Boarding for fun and profit

[nakorkren (OP)]

I recently discovered a new alien species in their home system, and quickly ended up at war with them because they were only two systems from Sol and they wouldn't accept that those two systems rightly belonged to me

They're currently defending the gate into their system with roughly 500k tons of laser and railgun ships (no missiles, no shields). They're at roughly the same tech level as I am, but that is significantly larger than my own fleet size. I was contemplating how best to defeat them, and finally settled on attempting to board them, since boarding circumvents the fire control/targeting delay associated with jump shock.

I created forty 1k-ton boarding shuttles with reasonably fast engines (16k vs targets with 6k) and 250 tons of troops each, and a few layers of armor. I jumped those boarding shuttles in at the same time as about 50 fighters (around 20k tons) to help overwhelm the number of fire control systems present in the enemy fleet. Most of the fighters were destroyed in the first increment, but that gave me time to sic my boarding shuttles on all of the enemy ships.

By the time the dust settled, I managed to jump back with 23 of the 40 boarding shuttles and 5 of the fighters, then waited for the marines to do their thing. As each ship was captured, I had it jump to my side of the gate, where the rest of my fleet was waiting to see who might follow through. Sadly 250 tons was not enough troops to defeat the crew on some of the larger ships, particularly since I lost a good chunk during the boarding operation from the speed ratio. Still, I managed to capture about 110k tons of tech-comparable ships, reducing my enemy's fleet by 110k and increase my own by about 75k net (+110k, -35k). Seems like a pretty favorable exchange.

My house rule to prevent cheese is that I only get to try tricks like that on a race one time, after which I have to act as if they'll be smart enough to foil it tactically, even if the AI doesn't actually do so. In this case I'll pretend that my admirals assume the enemy will move their fleet a little bit further off the jump point to at least give them an extra tic to shoot and prevent captured ships from being jumped right back through. That said, it was really fun!

Has anyone else had success (or failure) using boarding as a technique for jump gate assault?

Also, is there any mechanic that reduces the combat effectiveness of a ship when part of the crew is killed, i.e. the enemy ships where I didn't manage to capture the ship but did kill a lot of the crew?

[Garfunkel]

No, crew effectiveness doesn't go down with casualties. Hopefully Steve can add that in at some point, it would be cool.

And this operation of yours is really cool! Well done and congratulations!

[nakorkren (OP)]

For anyone who's interested, I had a fun bit of tactical play with the enemy fleet described above.

After reviewing the enemy ships I had captured, I noticed that they all had a max range of 160km. I also noticed that the two small 7.5k-ton Jump Destroyers I captured had a max squad jump radius of 250km. I built two 6k-ton ships with six 6-strength particle beams each and faster engines (10km/s vs the enemy fleet's max of 6km/s). I paired one-each of my new kiting ships with one of the captured Jump Destroyers and three fighters to pad out the max of 5 ships per squad jump, and squad-jumped both fleets in. As luck would have it both fleets landed at around 140km from the enemy, so I split off each Jump Destroyer (too slow) and had all four fleets burn full speed away from the jump gate and enemy fleet.

Interestingly the enemy split his fleet into two uneven parts, with one small part of 6 15k-ton ships going after one fleet, and the rest going after the other. The Jump Destroyers were close to the same speed as the enemy fleets, so they were not able to get out of range before being destroyed, as were all but two of the fighters, but both kiting frigates survived with light armor damage. I was able to merge them back together due to them having roughly double the speed of the enemy, and lead them away from the gate while sniping away at the larger ships of the enemy's fleet. The enemy's smaller fleet of 6 ships went back to guarding the gate, which of course gave me an evil idea. Once the enemy's main fleet was far enough away, I jumped through my three battle carriers (lightly shielded, moderately armored, but no guns) and launched my boarding shuttles and a screen of fighters. Once the boarders were aboard the 6 ships, everyone piled back into the carriers and I jumped them back to safety, losing a few boarding shuttles and fighters in the process.

By the time the dust settled, I captured 4 of the 6 ships, jumping each one back through the gate as my boarders took control. My boarding parties were eventually killed off on the two ships that remained; presumably those ships had very few crew left, but sadly as discussed earlier that doesn't impact their combat effectiveness. I jumped the combined fighter strike wing of roughly 100 fighters (400 ton, 4-shot railgun) through and let them unleash hell on "Fleet Fire at Will", destroying the two remaining 15k-ton ships in exchange for the loss of 4 fighters.

By this time my kiters had managed to engine-damage three of the enemy's main fleet 22k-tonners, which had fallen out of the fleet and were reasonably separated. Unfortunately, the range delta between the enemy's large railguns (160km) and my particle cannons (240km) wasn't quite big enough, and the enemy kept getting pot-shots in when my fleet back-tracked trying to maintain range, which eventually cost me both frigates and the rest of the handful of fighters accompanying them. Hoping the addition of 1s sub-pulse will fix the distance keeping jitters in the next update.

In any case I ran my main fighter fleet up the line and blew up the first straggler with only the loss of one fighter (22k in exchange for 400 tons; thank you sir would you like another!?), dodged around their main fleet which by this point had figured out what I was up to and was rushing back, and killed one more straggler at the other end of the line. I wasn't able to get the third, as it was now too close to the main fleet, so I booked it back for the jump gate.

All told, this operation captured four 15k-ton ships and destroyed two 15k-tonners and two 22k-tonners. I lost five 1kton boarding shuttles, eleven 400t fighters, and two 6k-ton frigates, for a total of 21.4k tons. I more than made up for that through the captured ships or just one of the two enemy 22k-tonners, so I was pleased with the exchange ratio. I also learned that you need a bigger range margin on kiting! I had developed better ECM and ECCM since commissioning those frigates, but was in too much of a hurry to retrofit them, which in hindsight was a mistake, as that might've made the difference. I also didn't include enough maintenance supplies, as they were down to about 30% when I lost the, and they'd only knocked three ships out of the fight, out of >25. Still, for a pair of 6k-ton frigates, that's pretty darn good. Posthumous medals for everyone!