Boarding vs Shields

[ArcWolf]

The suggestion I thought of while reading this thread is to add a percent penalty to units' boarding attempts equal to the square root of current shield strength, applied after all other calculations. That's a simple enough rule and it'd mean that shields would help somewhat in boarding combat but wouldn't completely prevent it unless your shields were 10,000 or more. A tiny shield or a shield that had just started to recharge would have negligible effects on boarding, but a large undamaged shield would become quite dangerous to boarders, and more so as tech increased. Killing a significant percentage of a boarding party with a shield before combat begins could have a disproportionate effect on the subsequent combat, too. And having a policy of boarding ships with full shields could cause serious attrition among your marines in an extended campaign even if they were otherwise able to board ships and defeat crews without taking casualties.

i could get behind that.

A ship with little shields, 20 points or so, would only add about 4.5% casualties, while a ship with stronger shields, 200 for example, would have an additional 14.1% casualties.

[nakorkren]

This is a good solution! It resolves the issue of micro, makes shields have an appropriate but not overwhelming impact on boarding, is tied to an absolute value rather than a percentage, and is easy to understand.

[Garfunkel]

Yea, that does sound like a good idea. It is weird if shields do nothing against boarding but it would be annoying and tedious micro to try to keep shields to zero before you can board.

[Marski]

I'd prefer if shields didn't affect boarders at all. Shields are already powerful and all-around good defense as it is.

[Froggiest1982]

If we allow shields to also prevent boarding and we consider the difference in the speed you must have with the target we may just get a too punishing gameplay balance.

Currently, small fast planes may fly undetected and manage to get "behind enemy lines" and board targets. Eventually, if they are detected there is a small fraction of time for the assaulted to react and I like it to be honest as it adds the needed high-risk high reward element.

Shields to impact boarding without changing the current shield nature would mean instead that to board a ship you still need to engage in some form of combat so I would probably just raid commercial ships as once I have engaged in combat I am not "holding fire" because of boarding. I may come back later to pick up some dead in the water ships but this is again something that is going to expose me to some weapons repaired in the meantime, missiles reloaded, and more because I need to get the shields down. Why bother then? Once I fired better be for good.

I see Boarding as a Piratry thing mostly.

I think that if we are going to allow shields to prevent boarding then I think it is fair to create a commercial shield and level the play a bit.

In the end, you could have small freighters with Commercial Shields and CWIS installed as small defensive measures against pirates. This could also balance civilian stations which we all know are pretty much dead if any red dot appears in the screen at the right time and the right place. (Yes new Raiders I am looking at you)

The commercial shield would work similarly to the CWIS with fixed dimensions, outputs and power all-in-one based on your racial techs.

[villaincomer]

Shields effecting boarding:  Perhaps with the ability to target sub systems (e.g. Shields, Engines, Fire Control) to render a ship (mostly) defenceless.

Else: Leave it as it is and spend time improving some other aspect of the game

[Garfunkel]

I've never boarded completely undamaged ships before and I doubt many people do. Well, that's military ships - commercial ships are a different matter and this doesn't affect them anyway. I doubt anyone plays with boarding being their primary method of ship combat since the moment you capture a ship, all the other enemies target it to destroy it, so you're frakked unless you can board all/most of enemy ships at the same time which is pretty much impossible. And to cut down the enemy speed requires you to take down their shields anyway, regardless of whether you're using HPM or not, so again the change isn't a massive change. And you probably do want to take a couple of engines out, at least, since even with boarding training for your marines, your assault shuttle needs to be 5x fast as the target unless you want to throw lives away in a pointless manner.

So really, the only scenario where this would change things in a big way is military stations which could be both shielded and immobile - and you'll probably have to get rid of PD first before you can board anyway, so once again you need to take down the shields before boarding.

[Foxxonius Augustus]

So I have already put my two cents in but I really wanted simplify my argument.

Point one, gameplay.

Boarding does not need to be made harder.


Point two, roll-play killing.

In every major sci-fi I have ever seen, energy shields are explicitly stated to not have any impact at all on boarding unless that boarding action is being conducted via teleportation.

[somebody1212]

Proposal: Have another design option for shields for whether you want to harden them against boarders or not. Shields which are not hardened against boarders function as they do currently, but shields which are hardened against boarders will cause damage to boarders during the boarding attempt based on their strength.

The problem is, without and drawback there would be no point in having an option between the two because everyone will always go with the shields that damage boarders.

The drawback would have to be significant enough to make the choice worthwhile.

Agreed. Boarding-hardened shields would cost more - I thought I'd mentioned that in the post but apparently I neglected to bring it up. Open to suggestions on how much more they should cost (20% more? 50% more? Double?) since that'll mostly vary with peoples' views on how strong boarding is.

[db48x]

In every major sci-fi I have ever seen, energy shields are explicitly stated to not have any impact at all on boarding unless that boarding action is being conducted via teleportation.

If we’re going going to talk about other science fiction, we should just point out that shields are completely illogical, that every fiction makes up their own rules, and that most of the time those rules are inconsistent. There’s no reason we have to copy Star Trek or whatever.

It might be interesting to explore all the fiction out there and catalog what types of shields they have. Shields prevented boarding in Farscape, for example. B5 had no shields at all. Harry Potter had all kinds of shields, but Dumbledore could always walk through everyone’s shields because he had already learned all those secrets. Etc, etc. However, tvtropes has probably already done this, so it probably won’t make a compelling forum thread.

[Froggiest1982]

In every major sci-fi I have ever seen, energy shields are explicitly stated to not have any impact at all on boarding unless that boarding action is being conducted via teleportation.

If we’re going going to talk about other science fiction, we should just point out that shields are completely illogical, that every fiction makes up their own rules, and that most of the time those rules are inconsistent. There’s no reason we have to copy Star Trek or whatever.

It might be interesting to explore all the fiction out there and catalog what types of shields they have. Shields prevented boarding in Farscape, for example. B5 had no shields at all. Harry Potter had all kinds of shields, but Dumbledore could always walk through everyone’s shields because he had already learned all those secrets. Etc, etc. However, tvtropes has probably already done this, so it probably won’t make a compelling forum thread.

I believe Independence Day (The first) has a "force shield" or "shield" that does not allow the fighters to pass it, however, the fighters from the mothership are instead able to do it. I guess it works in a similar wave frequency that Star Trek uses to explain how some weapons are able to bypass shields (like the Borgs) or jam their frequencies like in Independence Day.

What I am trying to say is that while the fact that a craft could or could not bypass shields, the Sci-Fi narrative and Science (which is real science up to an extent) all convene that shields would pretty much work all on the same way.

With the above in mind, a proper energy shield (or even a deflector) would NOT allow anything through it unless the Sci-Fi narrative requires it.

[ArcWolf]

Well, lets compare a few sci-fi shields quickly.

Star trek has, what i would call, "omni-shields" which stop energy & kinetic based weapons. it also stops transporters, which is the main form of boarding in ST.

Star Wars has at least 2 different types of shields (according to wookiepedia). Ray shields for use against energy, and particle shields which stop kinetic weapons. However these shields do not seen to stop fighters or boarding craft from passing though them. In SWtoR there is a mission where the ship you are on is boarded by the Sith Empire while the shields are at least partially still up. In RotS Anakin and Obi-Wan fly their fighters into the CSA ships hanger in the middle of combat. in RotJ an A-Wing, after getting shot, flies through the energy shield of a Star Destroyer and destroys the bridge.

Edit: Blogaugis points out that the ISD had just lost it's bridge deflectors, so the A-Wing example is incorrect.

In Mass Effect they only posses Kinetic Shields, since the primary weapons of the citadel races are kinetic based.

Halo again goes with the "onmi-shield" approach in that it stops both kinetic and energy weapons. Boarding takes place through battle damage or pre-existing entry points.

Based on how Aurora's shields work, it should be an "omni-shield" which would prevent boarding. I personally think that makes shields too powerful, so the above suggestion of taking the square root of the shield strength and applying that an additional casualty rate is a fair compromise.

[Blogaugis]

...in RotJ an A-Wing, after getting shot, flies through the energy shield of a Star Destroyer and destroys the bridge.

Officer specifically stated that they "lost the bridge deflector shields" - after one shield dome (of 2) on the Super Star Destroyer was destroyed.
Youtube video link:

But other than that... yes.

[Migi]

I did wonder briefly if you only wanted capturing civilian ships to be viable, but I deduce that combat boarding is supposed to be viable because the swarm uses it.

On that basis, I think the simplest solution is for a flat 0.1% penalty* to boarding chance for every point of shield strength, maybe capped at 100% penalty**.

A defensive station would need to maintain 1000 points of shields to be immune to boarding, but once the shields are down a few increments of recharging will make very little difference to the chance of success.
Ships can rely on speed to make boarding difficult and shields are an additive defence.

This system is easy for the player to calculate and the AI can easily determine viable targets. You don't need to worry about weird cases where low tech shields are better, or timing being the critical factor, or troops who can't degrade the target shields fast enough to break through, so they start living on the shields.


* I was originally thinking 1% per point of shield strength but I decided 100 points of shields would be too easy to achieve, especially as tech increases. I'm not discounting that other values might be better.

** I can't immediately think of any reason why that would be necessary but I figured someone else might.

[Ektor]

Honestly, I want boarding to be stronger, not weaker.