I know Wave 6 hasn't even landed yet; however, I'm wondering who believes there will be boarding parties that will take over ships? I can TOTALLY see it happening...

The topic's been discussed in the past here on the forums. The two boarding troopers and boarding engineers are what we got and they're going to work very well once Wave 6 is out. Can't wait to put the boarding troopers on an ISD-I.

I don't expect we'll ever see a boarding party upgrade that would allow you to take control of an opponent's ship. It would be wildly unfair and how would a card like that be even priced? A 10 point crew card that could gain you a 120 point ISD-II? Should it be an 80-120 point crew card because of what they have the potential to steal?
There's just a lot of unknowns on how to make "stealing a ship" fair. That's why I don't think we'll ever see it become a mechanic in Armada.

But playing casually at the kitchen table, go nuts. Make your own boarding parties that can take control of ships, go full pirate and steal ships all night long.

I've thought about trying to incorporate Imperial Assault into Armada using a similar mechanic. But it would be hard to implement since Armada only lasts 6 rounds by default.

The only potential way to capture an enemy ship would be to reduce it's shields first. Whether that's all the shields on a particular hull zone, or some combination of all it's shields. Or you need to reduce it's hull to half to represent a hull breach that could allow for a boarding party. From there, you'd need at least a round for the capture operations to succeed. That would give the team that is losing a ship an opportunity to blast it out of the sky before it's been converted.

The last piece of the puzzle would be an officer upgrade card: Garrison Officer - Exhaust this card when a boarding is attempted against your ship, that attempt fails. You may discard this card to resolve the Garrison Officer effect on an exhausted card. (0 points)

I'm sure there's plenty more speculation on this to be had. But I don't think we'll ever see any capture mechanic added to Armada.

I was thinking about this earlier today. Certainly, boarding and capturing a ship would be a risky waste of time and resources in a stand-alone, 6-round game. However, with the advent of campaigns and long-term strategy, and fleets that may well need to survive several tough battles with limited reinforcement...suddenly capturing is looking more useful. [If you've played the Homeworld series of real-time tactics PC games, then you know exactly how this feels.]

Let's say a flight of bombers has ripped into the starboard side of an ISD, destroying the shields and dealing several damage cards. Then, a Hammerhead comes in and launches a boarding party toward that same side. This boarding attempt, by some cleverly designed rule, rolls <x> number of <y> dice (immune to friendly and enemy card effects, and defense tokens). The damage total of that is then dealt to the ISD with some sort of special type of damage card (a "boarding card"). If the total number of damage + boarding cards becomes equal to the ISD's hull value, and there are more boarding cards than damage cards, then the ship is considered captured. If the damage cards outnumber the boarding cards, then the ship is scuttled. Perhaps it could even be that if the ISD has boarding cards, but is not captured or destroyed by the end of the round, the number of boarding cards it does have is reduced by <x> (to reflect losses in the boarding team).

I'm sure there are a number of problems with that system, but it has the advantage of not needing special-case rules for different classes of ships (i.e. larger and stronger ships are more difficult to capture by their nature), and quick-and-easy captures would be extremely rare, since the boarding attack still has to deal at least half of the target's hull value in special damage to take the ship in order to capture it. This would also allow the possibility of multiple ships working in conjunction to take over a big, valuable target like an ISD.

EDIT: Yet another facet of a system that works like this is that the attacker does genuinely have to be careful about how much damage they deal to a ship they want to capture.

On ‎4‎/‎4‎/‎2017 at 1:41 PM, Derpzilla88 said:

The topic's been discussed in the past here on the forums. The two boarding troopers and boarding engineers are what we got and they're going to work very well once Wave 6 is out. Can't wait to put the boarding troopers on an ISD-I.

I don't expect we'll ever see a boarding party upgrade that would allow you to take control of an opponent's ship. It would be wildly unfair and how would a card like that be even priced? A 10 point crew card that could gain you a 120 point ISD-II? Should it be an 80-120 point crew card because of what they have the potential to steal?
There's just a lot of unknowns on how to make "stealing a ship" fair. That's why I don't think we'll ever see it become a mechanic in Armada.

But playing casually at the kitchen table, go nuts. Make your own boarding parties that can take control of ships, go full pirate and steal ships all night long.

Agreed. Most naval games that I've seen both on table top and on pc tend to have boarding parties simply muck around with the enemy ships in some way (crits, raw damage, debuff, etc..) Though commandeering a ship is a realistic option if extremely difficult in some cases, it's generally unbalancing for a point-based game system.

I think there was an episode of Clone Wars where a Venator was nearly captured by droid boarding parties.

But I don't recall any other instance in canon SW where a capital ship is captured by direct assault.

4 hours ago, Democratus said:

I think there was an episode of Clone Wars where a Venator was nearly captured by droid boarding parties.

But I don't recall any other instance in canon SW where a capital ship is captured by direct assault.

I think that's because there was never much need for it in the stories told by Star Wars films and shows. During the Clone Wars era, the Separatists never really needed to bulk up their fleet with captured ships, and the Republic certainly didn't (though I do remember one Venator being captured, loaded with explosives, and very nearly kamikazed into a Republic space station). And during the Civil War era, only Rebels has a scope that includes the actual process of forming the Rebel Fleet. In Rebels, we do see some ships captured or stolen, but the rebellion isn't yet large enough to operate super-capital ships (As of season 2; I lament that I've been unable to watch the third season).

I think there was no boarding of capital ships because of the size of it and of their crews.

an ISD has a 38 000+ crew, plus almost 10 000 stormtroopers onboard, overpowering that much military power in the short space of a space battle seems incredible, the more if boarding vessel has to be small enough to evade destruction by short range defensive fire.

In EU, I remember 2 effective boarding occurence, one by VSD Bombard against Eyttitmin Batiiv Pirates. Bombard disabled and stopped some pirates corvettes with tractor beams before sending Stormtroopers to board and man those vessels, and use them to fight the rest of the fleet. So we have a capital ship with 2 000+ troops gretting hold of much smaller crafts that were allready damaged.

The other one was the taking of unfinished Razor's kiss by Zsinj and Part of Wraith squadron, from a squeleton crew in Kuat Shipyard. they encountered only 2 people between docking bay and bridge, so no big deal.

I may RPG that second occurence within my D6 campaign, for it is within scope of an adventure party, but for Armada, boarding action (in my opinion) must be limited to crippling/distracting (suicide?) attacks...

that doesn't mean it could not be very efficient, anyway