Trojan Horse...?

[Spartus001 (OP)]

A strange thing happened in my latest game that showed just how sneaky those NPR devils can be.   I dropped a couple heavily armed and armoured jump point stations on a jump point to keep the pesky NPR Bugs next door from snooping around my newly settled colony, which they also seemed to have an interest in.   Sure enough, half a dozen warships and a couple heavily armoured troop transports come waltzing in to lay claim to my turf.   Having none of that, I proceeded to turn them into smoldering wreckage. . .  except for one troopship which struck its colours and surrendered after a significant pummeling.   The ship was pretty shot up, but still mostly mobile.   

Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I thought why not use this fine ship against its creators?  I sent it back to my nearest shipyard for repairs and then lumped it in with my other troop transports, which were awaiting the last of my invasion troops at a forward muster point near the Bug system.   When I went to load up my captured ship with a load of squishies to throw into the enemy guns, I got an error message, ''Unable to load".   What the hek?  I checked a bit closer and saw that the troopship was still loaded to the gunwales with 4 units of strange insectoid troops with shooty sticks.   Cool!  Free troops!  But my freshly trained battalions of logistic troops earmarked for the captured transport would be sorely needed for the coming invasion.   It couldn't hurt to use my newly captured allies in the follow on wave though, so I landed them on the planet so I could load them later and got my logistics troops ready to load up.

The patience of those little Bug troops in springing their treacherous trap was near heroic and the result was total shock when the first thing they did was unload their 30cm STO railguns and shoot my prize ship out of the sky!  They then quickly did the same to 6 of my other 9 fully loaded transports before I could move them out of range.   My only remaining troops on the planet, a few units of logistic troops, were armed almost exclusively with tire irons and harsh language which were no match for angry bugs with shooty sticks.   The defeat was quick and total.   Over 180,000 tons of ground troops destroyed in transit, 70% of my troopships burned to ash in the atmosphere, 4 battalions of logistic troops turned into bug field rations, and to top it all off, the planet (and its stockpile of nearly 2000 anti-ship missiles) was seized by the enemy! 

I was able to rush some warships back from the front line and nuke the nasty little backstabbers into cinders.   But the damage was done, and my invasion plans pushed back by almost a decade.   I didn't even try using the planet again, just too many bitter memories. . . . and radiation.

Things I learned from this:
1.  Logistic troops need guns too. . .
2.  Captured troopships do not equate to captured troops.
3.  Don't underestimate the crafty AI of the NPRs, they are friggin diabolical!
4.  Pay closer attention to the tales of ancient Greece. 
5.  This game creates awesome stories without even trying. 

[RougeNPS]

This sounds like a story that would come out of Dwarf Fortress more than Aurora.

[Garfunkel]

Oh my, that's amazing! 

[StarshipCactus]

The admiral who captured that ship needs to be investigated! Why did he not try to do anything about the troops in the troop ship! Maybe he will be demoted to LT commander and told to drive haulers for the rest of his career lol.

[Steve Walmsley]

I really did LOL at that story. Now I am conflicted as to whether I should treat as a bug and fix, or leave it alone so that other players can experience it

[mergele]

Give it a 30/70% chance.

[Rich.h]

Definitely do NOT "fix" this, it is an amazing if unintended feature. We now have to go offload those troops onto `prison` worlds, and at the same time be careful about how we do it. In many ways it makes perfect sense, If I refuse to blow a ship out of the sky and insist on capture, then those troops aboard have no real death fear. They can just hold out akin to hijackers.

[nuclearslurpee]

It's a funny occurrence, but I think the reality of the gameplay is that it will trip up every player exactly once, and thereafter the player will always dump troops from a captured transport onto an empty rock which is ultimately just another micromanagement step that has to be done. Probably better to treat it as a bug, particularly since you would expect a bunch of armed troops to just re-capture the ship instead of cosplaying Odysseus.

[Migi]

It's funny in the same way that mass drivers accidentally performing orbital bombardment on your homeworld is funny.
Which is to say: only if it happens to someone else and they post a funny story in it.


As for fixing it, a military presence on the ship means there are 2 people who need to decide whether to surrender or not, rather than 1 if the ship is only commanded by its captain.
So the simple solution would be to roll 1 extra time whenever a ship checks for surrendering while it is transporting troops. The ship only surrenders if both rolls are in favour of surrendering.
The logic being that as long as one of the commanding officers is willing to keep fighting then simple inertia makes the other go along.


You could make it more complex by comparing the respective ranks of the officers, comparing the number of troops vs the number of crew and comparing the quality of the troops vs crew but I don't think it would add anything at the expense of making it much more complex.


I'm not certain if it already exists but there should be an event log detailing any ground units which change sides.

[xenoscepter]

It's funny in the same way that mass drivers accidentally performing orbital bombardment on your homeworld is funny.
Which is to say: only if it happens to someone else and they post a funny story in it.


As for fixing it, a military presence on the ship means there are 2 people who need to decide whether to surrender or not, rather than 1 if the ship is only commanded by its captain.
So the simple solution would be to roll 1 extra time whenever a ship checks for surrendering while it is transporting troops. The ship only surrenders if both rolls are in favour of surrendering.
The logic being that as long as one of the commanding officers is willing to keep fighting then simple inertia makes the other go along.


You could make it more complex by comparing the respective ranks of the officers, comparing the number of troops vs the number of crew and comparing the quality of the troops vs crew but I don't think it would add anything at the expense of making it much more complex.


I'm not certain if it already exists but there should be an event log detailing any ground units which change sides.

 --- I like this idea, but not as is. I'd rather see a chance for a Mutiny. If the ship surrenders, but not the troops, the ship becomes yours and boarding combat begins. If you win the boarding action, the ship is yours. If the troops surrender but not the ship, same deal. Ideally there would be some RNG involved, whereby the crew / troops might cow down to the party that is doing the surrendering. Maybe have it affected by the Determination, Militancy and / or Xenophobia stats of that race? This could also serve the basis of a Mutiny Mechanic for the player, possibly triggered both by surrender and being over your deployment by too much. That could apply to Commercial Ships as well, meaning there would be a reason to give them more than 3 months deployment and end the silliness of 12 year voyages on 90 days of space cram.

[StarshipCactus]

Maybe just make those troops count for any boarding action that would capture the ship?

[TheTalkingMeowth]

Maybe just make those troops count for any boarding action that would capture the ship?

They do. This issue occurs because ships (but not troops in their transport bays) can surrender when a COLONY is taken, no boarding action having occurred.

[Zap0]

As funny as the story is, the sane option is to delete any hostile ground troops from a captured ship. They're not going to fight for you, unless they're robots or something, but we have no way of modeling that ingame. If you can fly the ship around for a few weeks to arrive at some other planet and then unload them without the troops aboard taking back control I think it's safe to say that your empire will find a way to neutralize the troops in cargo, in the simplest case via airlock.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

As funny as the story is, the sane option is to delete any hostile ground troops from a captured ship. They're not going to fight for you, unless they're robots or something, but we have no way of modeling that ingame. If you can fly the ship around for a few weeks to arrive at some other planet and then unload them without the troops aboard taking back control I think it's safe to say that your empire will find a way to neutralize the troops in cargo, in the simplest case via airlock.

While I agree broadly that it's not actually an interesting mechanic (and thus not worth keeping), airlocking hostile armed troops that badly outnumber you is probably hard. See Honorverse slaver vessel designs.

[Migi]

--- I like this idea, but not as is. I'd rather see a chance for a Mutiny. If the ship surrenders, but not the troops, the ship becomes yours and boarding combat begins. If you win the boarding action, the ship is yours. If the troops surrender but not the ship, same deal. Ideally there would be some RNG involved, whereby the crew / troops might cow down to the party that is doing the surrendering. Maybe have it affected by the Determination, Militancy and / or Xenophobia stats of that race? This could also serve the basis of a Mutiny Mechanic for the player, possibly triggered both by surrender and being over your deployment by too much. That could apply to Commercial Ships as well, meaning there would be a reason to give them more than 3 months deployment and end the silliness of 12 year voyages on 90 days of space cram.

The changes post says that surrender chance is based on Determination and Xenophobia of the crew. (link)
You could make a huge decision tree about it but the situation occurs very rarely and there isn't much player interactivity (because AFIK it only happens to NPR ships) so I don't see the point in making it very complex.

As funny as the story is, the sane option is to delete any hostile ground troops from a captured ship. They're not going to fight for you, unless they're robots or something, but we have no way of modeling that ingame. If you can fly the ship around for a few weeks to arrive at some other planet and then unload them without the troops aboard taking back control I think it's safe to say that your empire will find a way to neutralize the troops in cargo, in the simplest case via airlock.

While I agree broadly that it's not actually an interesting mechanic (and thus not worth keeping), airlocking hostile armed troops that badly outnumber you is probably hard. See Honorverse slaver vessel designs.

Converting captured ground troops into POWs probably makes most sense but surrendered vessels don't make any efforts to keep high value information like engines or weapons out of enemy hands. I think that a human player can scuttle a ship at any point so they can deny a working (or partially working) hull to the enemy. That makes the 2 types of surrender inconsistent.

As for troops vs crew you can argue these things both ways, crew have better control and knowledge of the ship whereas troops probably have larger numbers and heavier weapons.
Would troop transports have better security for the crew because of the risk of the troops mutinying? Or are the troops specifically there to keep the crew in line?
The answer depends on how you RP the country so I by making detailed rules you could make the mechanics make less sense for some scenarios but more sense in others.