I think that a new variety of ships should be created to fit the role of ..."Troop Transport"....

Purpose : They should be able to capture another Ship, Station, Capship, Ammo Depot or Fuel Depot

Armament : Disabling (Crippling) Weapons Only

Variants : It should have certain variants that extend all the way up to ships that can capture a small station single handedly. The larger the stations are, the harder they should be to capture, and the more TT's will be needed.
Other ships currently in the game could be adapted to perform this role as well, it's just be cool if there was an identifiable ship for each nation, that, "looked scary".
TT's should have several different variants. Bigger slower ones mainly for bigger capturing abilities (stations or capships). Smaller ones mainly for single seater ships.
And medium ones for both, but not particularly good in either department, just capable at both.

Performance : They should be relatively slow and easy to hit for each of their variances.

Strategic Implementation : Various ships should be ordered to escort these Troop Transports, as they are sitting ducks in open space alone.

How it can be used : Multiple people can be assigned as "troops" to the ship, and in doing so, can be transferred to the disabled vessel, killing the previous owner of the disabled ship or station in the process. (I considered taking them captive, but I wouldn't want to be captive, so it wouldn't be fun.)
Capturing capital ships and stations would also mean being in the station or capital ship, and being able to control it.

On the galactic map, it would show which stations are currently controlled by who, and when this control took place. (There could be a silent measure to be taken so that the enemy doesn't know you have their station under your control)

Long-term : Eventually, these transports will be critical in the ablility to claim entire systems for a given nation. The nations will then change in shape and size, and who knows... Maybe some nations will cease to exist all together. I don't see this really happening because the Serco and Itani War would cause each economy to be thriving from the war with one another. Happy mediums will take place. It could be a gigantic strategic galaxy, and everybody could be a part of it, Troop Transports would be the only means of claiming stuff as your own.

P.S. : These Troop Transports could be used against Guilds and Factions as well as Nations...

In short, no.

In short, I think Troop Transports are coming up soon.

They do not make sense for a variety of reasons:

a) We do not have the option to 'disable' a ship. Nowhere have the devs made it clear that disabling a ship would be implemented (if you have evidence to the contrary, I am eager to read it). Most discussions dismissed disabling ships as not likely to be much fun.

b) It takes away from the skill-based aspect of the game. So I launch a ship at a station to have it taken over? "Maybe we can roll some dice over that, lessee. Oh, 20? Sorry, you need 24. Better luck next time. Your troop transport is in cinders, btw."

c) The thread contradicts itself:
It should have certain variants that extend all the way up to ships that can capture a small station single handedly. is almost exactly the opposite of Various ships should be ordered to escort these Troop Transports, as they are sitting ducks in open space alone.

d) Not all space should be conquerable. Eliminating an entire nation, while fun, would induce more members to dock their pay than could be good for VO.

e) 'Killing the owner of a vessel' is inadequately fleshed out. How would that work? What consequences would it entail?

In short, no.

I'll bet ya' a million credits troop ships are comin' up.

Toshiro, thank you for your input, but I must retort...

Let me just rip your argument apart small piece by small piece shall I?

"They do not make sense(you mean their usefulness? Because I can guarantee you, they will be both useful and necessary) for a variety of reasons:

"a) We do not have the option to 'disable' a ship."
This is true, however this is part of the suggestion. Why destroy a ship when you can capture it? Granted, some security measures may exist protecting certain ships from infiltration (at an extra cost ofcourse) and will automatically self destruct when a code is not entered to stop the self destruct, (unless you can buy a hacker that would generate a code... then the destructing ship would need even more security measures... etc.)

"Nowhere have the devs made it clear that disabling a ship would be implemented (if you have evidence to the contrary, I am eager to read it). Most discussions dismissed disabling ships as not likely to be much fun."
I'm sorry I wasn't aware of these conversations. I think if the devs see the necessity of disabling vessels in this situation, maybe they would reconsider.

"b) It takes away from the skill-based aspect of the game."
No it doesn't. It just adds another target for you to shoot at to protect yourself. It also adds significantly to the grouping and strategizing part of this game, something this game severly lacks.

"So I launch a ship at a station to have it taken over? "Maybe we can roll some dice over that, lessee. Oh, 20? Sorry, you need 24. Better luck next time. Your troop transport is in cinders, btw.""
No, haha. It wouldn't work like that. Obviously it would take a significant amount of time, and would depend on the skills of the people within the Troop Transport disabling key systems of the station and killing station crew to take it over. I do suggest that we enable both NPCs and PCs to take part in the attack of the stations "interior". I'm not necessarily suggesting that we actually see the insides of the station, I know that would be too much to ask. I just ask that it be consistent with the strategy of disabling certain stations. Station crew and/or defenses may be too much for a certain number of Troop Transport ships, and there will be casualties on both sides, but strength in numbers in these situation will not always prevail. With the fewer, but larger stations, crews may be much harder to kill...

"c) The"[This]" thread contradicts itself:
It should have certain variants that extend all the way up to ships that can capture a small station single handedly.[yes sorry my error, I meant without additional TT's. "is almost exactly the opposite of Various ships should be ordered to escort these Troop Transports, as they are sitting ducks in open space alone.
They would definately need protection for the long period of time they are capturing anything big.

"d) Not all space should be conquerable." Why not? " Eliminating an entire nation, while fun, would induce more members to dock their pay than could be good for VO.
In the unlikely event an entire nation was eliminated, there would have to be some kind of stronghold failsafe where that nation could secretly rebuild, and be protected by unkillable machines, or just not allow any ships to jump to that certain sector to finish off the last station they have. I mean, this game is centered around fighting, cooperation, trading, and the control of sectors. Why not up the ante a bit?

"e) 'Killing the owner of a vessel' is inadequately fleshed out. How would that work? What consequences would it entail?"
I suppose most vessels will have weapons or defense systems inside them. I think it would be cool to have all pilots be constant, but have the type of ship you are trying to capture the variable.
For Example: Lets say I'm in an IBG. My ship gets disabled by some pie-rats, and they kill me. The success or failure of each one of them to kill me depends on the type of ship I'm in. An IBG is a small vessel with not much room to move around, so therefore they should be able to shoot me right out of my cockpit. However there should be a minimal capture penalty of one assault guy for one pilot. Not all ships are like that however. Bigger ships and stations will have higher ratios of casualties as penalties for capturing. For example: A large station has 1000 possible defenders. The penalty ratio for that station would be someting like 5 to 1. Assaulting Troop Transports holding 5000 Troops would be the minimal amount of people to take control of the station. (You would want to leave a little lee-way because the skill levels of each of the defenders are not entirely constant.) So I would advise getting 6000 troops there to take over that major hub of a station...

Stop saying: "In short, no." It makes you sound like you're five years old, and like you don't feel like explaining yourself further.

by the way, I'd like replies, after all I did try...

I didn't feel like explaining myself further, however, I will.

a) You make vague statements that capturing capital ships or stations should be skill-based, yet you do not explain how you would implement anything to make it skill-based, short of mentioning a second FPS which you directly dismiss out of hand (and rightly so, but that's neither here nor there). How, then?

b) You state the almost exact same thing as I did, namely that not all space will be conquerable (quote: In the unlikely event an entire nation was eliminated, there would have to be some kind of stronghold failsafe where that nation could secretly rebuild, and be protected by unkillable machines, or just not allow any ships to jump to that certain sector to finish off the last station they have.).

Please read more attentively instead of rewording part of my post.

c) The problems with disabling a ship is that one might leave it because there is not enough time to recover it, or perhaps because it is not worth the effort. What happens with the pilot in the ship? Can s/he still /explode? If yes, what is the point of disabling the ship? An /explode script could easily be rigged to trigger once the ship is disabled.

Also, I'd like to apologize for the 'In short, no.' reply. I do hope you see that my other posts were in fact intended to point out errors, and insofar as they made you think more about how it could be done, they can be called constructive, if not in intention, then in effect ;).

Sounds like Escape Velocity to me.

Huh. That's true. It seemed more like HomeWorld 2 to me, though. You, know, those Marine Frigates.

I like the marine frigates, the AI aims at them the second he seems them dwaring fire from everything else, easy way to protect your units.

I do not really think it's such a great idea for VO however. First of all even in HW2 you can't capture one man fighters (I think nothing below a frigate). And in VO I'd hate being disabled while some moron is *hacking* my ship.

There have always been talks of capturing systems, and I am pretty sure that even the devs have said that it will happen. But again having to send a Marine frigate with 6000 people to capture a station sound silly to me. There is no skill based gameplay possible there.

I for one think a second fps could be really lots of fun really, but I can't imagine the devs having to develop that as well (then the game would become a bit more like XCOM).

I think that the best way for capturing a system would be a sort of a pvp "King of the Hill", a battle where a zone(s) has to be held. The side that holds it at a given moment would have NPC guards, forcing any attacked to have larger numbers. Once a certain amount of those zones are held by a faction the system would change hands.

And many other things which have little relevance to this thread, except the fact that I don't think we will need troop transport. Or maybe simply that once the zone changes hands the personel of the old faction leaves in a transport, while the personel of the new faction would come. But then it would be of very bad form to shoot at these vessels.

I do not think that you should be able to just send a transport to "capture" a station..

Lets see...

Disabling Things:
Big no-no. Not only is this very much not fun, but it simply doesn't make sense. Seriously, if a fighter's systems are damaged enough to make the reactor go into critical meltdown? Capital ships you might be able to disable, at least for awhile, but keep in mind that those things have dozens fail-safes, backup systems, and swarms of scotty-esque engineers aboard them; things that a single-man fighter could not possibly have.

Capturing Stations/Capital Ships:
Ok, this makes some sense. Every station or capital ship should have an intrinsic defense modifier relating to their crew (or, more specifically, their security teams), as well as a level of competence (i.e. a well-trained marine is probably going to be better than killing things than a gaggle of traders).

When the troop transport delivers its payload, the boarding party, they should slowly duke it out with the station or capital ship. Seizing control of the station could take take hours, or even days, depending on the boarder/defender ration and the relative competency of both. At this point, an alert should be given notifying pilots of the attack (sector for ships; several system radius for stations).

On their own, a the boarding party of a single troop transport, no matter how elite, should be capable of seizing event the least defended station, and capital ships should be hard to take as well (except, perhaps, trident frigates). Additional parties must be ferried to the site, and the space around the station must be tightly controlled to prevent station-friendly transports from dropping off reinforcements to repel the invasion.

Nation capitals should have ridiculously high defense values to prevent any players from capturing them. The only way they could fall would be by DEVine Intervention.

After repelling a boarding action, a station should call in reinforcements from the nearest friendly barracks* to fortify the station against future offensives.

If a station is taken, the station's affiliation changes to that of the faction that was previously attacking, and the boarders become the defenders.

* It is only natural for soldiers to be trained at barracks, unless they are Serco guises, which are grown at genetics facilities.

Guises, I should imagine, would be fairly incompetent (they are mindless automatons), but should be great in numbers and replenish their number far more quickly than standard troops, which would give the Dominion a lopsided edge in capturing things.

But how do you imagine *capturing* something? A new FPS? Or a progress bar with a possibly interesting story around it?

Also from experience, no matter how ridiculously high you make something it can still be taken. Especially if you let say the whole Itani space be captured, then taking a lone capital would not be very hard would it?

I don't think that the whole space should be dynamic, a few systems on each side, okay, but not the whole thing. Well maybe if and when VO 2.0 comes out the whole space could be built dynamically, but then that would remind me more of EVE (which is a fine game btw).

I always imagined that the core systems, (the ones in the game now) would be more or less stable. It would be the fringe systems where player owned stations, and capturing/destroying would be prominent, because they wouldn't necessarily be under national control. They could still be owned by players of a nation, and gain national benefits accordingly, but for example the Itani wouldn't be as concerned with some out of the player run mining post as they would the barracks in Deneb O-3.

This would mean of course that new wormholes would be opened up to new systems outside the original thirty, that would contain unknown resources, and unknown dangers. Discovering one would either require dumbluck, or following someone who already knew the location of one. (Hive bots maybe?) But the stability of these WH's might be questionable.

As for the actual capture of a station, I think that it should not only be the troops that matter, but the equipment they have to work with. The backstory mentions an akanese fleet drilling straight through SkyCommand to rescue their Itani buddies. Having a supply of explosives could make taking a vulnerable station alot more possible. Or maybe a UIT mercenary could land a team of agents to take the station through espionage. For that matter, perhaps NPC spies could be valuable.

Whatever the method for capturing, I hope it's extremely flexible. It should be entirely possible for a crew to mutiny against their captain in a time of desperation. Maybe not so much when things are fine, as there'd be automated defenses that only the Captain had the code to, or whatever, but perhaps while a team of Serco guises have made their way to the bridge, and the Captain's sealed himself inside a broom closet. I know I'd consider surrendering at the point, regardless of my orders.

I guess I imagine a blueprint of the whatever's-being-taken with certain rooms having certain strategic advantages. The goal would usually be to take the bridge, but depending on the situation, it might be valuable to target other areas first. Perhaps a HAC filled with Itani POW are being shipped to Pyronis for experimentation, but is intercepted along the way, and the prisoners freed whereupon they all mob their captors. Or pirates might land their troop ships on a station, forget actually capturing it, and instead just take over the docks and fly a convoy of Moth's filled with the stations most valuable goods back to their secret hideout.

But yeah, flexibility = fun.

I agree completely SMM...

new wh's which may be temporary or unstable, capture stuff, fight within stations shooter style, walk around in a HAC, go to a mission terminal and then switch into pda view...

sounds good, very good, but sure it is still the game we are actually playing?

The capturing aspect involves a bit of dice-rolling, which for some reason, everyone hates. I think that if there was the ability to say, destroy the troop transport, which could have troops still in it and be the center of command to cripple the offensive. But at that, maybe station defenses could attack the boarding ships while attached to the station but then only nation capitols [here's my one cent] would have it, or would all stations have some kind of defenses, and would they need to be shot down to get a ship through to drop troops? There then should be some kind of command mechanism to suggest that the transport releases all its personnel as quickly as possible upon breach (making it so that troops would not be destroyed inside the ship if it was destroyed, but the troops would be less effective), or leaving the ship to be a command post with which to direct the troops from (making troops more effective, but leaving leadership available to attack, and once destroyed, for a while the troops would have vastly decreased fighting potential and some would be killed on the transport). There would have to be bunches of variables, such as soldier type (serco guises, IDF marines, space pilots, civilians, traders, pierats, mercenaries, etc.)
There would be lots of variables, but it would be interesting if it was released in part, then built upon. Start with only nation soldiers, nearly evenly matched, and a few variables (command type, where they're trained). Players could be responsible for gathering and escorting troops (or hiring [here's my other cent] pierats) to defend or reinforce invading parties.

Just popped into head: life support could only support so many soldiers at a time, maybe a station population limit, extendable by having soldiers in suits (think MJOLNIR, or it's predecessors, which only had energy weapon-deflecting construction, and their own air supply as well as a HUD and well-trained soldiers. Read the halo books, they're good books.) or having an attachable life support module to help the loaded station module. OOh, and then destroyable station parts... hmm...

My 2cents, all jumbled up and mixed in there.

dice roling?

hey i play this game because of i played auto attacking avatars much to long.

either make it playable RTS/Shooterstyle or leave it out.

the game actually is not realistic in may ways like why oh why has a station a docking bay that nearly has the same size of the station? when i dock with a 12 m long ship and i fly past a "habitant section" of a station with thousands of windows with light in them and this is just about double my shipsize... 24m
how many people are you expecting to live there? 2 or 500?
there is a station in artana that has only one docking bay and two exits attached to one blob of other station structures...
honestly when a convoy docks where are all these ships then?
i mean even two moths would fill the station up.

honestly the game should get something more to do but it has nothing to do with dicerolling.
buying stuff, building structures, building stations, conquer freespace from the hive, establish a settelment on your governments demand or whoever hired you to do so. and defend it, raising your flag there...
set the rules for that station, who is allowed to dock there...

then a new fabricmetall was found in free space just between our 3 nations... but only the faction that actually controls the area is able to mine it... (nation war 24/7)
capture the controlpoints (stations with limited supply of defenders, once they are killed and no reenforcements have arrived yet from homespace you are able to dock and take it over. then it is your nations controlpoint. reenforcements on the way turn around and your nations homespace will send out a garisson, just hold the station untill it arrives and your gained control over another zone.) your nation owns more than the others your nations mining bots will be deployed and you get reward for being part of the group conquering such a station.

and sure shooting mining bots is worth a little reward as well...
the ore is used to makee the neuts mkIV every 1000 units = 1 neut
depending on what your nation has harvested the prices are high or low or maybe it already sold out, then you really should do something about it.

Capturing could be done with a chess-like game.

Each side has peices equal to the number and nature of their Marines. Each side gets one move per Marine per 10 seconds.
As both have their turn at the same time, there is no "OH COME ON MAKE YOUR DAMN MOVE ALREADY AND STOP STALLING", and as soon as a new "tick" comes along, you can move again, even if the opposing player has moved or not.

The Attacker would be the leader of the attacking group. You'd have to be in a group and with an attack mission to attack.
More people in the group = more attacking marines.

The Defender would be the leader of the defending group. You'd have to be in a group and with a defend mission to defend.
If there is no Defender, the AI handles the fight.
More people in the group = more defending marines, but the number never drops below a certain minimum for that station.

The Marines would be in squads (so 100 Marines = 10 play peices)
The layout of the board could vary depending on what is being taken over.
Marines could be in "Shoot", "Move" or "Defend" mode, switching modes takes one tick.

Shoot: Shoot at any square within a 5x5 grid surrounding your position
Move: Move up to three steps in any direction (even diagonal)
Defend: Have double toughness and 100% chance to "Return fire"

Yes, that would make defending the brige a lot easier than attacking, as is pretty close to reality. One man in a good position can take out a whole platoon in the open.
To balance this a little, entering or exiting "Defend" could take more ticks than chaning Walk<->Shoot?

"Return fire" is, with the exception of a Defending squad, a chance occurance based on the stats of the Marines. Good marines have a higher chance of returning fire when shot at.
They will shoot at whatever shoots at them.
The "quality" of the Marines would be tetermined by the "Leadership" level of the players of the group. 10+10+5=25/3=8.333, so if there are two Level 10, and one Level 5, the Marines are Level 8.
The way I envision this thing, that would not make a HUGE difference, but if the number of Marines are equal, this could tip the scale slightly.

The whole thing could be done in an iterface a lot like the current navmap, only it would feature a render of the HAC (for example), and not the system. Remember, you're not controling the marines actions, you're using an interface in your ship to give the squad leaders their commands.

A winner is decleared when either all opposing marines are destroyed, or a critical objective is secured. Either the attackers get to the main control room, or the defenders get to the entry point and seal it (or whatever).

This is a very rough idea in my head, but I think it could work.
It's pretty disorganized here, but you're all pretty bright people, and should grasp the concept of my babble.

There, toshiro, is your skill-based capturing.

And when, Demonen, would the developers develop this mini-game?