Liek the idea.  it worked pretty well (IMO) in supreme commander 2 so dont see why i t wouldnt here.

Don't mention that abortion of a game. There is only SupCom and SupCom: FA.

That said, boarding would be kind of cool. Might be too hard to accomplish with this engine, though. Think about how mucked up it can get late-game when you have hundreds and hundreds of ships flying about - adding boarding operations would probably be like driving a nail into the game's coffin.

For SINS2, however...

I once was thinking of a similar idea for a mod, but I used a ship class called Troop Transport that had far more capabilities than just boarding.  The idea was that they could be used to capture structures, ships, or planets.  Now, there's a problem with balance when dealing with ship capture...

You make Domination obsolete.  Now, in your case, its not completely because you did make the ships destroy themselves, but you still run the risk...  The only way I see to maintain the supremacy of the Rapture is to make Domination an AoE.  Do you realize how impossibly overpowered that is?  Now only that, but you are getting into Clone Frigate territory by getting extra free ships, not just one.

Now, something that could be done by the devs and not by us modders is make it a conditional capture, for instance, it would only work if the shields were offline, or if the shields were down and it had less than 500 hull remaining.  I don't know of any way us modders could do that, but the devs certainly could.

The other thing about this kind of capture is that they have to take a while, but there is some advantage gleaned, for instance, it takes 30 seconds to capture an enemy ship (though after half that time, all systems on the ship go offline and don't come back online for like 20 seconds after capture).  The same sort of thing would apply to structures.  Now, I see no reason why Starbases should be vulnerable...  I suppose you could make them deal a DoT if the target has too much hull remaining (ie soldiers are sabotaging critical internal structures, but know they can't take over the ship itself).  You send a few of these down to a planet, and perhaps you could capture it with minimal loss of life since its invasion rather than bombardment.

So, true, modders may be able to do this to a limited extent, but the devs could make troop transport-like ships far more advanced and engaging.

True, but there could probably be some variation that wouldn't make it seem like it was replacing a level 6 ability.

Well, I've seen the unused images in the icons files, but I just figured they were for abilities/researchables that never made it in...

Regardless, if a troop transport/boarding vessel was a corvette that would be kind of cool..

Speculation aside, having boarding parties on ships I think is a somewhat risky move as you could replace Domination if you aren't careful.  Probably the best way to go about it would be to make boarding parties deal a DoT of say, 12 DPS to hull only for 30 seconds (since they wouldn't really be hitting shields lol) until the ship hits less than 200 hull and 10% total hull health at which point, they are actually captured.

Any ability like this would have to have a monstrously large cooldown/AM count so it doesn't get abused...

But anyways, back to what I was saying about troop transports...  They would have abilities such as the following:

Boarding Party: deals 12 DPS (can stack twice) for 30 seconds.  If at the end of this, the ship is below both 200 Hull and 10% hull, it is captured; captures logistic structures if less than 20% health and you have control of the planet around which it orbits.  Costs 200 Credits to use.

Marine Reinforcement: used on friendly ships; negates use of boarding parties and can be deployed preemptively.  Costs 250 credits to use.

Invasion Force: can be used to capture planets with infrastructure only dropped to half its current level.  Costs 350 credits to use.

Just something to throw around...  Respond however...

Cruisers and Frigates are coded as simply frigates in game code.

You could mod the effect of the ability to make it look like little shuttle craft are docking with the target ship, kind of like the ability of colonise.

Unless you made this ability have a goodly range, pathing would destroy it. As for the shuttles flying out? Memory issues... imagine someone w/ 30 ships trying to board simultaneously in a battle that has over 125 ships on each side. You'd see a slide show.

I'm all for the ability being done, I just don't think it can be done properly on this iteration of SOASE