Proposal: PoB boarding attacks

[jammi]

I mentioned this idea in another thread recently, but figured I'd expand upon it in its own right to give it a little more exposure. The gist of this idea is to enable a wider range of viable attacks on PoBs than are currently possible, especially for factions that don't have access to battleships.

This command utilises freighters - any freighter will do, so long as it is classed as a freighter. The command used would be /board. The command will only work if you have Marines in your hold, you are stationary and within 50m of the station. Once activated, the command will also drain your powerplant to zero. This means in order to be successful, you will need to have and retain space superiority around the station. Platforms and enemy players will need to be destroyed or the freighters are toast.

For maximum effectiveness, this should also be deployed along with requiring munitions for defence platforms to regen. 200 munitions per platform respawn would probably be about right. A campaign to bleed munitions from a base beforehand would then be effective, or even necessary.

Once the command has been successfully initiated, the freighter will damage the station over time, consuming Marines in the process. When you run out of Marines or if you move, the command stops. The specifics would be that a marine is depleted every 2 seconds, meaning a ship with 540 units would take roughly 20 minutes to deplete.

Each two second tick would inflict 132,000 damage, which is equivalent to 1.5 battleship Cerberus turrets firing for 2 seconds. This means a boarding freighter is approximately half as efficient as your average 3 cerb siege battleship, meaning twice as many freighters would be needed than standard battleships. This makes them useful as a supplement to an existing siege fleet, or for factions without battleships attacking low level bases.

Naturally you want some way to countermeasure this. Marines could be garrisoned on the station, adding to FOW upkeep in the same manner as regular crew. This would prevent 50,000 strong marine garrisons, for example. Each defending marine will deplete 2 attacking marines before being killed itself. All defending marines need to be killed before boarding damages the station. Alternately, instead of garrisoning marines, a player could elect not to deploy a security force and simply absorb the damage directly as they would in a normal siege.

Additional supplements to defence ideas: add a barracks module, which would enable the free garrisoning of a certain number of marines - perhaps 400 - 500. Additionally, bases with military IFFs have more effective marines, i.e. defenders kill 3 attackers instead of 2.

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