Blog » X3AP » Advanced Capture Guide part 2 Fundamentals

Posted by JoelNussbaum on Friday 10th August, 2012   ·   0 comments

Its been a while since I last blogged a capture guide

The first thing about these ships is that they dont give up ever. This means you have to take them by force. In order to do this several conditions need to be satisfied. First, you need at least one equipped ship that can board, second you need to work on the weapons, finally you need the marines.

Part 1 Essential equipment:
Your ship is the core of your capture efforts. The ship you are using should have several essential systems. First it should be well shielded or maneuverable enough to dodge enemy fire. You will take damage so they need to have shielding. It should have lethal and less lethal weapons on board. I also suggest you buy several "sacrificial systems" that have a chance blown up instead of your primary reload the game type systems. The list of those primary systems follows:

Cargo life support system - Every ship you take should have one of these on it. It gives your marines a place to live on board your ships. It gets destroyed bye bye marines.

Bioscanner - The ship you are in NEEDS this. This system allows you to see if there is any enemy marines on the ship you are trying to capture.

Freight scanner - The ship you are in needs this. This will allow you to see if the enemy ship has any nasty surprises awaiting your marines. These surprises I will elude to later in the guide.

Jumpdrive - NEEDED on all capture ships. This allows your ships to jump into different sectors AND allows your ships to jump to your position.

Energy Cells - Needed to run the Jumpdrives Safe bet to keep about 1000-2000 on board

Transporter Device - Overlooked by most guides but it has several useful uses. Equip every ship in your capture fleet with this bad.

Salvage Insurance - Allows you to save anywhere ex. right before you board a ship in case the odds are not in your favor.

Marines: These men and women are your only means of capturing a ship bigger than a M8. You find them at military outposts, rehabilitation stations and marine training barracks. If you have a bioscanner, you can see what they are good at before you buy them. You want to initially pick the marines that have the highest fighting skills because all other skills can be trained at the aforementioned facilities. I typically have a TP ship that is dedicated to training marines that just sits at a station. Its wise to train marines in all skills not just one. Even though it costs more lets say a boarding pod never makes it to the ship. gets blown up in route and like always, its the marines that have best engineering hacking or mechanical. Now you are down several marines and its questionable if you can even make the capture. This is the breakdown of the skills

Fighting - Gained by successfully boarding ships this skill makes your marines harder to kill once they are aboard a ship. It also makes the equipment like internal security lasers and enemy marines easier to overcome.

Engineering - This skill is trained and it affects how thick of a hull your marines can cut through. The bigger the ship the bigger hull. High enough marines can even defeat the dreaded Hull polarization device.

Mechanical - This is another trained skill. This skill is overlooked but it is an essential part of defeating the Security lasers and not destroying the ship while clearing the decks. Fighting is going to damage the hull irrespective of how high the mechanical skill is BUT when its higher they do a considerable amount LESS damage to the hull.

Hacking - This is the third trained skill. This skill plays out once the marines reach the central computer. This allows you to transfer the controls over to you. It also allows you to get through any advanced firewall software.

The capture Process happens in 3 parts Boarding Clearing and Capturing. I will explain them in detail in the following Section. Depending on the ship type you may only be able to send in a limited number of marines. A m6 you can only send 8 while a TM you can only send 5. All others you can send 20. I suggest you send the MAXIMUM number every time.

Boarding: Sounds easy, but it is the hardest part of the whole process. Once the shields are low enough your marines will get in the pods or attempt to fly to the ship and breech the hull. This phase depends primarily on the marines ability in the engineering skill. While they are trying you need to keep the shields down. If the shields reach above a certain power level your marines get baked alive and you fail the mission. If the fail here they will typically get away from the ship and attempt to return to the ship they were launched from. If successful then the next phase clearing starts.

Clearing: Once in the ship, abilities needed shift from engineering to Fighting and mechanical. The enemies will resist and the system will lock doors and hatches trying to prevent the advance. There are two main obstacles that can hinder progress. First is enemy marines that can be on the ship the second is Internal security lasers that can shred an entire boarding team. Mechanical is needed to bypass locks on doors and hatches instead of blowing them up and damaging the hull. The ship size depends on how many decks they have to clear M6/TM have 3 decks, m7 has 4 m1/st/m2 have 5. If the succeed in taking all 5 decks then the final process begins.

Capture: Once they reach the central computer the music changes and there is nothing that can stop them other than the computer. If they hack it the ship becomes yours. If they fail everything is for nothing. The hacking skill here solely plays the part in determining success or failure.

DANGERS: The x universe is wrought with dangers Capturing is a high risk high reward game. For an example a single marine that is well trained is going to run you about 1.75 million credits that's as much as a good m3. Not too bad right Okay you are boarding up to 20 marines from a ship that costs 75 million equipped. Then, the ship can be part of a fleet of ships that costs around 200 million. There are a number of things that can go wrong that's why we save frequently with salvage insurance and in different slots so we don't trap ourselves in a loss.

1) Ramming ships: Accidental collisions happen outside of capturing. In side capture it happens as well nothing much can be done bout it. Reload

2) Over damaging the ship: This happens a lot with missile captures and m7 captures. You launch too many missiles or your broadside weapons pulverize the ship. Reload and fix the problem. This is a problem you have to fix either by getting missile timing down or removing some of your heavier guns.

3) Marines not getting to the ship: launch 20 and only 5 arrive because a turret takes them out. There are two ways to defeat this. The first launch screening missiles. Second get in close or approach from a blind spot and launch. Also stay out of range of short range defenses like cluster flak arrays and phased shock wave generators.

4) Marines failing to penetrate the hull. There are a few reasons this happens. Low engineering skill, Presence of hull polarization and finally just bad luck. Use your guns to blow off the hull polarization device then try to board. If both these things fail then you need to send your marines back to school.

5) Marines being killed once they are in the ship. This primarily is because of the fact your marines have low fighting skills or low mechanical skills. Internal security lasers can ruin your day even with the best fighters. Blow up the lasers and your marines will have a much easier time clearing the ship.

6) Marines reaching core but failing to capture the ship. Hacking skill is too low your marines could also be running into the firewall software ship defense. Again blow it away and continue to board.

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