the root problem of boarding that perpetuates other problems

[johndh]

Problem Description

Edit: to be clear, this is about reducing the financial rewards of boarding, without making is less fun! /Edit

This is a meta issue, in that it's a stumbling block for other issues, and has been for several years. The fact that boarding actions are so profitable has been cited as a reason to not fix numerous other issues that make the game more frustrating or annoying, and I believe these issues could be fixed if the root cause were fixed: boarding is very profitable and allows the player to expand their fleet very quickly. Capturing (taking an enemy ship) is higher risk but very high reward, while looting (taking outfits) is not risky at all but lower reward.

Currently, many of the balancing mechanisms make boarding harder in annoying or frustrating ways that come down to capricious behaviors (bad difficulty), instead of challenging ways that can be navigated through skill and strategy (good difficulty). If it can't be overcome by playing better, it's not good difficulty. On top of that, these things aren't a reliable way to address the problem of boarding being the obvious First Order Optimal Strategy.

Related Issue Links

8073

7787

Desired Solution

The easiest thing to balance might be a direct cost modifier that can be tweaked as needed, like making captured ships and loot instantly depreciate to 10% value, and/or making them inoperable until you pay to have them repaired, which I suggested in #7774 . If you have to pay (e.g.) 75% of the value to actually use it, or sell it for scrap prices, that's a direct tweak that isn't frustrating or annoying, that could be adjusted later by changing numbers instead of laborious coding, and I don't think it would have the undesirable side effect that caused death benefits to be removed (discouraging bold styles of play) because it would affect all ships proportionally. This could also take the form of a tax or a prize money paid to your crew before they let you have the gains. #7826

Either way, this would keep the fun parts of boarding, while nerfing the profit, without relying on frustrating things like roaming execution squads, crossfire deaths, chain reactions of self-destruction, and so on.

There are also some various exploits that could be dealt with, like the ability to keep chipping away at a bounty crew over a few days or looting multiple times. #8023

Alternative Approaches

As others have pointed out (#3638), self-destruction is not fun. This is one of those things that makes boarding less rewarding in a capricious way instead of anything based on skill or strategy.

Regarding the possibility of there being dozens of derelicts floating around after every fight, for the player to swoop in and take without a fight, several suggestions have been made regarding the authorities being able to take prisoners or haul the ships away via tractor beams etc. #580 #1959 There could also be a system of dibs, where the first faction to fire on the target claims the wreckage. If the FW, Republic, Remnant, or Hai attack a ship first, you don't get to board it, but they won't board something you attacked first. Of course, some factions wouldn't honor this. This could be less capricious than the current "we'll slaughter them if we feel like it" approach.

Or perhaps make it so that destroyed ships still have something of value to collect, like bulk commodities (metal, equipment, industrial, heavy metal) or damaged outfits, or minable wreckage. #7521 This would dampen the annoying parts by leaving a little consolation prize, but may amount to giving the player free stuff.

Looting in particular could be made harder by making certain outfits require some HTH combat before looting them, which addresses part of the problem and could work as part of a larger solution. #3346

Someone suggested making HTH outfits like grenades and gas consumable, but I have a feeling I'd just end up hanging around closer to pirate worlds where I could restock every time I land, and this also could reward less risky more boring play. #2392

HTH outfits could have their offensive ability reduced and their defensive ability increased, which is probably the simplest to try but could reduce access to later ship types that can only be gotten through boarding.

Additional Context

Extra Credits explains First Order Optimal Strategy https://youtu.be/6op8eV5OBwE

Once upon a time, ES had "death benefits", which cost money for every death of a crew member. This seemed good in theory, but the result was that it punished players for being bold and capturing difficult targets, but didn't punish the player for capturing weak targets, so it encouraged boring play. This makes me hesitant to suggest any solutions that involve making crew more expensive, or deaths more punishing.

Depreciation has been successful somewhat at reducing the reward for selling captured ships and outfits, but it doesn't reduce the reward for keeping captured ships in the fleet, leading to an exponentially expanding fleet of mismatched ships.

[Hurleveur]

https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky/issues/6986 is the plan to fix boarding currently

[johndh]

6986 is the plan to fix boarding currently

Thanks for the additional context. That's a nice set of features that will be nice to see, though I think my current suggestion is outside the scope of #6986 , which I feel doesn't really address the massive profitability of boarding actions, just makes boarding a more complex and interesting aspect of the game.

[Hurleveur]

It won't make it less profitable it'll make it less accessible and more costly

[johndh]

I think those are different concerns that can happily coexist. When a feature request or bug report gets shot down, it's not because boarding is too accessible, but because it's by far the most profitable strategy, to a game-breaking degree.

Edit: it's important to note that my suggestion doesn't limit what the player can do, just makes it less overpowered.

[ThrawnCA]

Have there been discussions before about the possibility of disabled ships randomly losing outfits? The idea being that although the ship is intact enough not to explode, its systems have been heavily damaged (thus disabled), so not everything is salvageable. You can still pick through the skeleton looking for loot, but it's not quite a smorgasbord, and it quite possibly won't have the essential systems to make it flyable (reactor, thrust, steering).

[Hurleveur]

I like that idea but I'd prefer damaged outfits that you can repair at the rigjt oitfitters

[yafflehk]

What about veteran crew as a shield against excessive boarding? If crew don’t die over a length of time they acquire veteran status – they are better at their jobs, better at boarding and can run your ship better. Veteran crew should mean that your ship is faster, uses less fuel, shoots more accurately, turns quicker, repairs itself quicker etc etc. Maybe these are all tiny differences - 1 or 2 percent of the original values of the outfit, but marginal gains add up. Maybe there are three grades of crew – Landsmen, new hires who know nothing and can’t get the full potential out of a ship, experienced able crewmen, who give you the base stats of your ship as they should be, and veterans who make things better? This would mean that spending all your time boarding and acquiring bigger and better ships in huge numbers would make your own ship worse, your veteran crew would all have been killed in crazy boarding adventures and your new hires would make mistakes and occasionally break things.

[ThrawnCA]

What about veteran crew as a shield against excessive boarding? If crew don’t die over a length of time they acquire veteran status – they are better at their jobs, better at boarding and can run your ship better. Veteran crew should mean that your ship is faster, uses less fuel, shoots more accurately, turns quicker, repairs itself quicker etc etc. Maybe these are all tiny differences - 1 or 2 percent of the original values of the outfit, but marginal gains add up. Maybe there are three grades of crew – Landsmen, new hires who know nothing and can’t get the full potential out of a ship, experienced able crewmen, who give you the base stats of your ship as they should be, and veterans who make things better? This would mean that spending all your time boarding and acquiring bigger and better ships in huge numbers would make your own ship worse, your veteran crew would all have been killed in crazy boarding adventures and your new hires would make mistakes and occasionally break things.

Probably not feasible when crew aren't distinguished individually, there's just a single number indicating how many a ship has. Reworking that would require extensive changes and lots of new interface options for moving them around. And then you would have people wanting veteran status to be granted by surviving combat, which is after all the meaning of "veteran" and would have the opposite effect to what you want.

[Hurleveur]

We'll fet more developed crew at some poimt after the boarding rework

[johndh]

If crew members get better over time by fighting, a lot more of them need to survive every fight if any are going to last long enough to get good. Maybe most of the crew you "lose" in a boarding action are just wounded and will return to service when you get them patched up with 31st century healthcare... But ultimately, isn't this yet another way to minmax for boarding? Ships already have to be so specialized to be viable boarding craft, having their entire fleet only use beam weapons, have extra bunks, multiple HTH outfits, etc.

If crew get better by not fighting, then this is just a punishment for actually doing anything interesting, which is the same problem death benefits ran afoul of. My proposal is not like that, because it doesn't disproportionately punish difficult targets over easy targets, and it doesn't punish the attempt.

[Zitchas]

I do like the idea of having veteran crew; however, combat experience is not the same as "improving my ship's performance" skill.

So I would expect that keeping my crew alive long-term would lead to better ship performance, but have zero impact on boarding combat (except perhaps defensively, as better familiarity with my ship could lead to better understanding of how to use the ship to their advantage when dealing with intruders. Classic sci-fi tropes of engineers rigging traps, improvised defenses, etc.

Conversely, I would also expect that boarding combat experience, while valuable for helping survive combat, would have zero benefit to running my ship.

Upon further thought, I realize that capturing ships right now feels over powered because there is no downside, no cost. If a ship is disabled and the player has sufficient crew to capture the ship, doing so gains them a free ship, which either increases their fleet capabilities, or can be sold for additional wealth and thus upgrade their ship. It may even give them access to a ship that is normally license locked or even completely unpurchasable. There is no downside to capturing: Adding a ship to their fleet does increase crew costs slightly, but even a thousand credits per day for a 10 crew ship is a vanishingly small amount when individual jobs can give in excess of half a million and ships themselves can cost into the tens of millions. The other downside is that if the player wasn't planning on capturing any ships, they will likely have insufficient crew to operate their own ship, resulting in the inconvenience of limping back to the nearest populated planet with partially unresponsive controls. This is a very short term annoyance, although it can sometimes contribute to a player dying, it doesn't have any real consequences.

In contrast, a player that chooses not to capture a ship when given the opportunity... Just looses out on all the above benefits, in exchange for the benefit of not increasing crew costs or having the annoyance of manouvering with insufficient crew for a couple minutes. It's really a very poor option.

If these two experiences are kept separate, then having veteran operational crew would be a disincentive to conducting boarding operations, while rewarding players for keeping their crew alive. This also has the built-in balancing mechanism of giving players a choice because now the option of not trying to capture ships rewards players for doing so. It's still likely to be inferior to the benefit of adding a special/unique/powerful ship to one's fleet, but at least there is a reason for passing up those opportunities.

[johndh]

Capturing otherwise unavailable ships and outfits is cool and fun, though. It just shouldn't be so financially advantageous. There's really no cost to opportunistically capturing a few interceptors here and there, but making a viable "capturing" ship has a pretty high barrier of entry and requires altering your entire fleet, with the benefit of being able to get cool stuff like Korath ships. Unique effort for unique payoff.

[Ferociousfeind]

I do not think that capturing requires unique effort, nor do I think it's actually fun. You disable a ship, you board it, you press the "attack" button until you get what you want.

You don't need anything special to capture. If you want to go all out, you can, but you don't have to. The "high barrier to entry" isn't entry at all, it's the highest level of capture-play. It's as involved as it is possible to get/ (Though, the capture rework will change this so there is a higher "skill" ceiling to preparing to capture.)

You could get more bunks if you want, but you only need them to modestly increase your chances of success (you can always just reload).

You could change your fleet's loadout to use beams, but you really don't need that one, that's entirely optional unless you're also death-balling. (Which is an exploit, and I have minimal sympathy for you blowing up your capture target if you're using that exploit.)

The problem isn't just that capping has no downside or cost associated with it, although that is a huge part of it, to me the problem is that you can get a bigger ship from a smaller ship, solely through capping. It goes up exponentially, with extremely minimal demanded from the player (like crew costs, or "waiting until someone else disables it"). The rewards from capping don't stop until you have the biggest ship in the game. There's a capture ladder due to this, which starts with any one of the three starter ships, and ends at the Korath World-ships. I have immense disdain for the capture ladder and I think it hurts the game by making all other forms of ship acquiring and moneymaking woefully inadequate by comparison.

[johndh]

I think what I'm suggesting here actually addresses your concerns really well. I'll explain.

I do not think that capturing requires unique effort, nor do I think it's actually fun. You disable a ship, you board it, you press the "attack" button until you get what you want.

ES is, aside from the very beginning, a cookie clicker. Capturing, other than opportunistically capturing small ships like fighters and interceptors, is the only strategy you can't accomplish purely through brute force and buying a hundred escorts. You can't just hire ten thousand crew and capture whatever you want.

The "high barrier to entry" isn't entry at all, it's the highest level of capture-play. It's as involved as it is possible to get/ (Though, the capture rework will change this so there is a higher "skill" ceiling to preparing to capture.)

I'm referring to the barrier to capturing as an intentional strategy rather than opportunism, so maybe "entry" was unclear phrasing on my part. If you're concerned about low-level opportunistic capturing, I think my suggestion addresses that too. If a sparrow or hawk is only worth a few thousand credits, it's not much better than hauling bulk cargo. This is the kind of zero-effort gameplay that isn't fun and wouldn't be financially incentivized any more than mining imo. If you're capturing a hawk with a shuttle, and have to pay to repair it, you probably can't afford it yet (or else you'd just buy one). To get the cool special rewards like alien ships, you have to do the "involved" work, which is imo how it should be.

You could get more bunks if you want, but you only need them to modestly increase your chances of success

In my experience, bunks and HtH outfits are a requirement for capturing anything that you can't already easily buy. If you're able to capture ship A with generalist warship or freighter B (rather than a specialized transport), you're wealthy enough to buy it by the dozens. Capturing a Korath raider (whatever they're called now) is AFAIK mathematically impossible for any ship you can buy (star queen or centipede), without extra bunks and grenades or gas. You probably even need to strip the weapons and downsize the engines and cargo to make room if you want a decent chance. It's not something you just casually do with a generalist warship like a falcon or shield beetle. This is the kind of specialization that you don't have to do for anything else.

(you can always just reload).

This is the case for every strategy. If somebody wants to make a rogue-like/ironman mode, I'm all for it.

You could change your fleet's loadout to use beams, but you really don't need that one, that's entirely optional unless you're also death-balling. (Which is an exploit, and I have minimal sympathy for you blowing up your capture target if you're using that exploit.)

I'm not familiar with this exploit (unless it's spawn camping?), and I play on mobile with no means to issue commands, so my escorts are left to their own whims. Unless you're micromanaging your escorts in the few seconds that a fight lasts, they're going to be attacking en mass. I guess if you micromanage your escorts so that anyone with plasma or blasters (or especially missiles) stays on the other side of the system, you could get away with not having exclusively beam weapons, or you could limit yourself to a tiny fleet, but once again that's extra effort or specialization required for capping that isn't required for other strategies. I don't think you can reliably capture enemy ships by shooting them with torpedoes.

the problem is that you can get a bigger ship from a smaller ship, solely through capping. It goes up exponentially, with extremely minimal demanded from the player (like crew costs, or "waiting until someone else disables it"). The rewards from capping don't stop until you have the biggest ship in the game. I have immense disdain for the capture ladder and I think it hurts the game by making all other forms of ship acquiring and moneymaking woefully inadequate by comparison.

Every other strategy in the game (I'm not referring to the campaigns) is a cookie clicker until you get the biggest ship and/or get bored. I don't think this is unique to capping, except that there are some ships only available through capping. With my suggestion, you essentially still have to buy the ship (at a slight discount) to use it, or else sell it for cheap scrap (potentially even reduced to commodity prices), meaning you're only climbing the ladder slightly faster than you would with an effortless strategy like freight hauling or bounty hunting. Does this address your concern?

[ThrawnCA]

I'm not familiar with this exploit (unless it's spawn camping?)

I suspect it's referring to the "gather" command. Arm everything with turrets and anti-missiles, then get all your escorts to clump up around you and slowly drift through an enemy fleet. Since your ships are covering each other, you're practically immune to missiles, you get overlapping shields making each ship unreasonably hard to kill, and you have ridiculous concentration of offensive force. The biggest source of damage is typically the explosions of your enemies as you fly through their wreckage.

[Zitchas]

Alternatively, I refer to "death balling" as the standard universal combat "strategy" of fleets; Everyone rush for the nearest ship in a big mass. So big fleet combat is two big masses piling into each other, where stuff just gets thrashed randomly until one or the other fleet dies. Zero tactics, zero skill, zero real influence, lots of fireworks.

[johndh]

Since your ships are covering each other, you're practically immune to missiles, you get overlapping shields making each ship unreasonably hard to kill, and you have ridiculous concentration of offensive force.

It sounds like this works because space can't decide whether it's two or three dimensions, related to what you suggested in #8073 . The idea of having your flagship protected by a 2D ring in 3D space could be considered an exploit of the geometric quirks of the game.