I must have fought 30+ Pirate Kestrels since I captured one for myself, and none of them bailed. If it were a lottery, I wouldn't call it one with fair odds.

If you're really set on getting one you might want to try drawing it away in a secluded corner, saving, then going one on one with it until you get it to bail. If not, reload and try again - until the dice falls right side up.

I have left a bunch of pirates behind me with almost no hull points left (shown as 0% or 1%) but that does not make for interesting stories.

Poking the ship you want to try capturing or boarding with a missile or eight (I use a Wasp) and drawing it away from its brothers&sisters in arms is a sound strategy unless you want to kill everyone but your target AND are capable of doing so. I have been tempted to scum save but am a bit against it so I do it very sparingly but in this case I might give up and go for it unless I get lucky within a game day or two.

I am concentrating on the main plots at the moment and thinking of whether I want to start on the corporation plots too and if so, which ones. I had better have a look at the rewards. It seems like they are a lot of work for sometimes not that useful rewards.

My favourite types of missions to avoid: Return stolen ship; Covert operation, many combat ones.

Installed the Enhanced Briefings mod (also compatible with X3AP) that makes a lot of missions much more interesting again as I will get a good bit more info about what I am up against before I accept. Now off to look for return abandoned and stolen M6s to start boarding practise on as I still did not start that hehe. I understand the abandoned ships are much easier.

I managed to board my first ship ever, a pirate M6, using my own M6, a Hydra with 4 IDs, some PBEs, a bunch of Wasp missiles and 5 marines. It took three hours of trying to succeed but that included making BIG blunders like forgetting to install a Cargo Life Support System on the Hydra... A LOT more practice needed before I can manage to do boardings under anything but the most relaxed conditions.

One tip: Make sure your boarding target has at least 25MJ shields left, preferrably more as it is very hard to keep small shielding under 10%. It seems IDs like to fry all big sized shields first and if the target ship had say 2x200MJ and 1x5MJ it will only leave the 5MJ and you have the joy of trying to keep that under 0.5MJ until all marines have successfully entered the target ship. So why did I use the IDs? Because the target ship had polarised hull and a skilled marine onboard.

I tried using fighter drones but never figured out a way to get them quickly back on board and they were a bit hard to control. I need practice. I want to try like all methods there are for boarding until I am capable of pulling them off after which I will most likely stick to boarding pods unless I totally fall in love with another way.

Sorry no picture. I left a wreck of lots of lost reputation and losses and such that I felt were due to things I do not feel bad about loading an earlier save to correct, namely me not knowing enough about these things.

Nicely done! May it be a first of many :). But do remember: once you get a boarding-pod launching capable ship you'll never want to go back to any other kind of boardings.

As for getting fighter drones to keep the target shield's down, yeah, it's not a bad tactic, but save it for difficult boardings - I usually go with yer' standard Ion Weaponry (not the Disruptor though, as I prefer to keep as much as possible of the cargo intact) to keep the target's shields down with minimal hull damage.

Never fell bad about reloading to get a better outcome - it's the one thing games offer and life sourly misses to.

So should I go look for a different target if the ship has too many nasties the likes of sentry lasers and such instead of trying to fry off enough to get acceptable odds? The PBEs are very effective at taking down the shields and missiles can help there too, as can fighter drones too. I would love commands like "all drones return home" and such.

I am just fooling around as I can afford to buy several M7Ms and equip them.

I just learnt that I will need to complete the OTAS corporation plot to be allowed to buy a Sirokos M7M, the single ship capable of launching the most marines pods. Looks like a Split Cobra M7M is going on my shopping list instead.
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Data pertinent to X3TC, X3AP is different when it comes to boarding and marine berths at least.

As you already said, the boarding model has been tinkered with between X3:TC and X3:AP. Since I've never done any boardings in X3:TC, I can't really say how bad the sentry lasers, hull polarization and other boarding defenses affect the performance of your marines.

In X3:AP, whenever I see a target with such an extra level of nastiness it's usually enough if I use more experienced troops and exploit the full number of marines that can be involved in a boarding operation - even then I might lose a couple of them.

So, it's up to you really. Extra defenses make things harder for you, but it's still not an impossible thing to pull off.

By the way, totally off topic, remember when we joked around about how a peace-loving Boron marine might sound during a boarding operation? It so happens that I found one left over in a ship I was boarding.

I've since used him in the lines of duty and I call tell you that I laughed myself to death the first time I heard that scared-anxious tone in which he cues the boarding milestones. Imagine an "I need more covering fire" uttered by a squiddie shaking with fear, or a "Deck 1 cleared! (but let me now hide under a command panel and never be heard from again)" and you'll get pretty close to the actual thing :D.

The sergeant leading my troops during my first boarding was a Boron so I do know :-) I think I got him/her from a pirate base or other piratey installation. They were called mercenaries in there, whereever it was.

I found out that having a ship with a free docking bay and enough cargo space will allow us to tell the fighter drones to dock with that ship. This is probably the same in X3AP.

My personal fight to come to terms with boarding in all its forms continues:

So I have used, what looks like something that started as a mod, called Piracy command, to board ships and it works so so for launching the attack from the ship you are in as you cannot do anything while it is running. It looks like it was mainly made for ordering TPs to launch marines/mercenaries while you are taking care of the target's shields and drawing its fire in a more combat ready ship (even a good M3 can be used if skilful.)

But I wanted to try all methods so next up is manual.

Searching around in the menus I eventually found a command to launch all marines at the targeted ship; much easier to use than ejecting them one by one..... I thought.... since clicking it does nothing but closes that particular menu. Arrrrrghhghghghghghg!

<goes off to blow up some M6s, M8s and M7s to blow off some steam>

Getting better at boarding but it is still pretty hard. Taking a break from that for a bit.

Now trying yet once again to plan some complexes for the Hub plot. It is unnecessarily complicated in my humble dumble opinion. A bright sector with lots of sunlight would mean I would need a lot less solar power plants (SPPs) meaning less crystals needed meaning less silicone needed but then for microchips I need a lot of silicone too. Sigh! If I must import something to a complex, crystals would be a good choice as they take up very little space so I can use something faster than a TS that is not so prone to a quick death by the hands of Xenon or pirates.

I tried X3:Albion Prelude for half an hour, the Bankrupt Assassin start and was struck by two things: One: How ugly the loading screen was compared to the beutiful and diverse pictures in Terran Conflict. Two: How much harder that particular start was in there compared to both Reunion and Terran Conflict. I wonder, should I (or someone else who has all the X games ;-) ) start a thread to discuss game starts; their difficulties and peculiarities.

I am soon a full fourteen days into my game and trying to concentrate on improving my marines and boarding technique plus getting somewhere with the Hub plot. Still trying to buy the computer components needed for the very beginning so have come anywhere yet to write here (home) about. If I get too frustrated I will go do the Treasure Hunt as it looks self contained and not reliant on me having done this and that beforehand.

IIRC systems with high solar power only affect energy production speed, they don't make your SPPs produce more energy with less crystals. Sowwy!

You are correct, you can save money on solar power plants by using a high-sunlight sector, but will still need just as many resources to run them.

I enjoyed the Treasure Hunt mission, although some of the clues required lore knowledge that had me scratching my head quite a bit.

Yup @Avo,

and yeah Hardrada, I enjoyed it as well. And while I try my best to play through all the plot lines with no outside help; I have to admit, this one had me tracking down info on a guide more than a couple of times (maybe a few :P) after spending a LOT of time trying to figure out several things on my own

Please suggest a good sector for a microchip comlex! I do not want it to get smashed by Xenon or pirates. Or, should I invest in a defence fleet first (M8s, M7s, M6s and such) so I can protect my expensive investments?

How bad is adding to a complex after having started it up already?

I built 2 for the Hub Plot. One in Ore Belt, and one in Menelaus Frontier. I think they both have 15 Chip Plants attached if I am not mistaken. Yeah, you can always add on to your complexes later, just position the station and add a complex construction kit to to add it to your present complex. As you may already know, it can be a little trickier positioning the new station(s) to an already up and functioning complex, because you can't use the functioning stations in the complex to directly "line up" your new additions easily with the 3D camera view in the map/satellite view like you can when just lining up all your stations ahead of time before connecting them. You really need to do it by eye more or less, if that makes any sense.With a little patience and finesse though, it can be done without too much trouble/fuss (saving is your friend). Mine are being constantly depleted right now supplying the Hub. As you may have guessed from the pic, I choose Ore Belt as my "home" sector in that plot. Never had a Pirate, Xenon, or Kha'ak bother any of my stations in these two sectors. I did get a little nervous one time though, when the Paranid showed up in Ore Belt with a sizable military fleet and started attacking all the Argon ships, and eventually took out Plutarch Mining HQ (they rebuilt eventually). After reeking havoc for quite some time, they eventually left before any real Argon military forces showed up. Never touched my assets though...guess my good rep with them paid off after all!