How do you effectively board ships?

[BlackGyver]

So, I was very excited after the tutorial at the prospect of boarding enemy ships, making them my own, and possibly getting some extra techs in the process. However, the game seems to consider "not moving" as "not having any engines". And enemy ships will unfortunately have engines, unlike the probe, which makes boarding a tad harder. So, now I guess I have to somehow disable their engines. Great. Is there some easy way to do this, or do I just pray for a lucky hit with the lasers / ion cannon? Also, I assumed transporters would bypass the "ship must not have engines" requirement, since your troops are actually teleported in the enemy ship, yet in the current state, they're not much more useful than assault shuttles.

[JNMeiun]

shoot them in the engines just like moo2. not really hard, not easy in large engagements either.

all things being equal it seems to take quite some time to establish control over a ship though. during which it can still fire on you.

do you really have a chance to steal tech from boarding? boarded a lot of ships now, but the rate of research is so fast every game its hard to tell if its stolen or just discovered.

[BlackGyver]

And by "shoot them in the engines", do you mean "literally go behind the ships, aim for the rear and cross your fingers", or is there some way to target specific modules?

[BlackGyver]

Shameless bump. If someone could help me understand how boarding works, I'd appreciate that; no doc or FAQ explains how you're supposed to disable certain modules (here; engines) on enemy ships.

[alanschu]

So far it has been mostly random which modules get destroyed, but now that I have "Critical Strike" on my lasers, I tend to damage modules most shots. As such, I envelope the target I'd like to capture (so that I don't punch through any individual armor, while getting in as many hits as possible), and then shoot until the engines are disabled.

Then I commence boarding operations (I just got transporters which should make that a bit faster too).


Sometimes the ship just goes down before the engines do, but other times they get taken out. It doesn't, so far in my experience, seem to matter where I shoot in order to damage the engines however.

[BlackGyver]

Much appreciated. I wonder which one of Ion or Lasers would give the most chances of deactivating the module, I'll have to test that out.