Currently, boarding actions are a niche tactic at best, motivated by roleplay as much as by benefits of capturing ships and crew intact. In practice, boarding only happens after the fact: you intercept a defenseless freighter or a crippled warship that’s fallen behind its fleet, offload a few hundred tons of marines, and wait to see if you took any losses at all. The outcome is rarely in doubt.
The new intelligence system has made capturing officers more valuable, but from a pure gameplay perspective boarding still amounts to a small bit of overhead with very limited circumstances.
The change I propose is allow missile warheads to be converted to troop space (at significant cost) and armed with a fixed complement of infantry capable of boarding through shields and armor.
This shifts boarding from a done deal that you only might do after the risk has passed into something with a presence during active engagements. Ten MSP might only deliver one unit of PW infantry, and they might not even make it, but that’s the point. That NPR ship with 10 armor and 500 shields could suddenly become a lot more manageable if a few marines get through. Even if they’re killed before accomplishing much, the threat changes the calculus.
This also opens up some interesting design space:
Spoiler factions gain natural flavor applications - Aether Raiders boarding freighters from cloak, and Starswarm… swarming
Ship designers now have a new tradeoff: does destroyer spare 50t for a marine complement to defend against boarders, or does that tonnage go elsewhere?
The core appeal is that boarding goes from something that follows a battle with basically no question of the outcome, to something more dynamic that adds to the tactical depth of the game.
Or have a new tech that allows tractor beams to grapple enemy vessels. Being able to pin down an enemy ship so your in a decent position to board it without first having to cripple it, would make boarding much more reasonable mid combat.
Still adds the design decisions around if you want shipboard marines for defense but also adds to the tactical layer. Do you continue to pursue the main enemy fleet risking one of your ships being isolated or do you pull back to defend it.
It would be cool if you could have a “Naval Crew” ground forces unit that you could then ship over on a shuttle as a prize crew.
I think it’s a pipe dream but I’d love more than anything for an enemy vessel captured outside view to not register as hostile to them.
I’m not really keen on the idea of boarding torpedoes per se, due to the mechanics involved. The troops could be trained normally and then carried normally, then when the parent ship fired a ‘boarding torpedo’ it would have to take troops from the onboard formation and then a new formation would have to created on arrival, with new troops added as they join. It’s a little messy.
Plus it doesn’t see that realistic that troops would sign up to the prospect of being placed inside a missile with a low probable chance of survival. Not to mention that the troops would have to fit inside the ‘warhead’ space and you would get very few in there.
However, I go agree with the background rationale that boarding tends to be a ‘mop-up’ tactic, rather than part of the main battle, except for a certain spoiler. This is driven by the limits on the speed at which boarding can be conducted (using boarding bays). This is currently 10x target speed to ensure no casualties and 5x target speed if the troop are boarding trained.
One option is to reduce this to perhaps 4x and 2x. A properly-designed boarding craft can achieve a 2x speed against undamaged warships, although the problem then becomes getting on board without being destroyed first. It wouldn’t be too different on concept to the boarding torpedo.
Of course, if boarding does become more effective, then I would need to start adding troops to NPR ship designs, or more likely some type of onboard defence systems equivalent to automated weapons.
The logistics of ground formations is currently quite a micro-intensive process at any scale so with limited knowledge of how that works in the backend I was thinking that a boarding torpedo would be fixed to a specific unit template at design which would be considered pre-loaded at build time per torpedo for the added vendarite cost in the ordinance factories. This saves having to specifically recruit one and load one unit of infantry separately every single time and having to arrange them into regular troop space, etc.
With how frequently your own campaigns are themed around 40k (which does have actual boarding torpedoes) I’d have thought recruiting a 90% doomed boarding unit is no biggie. Especially compared to having them come out of an ordinance factory.
Having garrison troops on a ship could be made much simpler just by saying that any excess crew quarters are populated with marines, being drawn from the same crew population pool but considered more capable during boarding combat calculations. Having the crew population go from x crew to x crew+y marines is a small change to ship design and again avoids the many steps of recruiting, assigning, transporting a true ‘ground force’.
Perhaps not as a missile, but as a more advanced form of Boarding Troop Transport Bay? Larger, more expensive, less space efficient, but adds speed to the ship attempting the boarding action.
Perhaps with a tech line to determine / advance the amount of speed added? Either flat addition or a percentage increase based on the parent ship’s speed, that’d need to be decided with testing I think.
Second the using tractor beams to hold ships, but a contested tractor would slow the enemy down AND you. With number of tractors making the exchange more favorable. So you don’t end up with beam FACs that can just cheese enemies by holding them in place and using super small FCS with low tracking to get ridiculous accuracy against the now stationary targets.
The biggest reason I, personally, don’t use boarding ships and/or shipboard garrisons is the micro. Compared to the “army” ground forces (lots of large formations, organized hierarchy, QoL with organization templates), “marine” units are a lot of small, unorganized formations which involve extra micro to replenish due to being onboard ships.
Between this and the fact that, frankly, there’s very little variety in shipboard marine force designs (INF+PWL and/or INF+CAP, job done), I wonder if we shouldn’t just add a component to do the job and remove the extra micro. Maybe a naval garrison component at 10 troops/HS (model as INF+PW, with normal racial armor so they are better than the crew by a fair margin) and a boarding marines component at 5 troops/HS (e.g., INF+PW with your best racial power armor and HP techs? And boarding capability). Both replenish with the “load crew” order at a population.
If you then want to use these guys as ordnance, that’s up to you, Steve.
I like the way boarding system is currently implemented, capturing enemy ships gives me a lot of joy and I do not see any strong reason to change it, especially with boarding torpedos, they would look extreme and unreasonable.
Yeah, I like the current system too. I don’t think that boarding being a mop-up thing is a problem. I would like to see NPRs use marines every now and then, both offensively and defensively.
Silicone soldiers and metal marines don’t mind being sent on suicide missions.
Just saying.
That being said, I don’t like boarding to get a bigger role in the game.
With the way movement in Aurora is set up to be quasi-inertialess I don’t see it as logical, that an actual intercept against a mobile ship could be achieved.
I’d rather get rid of ramming too.
With railgun bullets I can handwave that and say they are invisible to sensors, but not with missiles and bigger stuff. Missiles don’t have to intercept - they just get close and explode.
Silicone soldiers and metal marines don’t mind being sent on suicide missions.
This is how I RP my boarding formations as well. Especially if you manage to board a vessel in touch-and-go engagements (or breach a defended warp gate, swarm boarding pods, then jump out). If the boarding parties do manage to successfully capture a vessel in an enemy fleet while your ships are out of range, the remaining enemy fleet will quickly blow any captured ships to smithereens while they’re crippled from lack of crew/recent capture. Essentially treating boarding pods as long-odds ship-destroying weapons in fleet engagements, vs. mopping up crippled hulks post-fights as mentioned above.
If it was possible to have NPRs suffer ship performance penalties based on percentage of missing crew in the event of not fully-capturing a ship, that would be a nice incentive for boarding formations as well. As I understand it currently, while there is extensive mechanics for human empires to simulate insufficient crew on a ship, NPRs don’t to keep things more streamlined. Even some kind of flat percentage debuff on the NPR side could be nice.
