I'm leading with 3 videos to showcase what I would consider the higher tier of conducting piracy in the most recent iterations of Star Citizen, which is forced ship boarding's. And it's something that I try to push my org to aspire to doing more of. Ship boarding's have been possible for a lot longer than what a lot of people realize, which I find surprising since the concept of forced ship boarding's is easy. Enter through one of it's entrances. Now to do this is a bit more difficult, since there's more than one mechanic/system that needs to be used to be able to achieve a ship boarding. One of those mechanisms that makes ship boarding's possible is EMP, which when used for ship boarding's provides the ability to prevent a ship from starting back up, giving the boarding team enough time to breach and board the ship. With the most recent changes to EMP(Build 76300010) we're seeing a huge shift in capability with using EMP for piracy operations. This shift is large enough that using EMP to disable and suppress a target ship is now more dangerous to the attackers than those being attacked. The image below is from a simple calculator I created to assist with working out how many EMP ships I would need to be able to achieve an EMP suppression cycle to keep a target disabled long enough for my boarding teams to breach and seize a target ship. Prior to the EMP changes, 3 Warlocks could handle the majority of the targets we would go after, so long as our timing for our EMPs was on point. We regularly drill this particular skill because it's crucial to conducting a ship boarding. The next image is test results from 10 sequential EMP strikes against a ship with out shields. What we were testing was recovery times for different ships from an EMP strike that would shut them down. The EMP ship that we used was the Avenger Warlock. All times are in seconds. Test conditions were as follows: All target ships were using stock loadouts EMP ship was using a stock loadout All target ships started with shields off and kept them off for all EMP strikes Target ships were placed within 150 m of the EMP ship and all ships were stationary throughout the entire test EMP was charged to 100% for each firing Target ships were to press "Flight Ready" as soon as their ship was shut down We timed the ships from when they were shut down to when they started back up. We found that you must press either Flight Ready or Power On to get the fastest time for recovering from an EMP strike. The Valkyrie, C2 Hercules and Caterpillar were selected as they're ships we've pirated regularly. The Gladius is used as a benchmark for S1 fighters. We did have a Cutlass Black, but it was having serious power issues after being shut off that requires further investigation before we can test it again confidently. I will focus on the Caterpillar as we use it as our benchmark for training and testing our tactics and drills against it. Prior to the EMP update, using a Avenger Warlock against a stock Caterpillar, when first disabled, the Caterpillar would be disabled for 34 seconds with each subsequent EMP keeping it shut down for up to 43 seconds. Technically we could use one Warlock to keep a Caterpillar down, but only if it was using stock components. A Caterpillar using upgraded powerplants, shields and coolers would significantly reduce that recovery time. So we set our interdiction teams to use 2 Warlocks to help deal with any scenario that we would encounter when conducting piracy operations. When the Hercules was introduced we increased the Warlocks to 3 to compensate for the M2's default power plant allowing it to be able to recover within 16.2 seconds of being shut down. Using 3 Warlocks pre EMP nerf, we could achieve a 12.5 second EMP suppression cycle once the pilots got their rhythm going, allowing us to be able to EMP suppress nearly any ship until we stopped suppressing it. With the EMP change in build 76300010, that EMP suppression cycle is no longer possible with 3 x Warlocks. If we wanted to be able to achieve the same time, we would need to use 5 Warlocks. Which is a problem due to their shields now being weakened. We can switch to using Sentinel's, but we face the issue that we're still using 5 of them to achieve the same suppression cycle that 3 Warlocks used to be able to do. Now we could use the Saber Raven and only need 2 of them! Which is great for everyone who owns it, but it's no longer obtainable through legitimate means and I don't like the idea of having to buy a ship with real money, just to be able to maintain a competitive edge, nor do I feel comfortable with telling others to do the same. From my understanding Piracy is far from CIG's current focus when developing game mechanics and systems. However what we have been able to achieve by taking the different mechanics available to us and use them to conduct piracy has brought a lot of people entertainment in one form or another. These changes to EMP threaten that entertainment. I understand why they have been made from a purely combat perspective, but when we're doing piracy, we're trying to do as little damage to the target ship as possible. I don't like to bring up problems without suggesting some solutions, so here's a couple of ideas for consideration: Increase effectiveness of direct distortion weapons against larger ships so that they can be used to maintain suppression of a target ship Make the EMP component that is equipped on the Saber Raven available to other ships. When you look at the current iteration of piracy now with a heavy reliance on EMP and what piracy could be in the future, EMP being a critical tool for piracy doesn't scale well, especially when you start looking at pirating capital class vessels, so I'm not surprised that EMP is going in this direction. We still have more tests that we want to do to further work our the impact of the changes to EMP and piracy, but I wanted to push this post out now to get the conversation happening about the nerf to EMP, it's effect on Piracy gameplay, potential suggestions for CIG to mitigate the impact that the changes to EMP bring and the concept of Star Citizen reaching a point where sweeping changes like we're experiencing now, having an impact game play. P.S: thoroughly enjoying the changes made for ship combat even with piracy getting beaten with the nerf bat