EotH boarding ship

[Nirukii]

So I was playing Galaxies at war the other day, and I noticed that the borg took over a couple of my ships! not destroyed, mind you, but litteraly assimilated  my ship for them to use. I start another skrmish, this time as the Borg, and it turns out that I CAN assimilate ships!

Anyways, seeing that I see the Empire of the Hand more of a craft faction and fannon unit dump site (almost) I figure, why not try to unlock the code, and use it to create a new and rather unique ship that can take over other ships? Just tossing ideas around, thought this might be interesting.

TL:DR : ONE SHIP TAKES OVER OTHER SHIPS.

[Nirukii]

update: I found the code, and it turns out to be an invisible hardpoint! the hardpoint does need to be placed somewhere on the model, but it can't be targeted, and has 00 hp. interesting...

[Corey]

That's not really a hard thing to do, I wouldn't need to unlock their code to do it, but the reason we haven't is (1) it isn't espcially useful and (2) it only lasts for the duration of one battle, making it kind of pointless. Making it last throughout a GC is probably possible, but would be way too much work to figure out.

[Nirukii]

That's not really a hard thing to do, I wouldn't need to unlock their code to do it, but the reason we haven't is (1) it isn't espcially useful and (2) it only lasts for the duration of one battle, making it kind of pointless. Making it last throughout a GC is probably possible, but would be way too much work to figure out.

ah ok, I just haven't seen it done before in any other mod. I just thought it would be more effective than destroying a ship hardpoint by hardpoint, but that's just me.

[yutpaeksi]

Actually this does sound like a really interesting twist to add to the EtoH, even if the boarded ship is only usable in the current fight. To help balance it a little, you could code in a delay once boarding has started, whereby the boarding ship has to remain in one position, during which its shields are down. This delay could even be ship dependent, as taking over an ISD would be more difficult than taking over a Carrack cruiser.

The ship being boarded would stop firing and essentially be out of the fight until boarding is completed. A boarded ship could be reduced to half shield strength once its taken over or have reduced weapon strength.

I think this could really interesting tactics to the EtoH. You could take out screening vessels for an ISD or a MC80B, then board it before more ships are jumped in, and be able to use it in long protracted engagements.

[Corey]

Time delays and altered stats are not possible to do. On top of that there's no way to make it fail sometimes, so they only thing stopping you from taking over the enemy's most powerful ships is if the boarding ship gets killed before it gets there.

[Willhelm]

Could you modify the range? if you limit the range a bunch, and maybe give it weak shields and Armour it may be an interesting but not over powered twist
could you not also make it so the ability only works once, making the ships practically useless after taking one ship? and is there no way you could like limit the size of ships it works on? like tractor beams only work on ships significantly smaller than the ship using it (Star destroyer)
just throwing out ideas here

[yutpaeksi]

Yeah its range could be very small, meaning you'd have to get the boarder very very close. It could also be a relatively weak ship, and to prevent you from fielding a huge fleet, it could take up something like 3 or 4 pop, meaning you'd be choosing between fielding the boarder or another phalanx destroyer or ascendancy. It could also be fairly expensive, and while it might be a single use ship in a battle (meaning it can board only one vessel per fight), its worth would be in the ability to use an enemy's ship against them.

[Corey]

I'm also considering this as if the range is right next to the ship, and yes we could limit the ships it works on, however if we do that, it becomes kind of pointless. Why even bother doing it if the best you're gonna get out of it is a Dreadnaught? I mean, if you make it expensive enough to be balanced, you may as well just build the equivalent ship on your own side. I can see this being useful if it were like what Thrawn did with the mole miners to get more ships, or for the NR to get more interdictors, but hat can't be done in this game, since you can't make it depend on chance or last throughout a GC instead of just one battle, unless it's possible through some LUA tricks that I'm unaware of, and even if it were possible through that we'd have to do the script on every capturable ship, which would make it have performance issues even if it were possible.

So basically, there'd be a ship with a 100% effective capture rate that doesn't have lasting effects between battles while being expensive enough that you may as well just buy your own counter to the ships you'd want to be capturing. It'd be unbalanced, and then once the novelty of "omg I just captured their ship" wore off, it's not adding anything to the experience either.

[Willhelm]

by limiting it i meant just to remove the possibility of capturing a ssd or something

and the ship wouldn't necessarily have to be as expensive as a capital ship, that would actually be far less logical because the faction would be trying to capture ships to SAVE money, so rather than making them expensive, make them require alot of skill to successively use effectively.
so make them slow, weak and lightly arm'd but cheapish and extremely effective in a good players hands by making them work 100% of the time when their close enough and by maybe giving them a power to engines or shields power or something.

[Corey]

by limiting it i meant just to remove the possibility of capturing a ssd or something

and the ship wouldn't necessarily have to be as expensive as a capital ship, that would actually be far less logical because the faction would be trying to capture ships to SAVE money, so rather than making them expensive, make them require alot of skill to successively use effectively.
so make them slow, weak and lightly arm'd but cheapish and extremely effective in a good players hands by making them work 100% of the time when their close enough and by maybe giving them a power to engines or shields power or something.

I was saying it would have to be as expensive as a regular capital ship for balance reasons, not for realism reasons. If it was for realism reasons it wouldn't make much sense anyways because they'd have to have enough personnel to kill off the entire enemy crew and security (capital ships tended to have a company or two of regular soldiers on board) , and then man the ship themselves. Balance wise, you're using a single ship multiple times to give yourself a two ships advantage over the other side (say it starts 5 capital ships to 5 capital ships, you use this, it turns into 6 to 4 capital ships). If they were cheap, it doesn't matter how bad they are at everything else, just jump them in right next to the capital ship and congratulations. Do it three times and you've taken over most major parts of the fleet without firing a single shot. People already always say the Empire of the Hand is overpowered, we're not giving them an insta-win ship.