Capturing enemy ships?

[Shadowlord]

Is it possible to capture enemy ships by boarding them with marines?

MoO II had this, for example, and there were three ways to do it. First, if the enemy ship was immobile, you could board it if you were right next to it. Or, you could send marines in assault shuttles (if you had the tech and had assault shuttles on your ships - they count as a kind of weapon). Or, if you had transporters (a special device made available by a later tech), you could beam troops directly onto enemy ships if the facing shield on the target ship was down.

Edit: You could also defend against this in a few ways - security stations to boost troop defense, troop pods to increase your number of troops, shooting down assault shuttles with point defense weapons, or the damper field device (which replaces shields). Damper fields gave a chance to instantly kill marines trying to transport aboard your ship.

You could also raid ships (to destroy their weapons, devices, etc) instead of trying to capture them, if you wanted.

Does GalCiv II have anything like this?

[bonscott]

No

[Darsnan]

I think this would definately be a great addition to the game, especially in the hands of a modder!


D

[Shadowlord]

It sounds like it might be tricky to implement given the current combat system. Hmm.

After thinking about it, I think the best way would be to add a fourth weapon/defense set representing marines and security. That is, if it's possible to alter combat in a mod. If not, then maybe it could be implemented separately from combat (You would say 'capture this fleet' instead of 'attack this fleet').

[Hansolo88]

Hmm, the idea of adding a fourth weapon/defense type is actually quite clever and would represent the concept well. It would be weaker and perhaps more expensive than the other weapons/defense types, but would result in captured (probably damaged) enemy ships rather than destroyed ones.

Not bad, Shadowlord, not bad at all. Of course, no idea if it would actually be implementable. The UI problems alone would be substantial. But even the AI could handle something like that, just treating it as another weapons/defense type with slightly different characteristics. Seems like something the Drengin would really enjoy, it has kind of a Klingon feel to it.

[uberloz]

I like the idea of being able to capture enemy ships.

I wonder if they should come with an increased, reduced or equivalent bc cost per turn to maintain based on the alien technology?

Also, should they be able to be 'stripped' in order to 'capture' alien technology if it's more advanced than yours?

[Hansolo88]

A separate higher maintenence rate for captured ships sounds cool but is probably unecessary.

Again, its worth pointing out what Space Empires IV did, since it did a lot, some of it quite well. In that game, you could capture enemy ships as a result of close-range tactical combat using ships with the correct components. There were also numerous components to defend ships from this type of attack, including one kind of cool one that would self-destruct the ship if it was captured. Captured ships could then be "deconstructed", i.e. destroyed, to gain technologies that you didn't have. It would only go up one level, so, if you were at beam level 2 and captured a ship with beam level 5 weapons, deconstructing the ship would take you to beam level 3.

[Shadowlord]

That sounds quite similar to what MoO II had (security stations, troop pods, and the device that makes the ship have a 50% chance to self-destruct if it would be captured, and scrapping captured ships for a chance to gain techs from it).

I don't know, despite SEIV having all manner of special devices and techs and everything else, for some reason it just isn't *fun* for me. Hm.

Well, I can name one thing that I definitely didn't like about SEIV, and didn't like in MOO III either: The node-based travel between systems. I strongly prefer being able to fly my ships from any system to any system. The node-based travel is a major annoyance, and severely limits your strategic choices. So I'm glad that's not in GalCiv II.