I vote for no on the second option for the sole reason that a ship can melt faster than you can throw a defense contract up and its economically cheaper to blow the damn thing up than to capture it.

The only problem with option two is setting up the match and creating the maps. I don't play eve but I do know that capital ships are ridiculously huge and big space battles seem like they would be way to dynamic to set up matches and organize players. Assuming that the bots aren't as efficient as real players I can guarantee you that good players would be able to find an exploit in the AI and wipe out a ridiculous amount of drones before you can get real players to defend. Option 1 sounds more plausible but I have to agree with Nu11u5 and say fighting on stations for control is the best way to go.

Stations and Outposts would be a better option for space to space combat.

Which is also your personal opinion.

I can see so many things wrong with option 2. First is all the whining from a massive amount of eve players. Second is the massive amount of trolling tht smart eve players will do on dust mercs. Consider this ur war barge is flying around wen u encounter a nice shiny Titan so u start ur boarding deal and once u get ur pods in the Titan or u dock or whatever (basically past the point of no return) another 20 titans warp in lock down the Titan ur on and they all fire up their doomsdays on said Titan cus at this point theyd rather blow up their own Titan than have u steal it, then all ur millions of isk in clones are gone.

I would go with the first option. It seems feasible and it won't cause too much complication with the Eve code. Now, let's assume that second option is elected, a very important question comes up. Who will control the ship once it is successfully boarded? It can't be the DUST players because their clones are not designed to pilot a star ship. The winning side in the Eve world will have to get one of their own pod pilots give up their own ship in order to board the winning ship and take it with them. Alternatively the DUST merc corp can simply keep the ship and scrap it for its parts which are later used to produce more weapons.

But it will have to be under certain conditions for an Eve ship to be boarded. Conditions which can be countered by the Eve pilot controlling the ship and while being affected by the progress on the ground. Also, only certain ship classes should be affected. I don't see it practical for a merc to board a frigate compared to boarding a titan.

But to me the best boarding scenario is not with ships but with POS structures and/or outposts in null security space. But since pos structures are only present over moons instead of planets, boarding a super large outpost makes sense due to its location and various access points. With enough expansions and optimizing of the code over the years, I hope to one day see merc vs capsuleer action.

I seen a titan die within 5 minutes. it takes 1.5 minutes to initalize a battle.

Minus this on how it takes the FC to order his troops to stop firing, combined with all inbound ordinace means you probably have less than 2 minutes to win the match of which is likely going to have a crap tonn of internal defenses that wouldnt make it for the faint of heart. After all its not just a ship you're invading its a capsuleers 'body' and the body is going to do everything in its power to keep out forgien objects, such as horrific amounts of envrionmental control, jettisoning, and of course the classical anti-personal capable maitenance drones and turrets internally.

Lesser ships die far far far quicker.

Also any ship armed with boarding parties is not doing its job killing people.

Fueled Towers and Outposts takes however HOURS to flip over, this is where it would be deired to send in mercenaries instead to infiltrate invade and take over a station, they also dont have to deal with the nasty capsuleer mind of the ship from killing them.

First its eve ppl do stupid **** all the time. Second I believe there is a trailer somewhere out there where a giant railgunish installation fires a giant laser eerily similar to a doomsday weapon at a dreadnaught, not to mention I think (not positive don't have links either srry) tht CCP have hinted at DUSTies being able to shoot back at eve players in orbit. So there u go u can touch each other.

Yeah, I just don't think ship boarding is the way to go. What do you do with it once you've flipped it? It just sits there in space?

I like the idea of boarding and flipping stations, and personally I think it will happen at some future point. But this is still quite a long way off as far as I can see.

i say no
boarding ships in EVE
dust is meant for interaction with eve AND vice versa
i send my troops in an enemy ship, what can the guy inside the enmy ship do to prevent destruction of his ship? get outside his cloning pod and fight through the ships corridors? call in mercs to fight for him inside his ship? what if the mercs really suck...

it's like orbital bombardment without orbital defence batteries, eve players would keep on killing mercs withoout them being able to retaliate. and besides, no game of dust will be fast enough to win on the inside of the ship while it gets blasted by an enemy fleet, you'd just be sending people to get blown up with the ship.
and my final point, what about TiDi? yes that's right you forgot time dilation, an important mechanic of eve that you probably don't know about and a clusterfuck to implement on dust
so, again...
NO!

oh! and i forgot. where's the point of making a game with thousands of planets when you can invade the enemy war barge and end the fighting before it even starts?

NOOOOO!

yes they do, titans die, people forget to pay theyr sovereignty upkeep bill to concord, spies talk on the channels they're spying

eve players are humans you know?

ever heard of the Plextrel?
http://tagn.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/the-plex-story-weve-all-been-waiting-for/
http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/08/08/eve-player-destroys-over-1000-worth-of-game-time/
Welcome to EVE

There is a difference between actual trolling and simply using the same rhetoric you used.

Anyways, I'm not sure boarding will work with Dust. I'm not an EVE player but I'd assume that one simply can't fly around looking for people to attack. Boarding on Dusk would require looking for actually ships to board which may be more time-consuming than most would want.

the thing is, a capsuleer controls his ship through a neural interface. and there is no such weapon as neural interface jammers because if there would be the Empires (read non capsuleers) would have wiped out the capsuleers, because the capsuleers are on no-one's sides but their own and they'd rather get rid of them. and i don't think the eve community will allow that either. remember that there is a player elected council that is there to tell CCP "hey guys, that thing you did, not such a great idea, you need to reconsider" and CCP has done stuff the player base made them to undo because they weren't happy and subscriptions were dropped

http://mmodata.blogspot.be/2011/06/riots-in-eve-against-microtransactions.html

http://ardentdefense.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/eve-jita-mass-protest/

http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/24/ccp-offers-an-apologise-disgruntled-eve-online-players-lock-down-jita-surrounding-systems-very-crowded-too/

and as i said it, it's still a one way interaction, mercs boards your ship, mercs versu mercs fight ensues, mercs win and take your ship, where's is the ability for the eve player to get rid of them?



who talks about smart ideas in eve, if an fc orders you to shoot someone in your fleet, you do it man.

a guy told me he was ordered by his fc to drop a bomb on one of their own carriers to kill the enemy drones attacking it.
i have shot people in my fleet because the FC said so and i have no remorse doing it, specially when they screw up

it needs to be at the same time, not prior to boarding