Posted by: Migi
« on: December 20, 2020, 11:21:04 AM »--- 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.
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 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.
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.