Boarding combat so damn lethal

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

So today the time has come to try boarding combat for the first time (hint: it's super effective compared to fighting conventionally and have enemy shoot back at you) and, according to the rules, my boarding-capable marines on a shuttle roughly 3x faster than the enemy should mean each soldier has roughly 60% chance of surviving, getting to the hull and taking part in the firefight inside. And that seemed to be the case as I looked briefly at the casualties during boarding attempt, roughly 60% of the soldiers made it...

Except one thing. During each of two attempts done with 18 formations, 6 of them vanished without a trace.

How is that possible? I haven't found anything in the rules that'd justify this sudden evaporization of entire formations.

[Rich.h]

Were they the ones that were lost during the boarding attempt? Have a look around outside for floating bodies.

[Droll]

Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target? The game might be trying to be convenient and killing off formations one-by-one to simplify replacement.

Because if they are completely unscathed then you have a 66-67% survival rate, which is better than the expected.
To that end - what about the "12th" formation, is there one formation that took some casualties and the rest are untouched?

If they are scathed then it sounds like a bug to me - but I also know that the boarding capability for marines isn't completely broken as well and the 5x rule is defo in effect instead of the 10x.

Edit: Regardless it would be good if someone checked whether or not the boarding capability is actually being applied to troops that have them or if the game is just applying the 10x rule anyways.

[unkfester]

Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target? The game might be trying to be convenient and killing off formations one-by-one to simplify replacement.

Because if they are completely unscathed then you have a 66-67% survival rate, which is better than the expected.
To that end - what about the "12th" formation, is there one formation that took some casualties and the rest are untouched?

If they are scathed then it sounds like a bug to me - but I also know that the boarding capability for marines isn't completely broken as well and the 5x rule is defo in effect instead of the 10x.

Edit: Regardless it would be good if someone checked whether or not the boarding capability is actually being applied to troops that have them or if the game is just applying the 10x rule anyways.

Whenever I board with 250 tons of marines, I lose my HQ straight away every time. I am wondering, do I need an HQ for boarding?

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target?

And here's the problem. They were not. Out of every formation that made it to the hull roughly 40% of the soldiers died, which seemed correct according to the rules posted by Steve. However, according to those rules I should have 18 formations with 60% of initial numbers on boards of enemy ships, but instead I had 12 formations with 60% of initial numbers.

The remaining 6 just evaporated and I couldn't find them anywhere, on board of enemy ships, on board of my ships, nothing, no trace left.

[QuakeIV]

Seems like this is definitely a bug.

[Droll]

Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target?

And here's the problem. They were not. Out of every formation that made it to the hull roughly 40% of the soldiers died, which seemed correct according to the rules posted by Steve. However, according to those rules I should have 18 formations with 60% of initial numbers on boards of enemy ships, but instead I had 12 formations with 60% of initial numbers.

The remaining 6 just evaporated and I couldn't find them anywhere, on board of enemy ships, on board of my ships, nothing, no trace left.

Then overall you have an overall 40% survival rate which is quite a bit lower than the expected but maybe not impossible.
If less than half of your total forces survived I can be made to believe that some formations get completely obliterated - are you able to do a repeat test? I hardly think Steve has implemented random seeds for aurora saves.

If you keep getting these low survival rates something is wrong with the boarding capability for your marines. Otherwise it could be a fluke.

[Rich.h]

It does sound like you just got the sharp end to the rng.

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

6 out of 18 formations consisting of like 60 troops wiped out with each soldier having 60% chance of surviving, meanwhile the remaining formations suffer casualties matching the statistic? How is that "sharp end to the rng"? On top of that it happened twice in a row during two boarding assaults for me.

Also, just calculated the probability of a 60-troop formation getting wiped out based on 60% survival chance for each soldier (though my ship goes slightly faster than 3x speed and I believe I have slightly more than 60).

The rounded value is 1,32923*10^(-24)

And that's for just one formation.

Here we're talking six. Twice in a row.

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

Were the remaining 12 formations completely unscathed when they hit their target?

And here's the problem. They were not. Out of every formation that made it to the hull roughly 40% of the soldiers died, which seemed correct according to the rules posted by Steve. However, according to those rules I should have 18 formations with 60% of initial numbers on boards of enemy ships, but instead I had 12 formations with 60% of initial numbers.

The remaining 6 just evaporated and I couldn't find them anywhere, on board of enemy ships, on board of my ships, nothing, no trace left.

Then overall you have an overall 40% survival rate which is quite a bit lower than the expected but maybe not impossible.
If less than half of your total forces survived I can be made to believe that some formations get completely obliterated - are you able to do a repeat test? I hardly think Steve has implemented random seeds for aurora saves.

If you keep getting these low survival rates something is wrong with the boarding capability for your marines. Otherwise it could be a fluke.

Um, I thought 3x speed+boarding capability means 60% (actually a bit higher than 3x in my case), not 40%, besides, even if it meant 40% that'd be still too damn high, just look at my reply above. So actually for most formations that didn't vanish more than half soldiers survived in most cases. I can attach my db if you want to take a look at the logs (I think I haven't deleted them yet so they should still exist in the db), though I didn't look at them carefully because there were so many and it took me a while to notice some of the ships weren't boarded at all even though my shuttles survived unscratched.

But again, for the remaining 12 formations the list of casualties and survivors seemed to be about right.

[Rich.h]

6 out of 18 formations consisting of like 60 troops wiped out with each soldier having 60% chance of surviving, meanwhile the remaining formations suffer casualties matching the statistic? How is that "sharp end to the rng"? On top of that it happened twice in a row during two boarding assaults for me.

Also, just calculated the probability of a 60-troop formation getting wiped out based on 60% survival chance for each soldier (though my ship goes slightly faster than 3x speed and I believe I have slightly more than 60).

The rounded value is 1,32923*10^(-24)

And that's for just one formation.

Here we're talking six. Twice in a row.

Twice in a row is painful, but also it still doesn't rule out the rng. Or are you saying you suffered the exact same losses on an exact same boarding attempt? If you had it all happen 10 times in a row then you can start to point fingers, otherwise it still could be the rng just giving you a hard time.

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

Dude... Do you understand about what propability we're talking here? Do you acknowledge what a value 1,32923*10^(-24) is? To give you some perspective, according to first google result the propability of getting hit by a lighting is 2*10^(-6).

And the value I posted is for one formation getting wiped out given survival chances of my troops lol

[Droll]

It is clear that something went wrong - I want to know if something similar happens when you do another boarding operation under similar circumstances cuz right now I couldn't tell you what exactly caused it.

I think of one last thing to ask - When your 18 formations arrived at the target to roll their chances, did any of the boarding shuttles carrying them get destroyed / lose their boarding bay? If yes, when did this happen during the boarding operation?

Because if somehow you lost 6 boarding shuttles were lost to weapons fire while the marines were breaching the armor then I think we've found the bug.

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

Nope, all shuttles didn't get a single scratch and are as shiny as when they left docks...

Been a few days since I played aurora, but I guess that with Invaders around I'll have plenty of occasions to try more boarding because no matter the casualties among marines it's stupidly OP. Maybe then I'll have more info as I'll pay a closer look to all logs after giving order to board.

[Droll]

Nope, all shuttles didn't get a single scratch and are as shiny as when they left docks...

Been a few days since I played aurora, but I guess that with Invaders around I'll have plenty of occasions to try more boarding because no matter the casualties among marines it's stupidly OP. Maybe then I'll have more info as I'll pay a closer look to all logs after giving order to board.

It'd be even better if you save the game before boarding starts as that would allow people like me to see what's going on better.