Marines! we are not boarding! (in SF)

[Stu--]

I really liked the marines / boarding action rules in noble armada.

I never played the marine hit & run rules in SFB (it just seemed silly..)
On the telly show there are many boarding actions, and a couple of hit and runs - though mostly against specific targets of importance (hostages, specific device etc)


So.. how come boarding / capturing rules didn't make it into the SF game?

 

[Da Boss]

Good quesition - it did seem a strange thing to leave out - however it may well surface in the next supplement in a more substantial form - or it may not........

Its apparently not breaking any SFU rules..............

 

[Captain Jonah]

Give it time, there are a whole load of commando ships to come at some point in the game and SFB added rules for boarding combats and capturing enemy ships section by section later on in the game.

The ships don't really have enough marines to take over other ships just yet, a few marine squads trying to control the 3-500 person crews of enemy ships is just going to lead to all those heroic PC types crawling through the Jeffries tubes and doing heroic and sneaky stuff.

For now just leave them to board, drop some big bombs in vital areas and run away again :lol:

 

[Nerroth]

I agree that leaving out rules for boarding is a less-than-welcome omission; while commando ships would offer advantages in terms of capturing ships (or making the kind of planetary landings supported by the upcoming Star Fleet Marines game engine) they should not be required to do either.

(To compare with ACtA:NA, gaillots certainly offer advantages in terms of boarding; but other classes of ship can still initiate, or attempt to repel, boarding actions in their absence.)

 

[katadder]

in ACTA:NA the crew are never the target and will not fight back, they will fly the ship for whoever is in control.
in SF the crew will not work for you, so capturing a ship might be possible but they will all fight back. consider your few security teams against the whole crew of a ship armed with phasers.

 

[Nerroth]

While there are crew units to consider in SFB, there aren't in FC; the "resistance from the rest of the crew" is abstracted there into a need to inflict a number of casualty points equal to the number of control spaces on a given ship (beyond those needed to get rid of all defending Marine squads).

As I noted in another thread, that is one of the reasons why Seltorian line units have high numbers of Marine squads per ship class; in order to support boarding operations agaisnt pirate or rebel ships. (Other empires with large Marine complements can try this trick as well; it's just that the Selts have a certain advantage in this regard.)

 

[Stu--]

Yeah just think about what happens on the show.

The crew never fight to the death. Usually there's a fight of some description and the victor takes control of the bridge, engineering etc.

 

[Yuber Okami]

While there are crew units to consider in SFB, there aren't in FC; the "resistance from the rest of the crew" is abstracted there into a need to inflict a number of casualty points equal to the number of control spaces on a given ship (beyond those needed to get rid of all defending Marine squads).

Crew units never fought in SFB, neither they had any effect in boarding actions. Their only effect was to require you to put a specific number of marines in a ship proportional to the crew units still alive (something like 1 BP for every 5 Crew units, can't remember exactly) in order to "guard them" while you had to put aboard some of your own crew units in order to navigate the ship (which, by the way, was unable to fire weapons under her new "masters")

 

[Stu--]

Did anyone try using the NA rules yet?

Just curious as my minis are done now and come the first game, guess what - everyone wanted to use those marines they had wandering around the ships...!

 

[scoutdad]

Late to the party, but coming from a SFU grognard perspective...

There are so many rules in the SFB / Fed Comm game system that there was no way to include them all in the initial rulebook, so decisions were made on which to leave out.

since barding party actions do not come into their own until you can field Commando shios (which have increased marine components and remove some non-essential systems to increase transporters...), those rules could wait.
Also, much like the scout trait, boarding party combat in the SFU involves many more possibilities and levels of complexity than would be covered by a straight-out port of the basic NA rules. By saving them til an expansion which includes commando variants, you get the full benefits of the complete rules for boarding actions and the specialised ships to use them.

 

[Da Boss]

Late to the party, but coming from a SFU grognard perspective...

There are so many rules in the SFB / Fed Comm game system that there was no way to include them all in the initial rulebook, so decisions were made on which to leave out.

since barding party actions do not come into their own until you can field Commando shios (which have increased marine components and remove some non-essential systems to increase transporters...), those rules could wait.
Also, much like the scout trait, boarding party combat in the SFU involves many more possibilities and levels of complexity than would be covered by a straight-out port of the basic NA rules. By saving them til an expansion which includes commando variants, you get the full benefits of the complete rules for boarding actions and the specialised ships to use them.

Hmm depends on how complex boarding needs to be -the NA boarding rules may work just fine - but not tried them myself? AT present marines does seem to be a pointless part of the ship stats in a way that previous editions fo ACTA did not have.