the Hyperion to lower shields. The Cobra is good because of its speed and the ability to carry Hammers; I keep it at a distance and set its turrets to "Protect Ship" so it can defend itself if it happens to get targeted while I'm occupied with stripping the shields on the ship which will be boarded. I use the Launch All Marines command instead of Piracy as it's much more dependable, so the extra marine capacity of the Sirokos isn't very useful.

On the Hyperion, I use PBE on the main guns with HEPT on the front turrets. The PBE strip shields very quickly, destroy equipment faster than Ion Disruptors, and do very little hull damage. I keep a stock of Typhoon and Tornado missiles for extra damage or when I need to back off and let my shields recharge.

Spacewalking boarding is much harder in FL, because the factions hate each other. I.E. if you use Split marines to board a Boron ship, they'll probably get blasted in space.

In FL, several more ships support Boarding Pods. I tried boarding with a Carrack recently and it worked very well. The only difficulty is that the pods tend to run into enemy fire if the enemy is shooting at you when they are launched. Turbo Booster helps the Carrack get out of range quickly so the enemy will stop firing.