So in many games I had some pretty good fights, but when I'm facing space marines and a large mass of troop carrying ships, I find myself completely unable to fight them at all, even if I'm playing a fast race, It's hard to stay out of the way effectively, and once in range, they can take down your largest ships very easily by just mass troop attacks.

I have won very very few games against mass troop players in 1 vs 1 and like, literally none when it was 2 vs 2 and the enemy had two space marine groups.

Especially the slower races seem to be unable to deal with it. Like say Tau Protectors, they don't have the speed to really get out of the way easily enough, and though they can shoot from afar, they can maybe critically damage one enemy ship before the fleet is upon them, and then it's just a take down of ships, one by one by one rather quickly.

Maybe I'm missing something, maybe it's my inexperience to deal with this because I can't adequately prepare for it (Because you don't know what you'll be up against), but I personally have found it very frustrating and almost a complete lost cause to fight against enemies using this tactic.

Anyone else fare better? And if so, how?

I am encountering a similar issue. The Space Marine ships are ridiculously fast and I found the campaign to become a breeze once i found out about the massive amount of troops you can deploy quickly with a fleet of escorts and cruisers. If I had to make suggestion, maybe reduce Space marine speeds a bit or have longer cooldowns? Maybe an emphasis on numbers but long cooldowns compared to Chaos having higher morale damages to their troop assaults.

In short, there was no need to fire guns when I could derelict a ship in a quarter of the time.

Have you tried scuttling your ships as soon as they are emptied? I was once playing Marines vs chaos and the chaos player scuttled his ship right at that moment. It was brutal because Marines need to use many small sized ships very close to each other in order to empty an enemy ship quickly. He halfed the hp of all my ships in one go. Maybe also a plasma bomb can be nice, but you can't really always have it since as you said you never know what you're going up against.

@aram_thehead I have scuttled my ships at times, but often it's not enough to turn the game around because unless I've got many smaller ships to play with, I often have one larger ship as well for the real damage output, and since it's often targeted first, it ends up limiting my capabilities severely. Also, the range of the lightning strikes or boarding attacks are generally long enough that I need to end up in a lucky position if my empty ship ends up being right where it needs to be to scuttle without the enemy having a chance to run away.

They can use their boosters pretty easily as well, I have once even seen an enemy just boost and push the scuttling ship away from the rest, thus sacrificing one to save the rest. Which I gotta admit, was a pretty damn awesome action in its own right.

Large ships and ''damage dealers' are useless in this game as it is right now. Ramming / boarding will always win vs damage. Game has spectacular bad balance, I hope they fix it, I would like to play big ships also..

There's also Necrons; if you thought mass boarding was effective, wait till you see a Cairn Ship go from 0 damage to hulk in literal seconds.

Yeah; boarding in general needs to be looked at; especially the assault boat spam and be made less instantaneous in it's effects.

@drunkbacongod Yup, that's my experience as well, I have fought a couple of mock battles against a buddy of mine, trying to test out things, he'd go for a full on Tyranid ramming fleet while I went for whatever I could do, and in every case, getting rammed and drained of troops just ruined me.

I think an easy fix would be just to up the amount of troops available on a ship, making it harder to just drain it in seconds.

@cool_lad Yeah that's my experience with the Necrons as well against boarding fleets. The Necron ships are otherwise pretty powerful I find, but once they lose too many troops and get more critical damage because of it, it goes down really fast. I still think the nerf to the pulse star thing was a pretty good choice, because it could decimate fleets before, but now it's really hard to survive as a Necron versus very dedicated ramming/troop spamming ship compositions.

I think boarding actions should be effective relative to the ship size you are boarding.
For example boarding escorts/ LC should be pretty simple. But Boarding Massive Fleet Mother-ships should be practically impossible, like at most you should be able to destroy the engines or some of the weapons and slow it down a bit, but not turn it into a squig...
The crews inside main ships should be closer to 50-60 than 10, with reinforce of 20+

and then there is ramming... Even with brace for impact, when being rammed the whole fleets morale goes to the toilet.. It should not be this effective vs the morale, I guess the damage can stay

@drunkbacongod 50 seems like a little much, I mean, the largest ship can take away around what, 8+ of that? I reckon just having multiple layers of 25 or 30 would make a big difference though, so a heavy boarding strike can cause some damage, but needs a severe amount of investing in order to hurt more.

I mean, I think that if you are investing fully on boarding, and you target the largest ship, you should max be able to scuttle it and then have no more boarding left. Currently you can scuttle the whole enemy fleet with space marine escorts..

@drunkbacongod Yeah, but I'd be happy if it just takes longer to accomplish that.

Boarding needs to be a minigame and act like a slow damage over time effect , watch in horror as S L O W L Y your ships troop number is dropped (depending on your onboard troops of course) while desperately trying to get a lightning strike or boarding action onto your own vessel to try and kill off the boarders. THAT's exciting and that;s the type of gameplay that I feel a lot of people would enjoy.

Right now its like a weapon, hits quickly and in an instant the combat internally is resolved leaving no tension, suspense or allowing a boarded player to do anything about it.

They board it's over in a second and your ship is a hulk especially when faced against the two most complained about factions at the moment. Space MArines and Tyranids - surprisingly Boarding factions.

Every faction in the 40k universe has elite troops and one of the upgrades should be the ability to stock your ships with Kasrkin Shocktroopers or Ogryns, Aspect Warriors or wraithguard, Chaos Space MArines or Obliterators and erm Kroot, but you get what I am saying!

Allow a faction that is ordinarily bad at boarding to be able to choose to surprise a boarder if they choose to dedicate an upgrade for it for a limited offensive and defensive potential.

Boarding is not fun right now, its too quick and too effective.

Give those boarded a counter and one that involves reboarding to kill boarders and we actually have an even more exciting game on our hands.

@orkan That's a brilliant idea, the ship has a little warning going "There's boarders on your ship!!!" and slowly, the troop count is going down and you have to deal with it, otherwise you're in trouble!

I don´t think it is as much of a problem as you think it is. Especially Space Marines are not much of a problem at all (I play Tau Protector and am Legendary now).

I do believe it would be both cooler, more realistic/accurate to the lore and better balanced if Troops were not an instant thing but there was some level of simulation of fighting inside the ships. You could take this quite far of course and make a very complex simulation but I think a basic bar with the opposing factions colours that slowly goes in on direction depending on how many troops are deployed and how much crew the ship has left would suffice and be much cooler.

Yeah exactly. Gaming design is a very important responsibility because it deals with the human psyche. Good games address that and become legends and bad games are forgotten as soon as another one comes out.

Stunlocking is a mechanic present in a lot of games but the time your avatar or character or vehicle is stunned has to be minimal for you as a human being to enjoy the game.

Playing a game is all about having fine control of your character or vehicle or in this case vessel.

Having that control wrenched away from you is the worst thing any game developer could possibly do and is the reason why the stasis bomb is so dreaded.

The good thing about the stasis bomb is that it is TEMPORARY and does no damage nor does it kill you.

It merely gives an opportunity for your enemy to take advantage of your disabled state and for you to come to the rescue with another ship.

Being able to reboard a vessel that is empty of troops is a GREAT step in the right direction but it is not yet enough.

The reason why players are NOT enjoying the current boarding mechanics are because they are esentially stunlocking you and then ending your control of that valuable ship in a split second.

That is not fun and therefore that gameplay mechanic should be redesigned to BE FUN.

A slow life threatening mechanic THAT CAN BE REVERSED creates additional tension and if played well can be reversed which gives players a sense of purpose and accomplishment.

Players don't play games to have control taken away from them and right now that is exactly what is happenning with the boarding mechanic.

We are still in Beta and its not to late to change some values and add a few lines of code here and there to make that sort of gameplay a reality.

@lino How do you counter space marines?

@lino Well, I just know I've got a hell of a time fighting against it. And yeah, it would be cool if you could set those troops to attack specific points of the ship, lower the total damage they can do (by killing off a ship entirely) but allow you to more specifically target enemy systems, like weapons or engines to get an advantage with a successful troop strike.

@aram_thehead With my tau fleet I try to engage them from range as much as possible and focus their engines. Pretty straight forward really. I save my boarding to take my ships back. Also I spread my ships out so that they cannot easily get close to all of them. If possible hiding behind asteroid fields is a huge advantage.

But this is very tau specific. Every faction will have to use a different tactic. But considering win rates and how many (few) Space marines are in Epic and legendary according to the score board I do not think they are OP at all.

@zucadragon Yeah you could make a basic system where the boarder can tell their troop to attack a system and the defender can prioritize the defense of a system. Would be a little more immersive and adds some more strategy.