What do I need to make this Carnifex work?

[j1000]

I just upgraded (I hope it's an upgrade) from a Royal Dark to a Carnifex Cruiser. In my new ship, I'm getting badly wrecked in boarding actions, and I'm not sure what I need to fix to keep my losses lower.

	Royal Dark	Carnifex
Hull	22	40
Armor	15	25
Engines	49	47
Sails	32	42
Crew	182	318
Speed	Med	Med
Agility	Quick	Med

Upgrades are mostly the same, but the Carnifex has a Leviathan system instead of an escape shuttle.

Captain:

Explorer	1
Pilot	22
Negotiate	3
Tactics	14
Stealth	21
Warrior	38
Intimidate	27

Is my intimidate too low for my crew size? But I still take lots of losses to sails, and lots of losses even after half my crew is dead. I typically deal 100ish hits and take 30ish in the Carnifex, and deal 30 and take 2 in the Royal Dark.
Or is it the difference in Agility of the two ships?

[xdesperado]

Your pilot is low especially for the hull size of the Carnafex.
That combined with the lower agility will have you taking a lot more damage when closing on the enemy and manuevering to board.
You would probably have been better off as well without adding all the extra crew. Carnefex starts with 225 so unless your Exploring, Hunting Aliens or running into a lot of really large crew ship's adding the extra crew just reduces your efficiency as a captain if your skills aren't high enough to support it.

[j1000]

This is intended as an alien hunter, since I've run out of other things to do on hard but don't feel like retiring this captain yet.

However, most of my damage taken is during the boarding action, not in approaching. Do you still think it's pilot that I"m low on?

Thanks for your help!

[Fenikso]

How many weapons do you carry? Your Pilot is very low as xdesperado pointed out. Not sure about Intimidation, but on Impossible I have 50 Intimidation to handle 200 Crew. Without it they would drink me alive worth of WF .

BTW: Agility is swapped in your table.

EDIT: This ship looks like very advanced craft for very late game. You Captain should be much more experienced to take command of that vessel in my opinion. I have named this as "death trap effect" myself. It means taking command of ship you are unable to handle yet without being able to switch back. Happened to me a few times, I especially remember the Slayerz Cruiser. It nearly killed my Impossible Captain.

[j1000]

(fixed agility)

I tend to carry between 20-40 weapons.

On your advice, I've drydocked the Carnifex and will keep flying the Royal Dark around for a while. We'll see if the RD can take aliens, if I can ever manage to dig any up.

[contributor]

j1000, a quick question for you. Pay careful attention to the results and see, are you boarding them or are they boarding you? With your hull being so high and your pilot and tactics lower, I would guess that it may actually be you who are getting boarded and not the other way around (there is no graphical difference). You are still dealing them a lot of damage, but since the fighting is happening on your ship, you're taking more hits. If you are successfully boarding them I don't know why you would be taking so much damage with the set-up you've got. Your intimidate is high enough, it may actually be your tactics that is low.

[j1000]

I've swapped out of the Carnifex, and am getting such enormously better results on the Royal Dark. I'm not 100% sure I was doing the boarding, but I suspect so, since I was taking more hits 100% of the time--so unless every enemy always tried to board me, I think I was doing the boarding and just having my crew die right and left.

I'm now doing 70ish and taking 1-6 on the RD. I also feel like I'm killing captains faster and my boarding crew is doing more damage to the engines and less to the sails, but I'm not sure.

[slayernz]

j1000
As a number of the gurus here pointed out, your pilot skill is very low for the Carnifex. In fact, it is low in general even for your Royal Dark. I know that pretty much every skill is important in most aspects but Pilot is one of those skills that is used most frequently when determining your results. At the very very least, pilot should be at the same value as your level. Ideally, it should be higher than that.

If you do enjoy boarding craft, then you've beefed your warrior skills up appropriately. What you need is to get your ship to get to boarding range as rapidly as possible (if it takes you 5 - 10 rounds in order to get to boarding range, you're exposing yourself to being hit all the while. Two big things are used to determine how effectively you can manage range between your ship and your enemy.
The first is the Pilot skill ... if you and your enemy have identical ships, then your pilot skill will be the deciding factor when it comes to controlling range.
The second factor is the number of engines you have compared to the size of your hull. If you've got 20 engines with a 10 hull, you'll be more maneuverable than if you have 20 engines with a 20 hull.
So your Royal Dark, you've got a EHr (Engines Hull Ratio) of over 2:1. The Carnifex, on the other hand, is only 1.175. So if you have low pilot skills with a low EHr, you're pushing kaka up hill.

What can you do?
1) Boost your pilot skill as quickly as you can
2) Get some extra engines as an upgrade. Anything you can do to get your EHr up will help your chances of success until you have a decent pilot skill.
3) Get a Pilot officer - they will boost your pilot skill (with additional bonus for the amount of spice you are carrying)
4) Get a Military Officer - very useful for boarding itself


If you don't actually want to board the enemy ship, and would actually prefer to shoot and kill without risking your crew, then you'll need to focus on Pilot and to a lesser degree, Tactics and not much else. The Carnifex ship is definitely an okay boarding ship, but pretty lousy as a gun and run type ship. It's big, it's slow, and it's begging to be shot at

[j1000]

I stopped boosting my pilot skill because I was finding I was winning every "Advance" maneuver I tried, and almost never taking damage during range-setting maneuvers. With the stats I posted above, I don't think I ever took damage except at max range if I was trying to flee, or at zero range during boarding.

None of my losses in the Carni are from getting shot at while closing. They are all from the actual boarding itself. I was getting "You did 100, and took 30" each boarding action, with a bunch of weapons in cargo, a military and templar officer, and boarding-oriented upgrades.

I can keep boosting my pilot if that will help, but I'm not sure if my success in maneuvering into range should be telling me that pilot isn't the problem, intimidate or tactics is.

[slayernz]

There are a bunch of useful posts regarding successful boarding. @starfixer and Fenikso are probably our two resident experts in the fine art of boarding. Me, I'm a gunbunny who never sets foot on the enemy ship until they have surrendered, or are dead. I don't get quite as many ships that are not in pieces, but I don't suffer many crew losses either.

Anyway, here are some posts related to boarding strategy

Apr 20, 2011 0:30:19 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Increase: Warrior, Intimidation, Tactics

Notes on Crew: Ships with a high ratio of Crew to Engines will NOT do well in Boarding combat because so many Crew are busy running the Engines -- not fighting.

If you find a ship that you like, upgrade Boarding Weapons and Crew numbers. Get some pods that are full of soldiers -- those guys don't need to run the Engines they just use Weapons and kick butt for the Captain.

Leviathan is a great upgrade for SUSTAINED boarding. Shuttles is best of close, board, retreat, fire, close, board ... cycling instead of jamming Board.

I am a Board button Masher. I find this yields the highest number of victories, but I'm not all jazzed up about the RAW numbers of a Ship.

Look at the Ratios -- that is where the secrets are.

Apr 20, 2011 7:26:30 GMT -5 riverman120 said:

OK secrets for real!
1. if your pilot skill is lower than your hull stat you will lose a lot.
2. Get yourself a military officer and maybe a veteran they come from the mercenary and dark creature of the void rumors respectively.
3. yes it does all comes down to warrior skill relative to your level so at level 1 against a level 1 captain 6-8 is good. at level 20 you want at least 20 warrior or more.
4. weapons and crew are good but i have won with very little crew and my captain standing alone in with high warrior skill kill bill style amidst a pile of bodies.
5. i prefer the attack shuttles simply because they have more range than other options they are hard to find but worth it.
hope that helps number 1 is important!!! high hull ships are awesome but if your pilot skill is lacking you are asking for lots of loses due to engines getting wiped out!

May 18, 2011 0:20:49 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

I like to give each Crew Member 2 weapons (that is Crew * 2 - Engines = Weapons in Hold.)

I also suggest that you strike fear before boarding. My boarding attackers do this:

Round #1: Torp!
Round #2: Close
Round #3: Guns
Round #4: Close
Round #5: Decks (now they're scared!)
Round #6: Board

-- If, upon loosing a Boarding Action AND your ship did not take a hit, immediately Gun.

More than likely the enemy still has Crew in shuttles or allocated to "outside the ship"

With 70 Crew I would try to have 60 weapons =)

May 22, 2011 11:40:48 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

#1
Weapons benefit the crew on the Engines ONLY if the enemy ship wins Boarding action and gets hostile Crew on Board.

#2
Enemy ships have an "upgrade package" that is consistent for the character class of the pirates. They are not specifically "Attack Shuttles" but they have many of the same modifiers.

#3.
After Boarding is completed, the game is tracking "Crew Points" in various Locations. In a battle between Good Ship and Bad Ship, the Crew of Good Ship could be:

A: On Good Ship
B: In Transit To Bad Ship
C: Fighting Inside Bad Ship
D: Fighting Inside Critical Area of Bad Ship
E: Fighting with Captain Inside Bad Ship
F: Fighting with Captain on Bridge of Bad Ship

So, sometimes you will fight at Boarding Range but repel Boarders. Therefore, the Crew points are stuck in "B" and are very vulnerable to destruction in the next turn.

If you think about it as a dice game, the Captains are allocating Crew orders (say, as cards face down on the table) and then rolling dice to see who's cards, and how many, are flipped up. The result is the mix of cards.

[whitegauntlet]

Slay, thanks for that AWESOME post! Cory's last post was very useful. Exalted.

[j1000]

Yes, thank you. So it looks like yeah, despite any ease I've been having in maneuvering, I need at least 40 pilot before the Carnifex performs well. That's too bad, since I was hoping to put that experience into tactics to russle up some aliens.

[Cory Trese]

Pilot skill is too low for the Hull.

Tactics skill is too low for 318 Crew.

40 Weapons is too few

[Fenikso]

Jun 16, 2013 12:59:13 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

40 Weapons is too few

I second that! I am carrying 60 Weapons for 195 Crew (well -38 busy running engineering section) and I still feel that it is not enough!

[j1000]

Fair enough. I guess you need ungodly amounts of pilot and intimidate for the carnifex then, since it's only got 100 cargo. I can stretch my range out a long ways by pirating every Syndicate and Independant ship that crosses my path, but somehow those guys never seem to need much of a WF stock.