Attacking ships for the joy of capturing them is not profitable in the long run you have to consider the cost in fighters and turns wasted. I doubt that you will find any "expert" players out capturing ships... They can be bought at Stardock alot cheaper then capturing them. Never the less it's not "All" random. When you attack another ship you must first see if it's manned or unmanned. An unmanned ships fights at 1/2 the combat odds. The next step after determining the other ships combat odds is its shields. Since only a few ships have a combat computer you won't always know how many they have. That's not a real problem because the shields will be the first to go when you do start attacking. Lets look at this little example I made up that shows you how to figure out the necessary fighters to capture a ship. Your tooling along in your Constellation its maxed out and your looking for a fight. Low and behold Jobo Frengit pops into view in his CT! Your going to get this guy! Ok you give chase and the battles on! Jobo's Ct is not maxed out (most aliens aren't) so you don't really have any idea what his shields count is. For this example lets say Jobo has 100 shields and full fighters. That's 200 fighters and 100 shields. CT's get .6 to 1 odds so, Jobo really only has 120 fighters. You can determine this by doing a little math 200 x .6 = 120 You still can't tell what effect the shields will have so don't waste time considering it just yet. Your Constellation gets 1.4 to 1 odds and if you hit him with 120 fighters your going to really hit him with 168. You can again calculate this by doing some math 120 x 1.4 = 168. The number of shields on your ship don't matter and you don't know how many are on the other ship. You must assume that there are no shields on the other ship or you risk blowing it into space dust. Your out to capture it so you need to attack with just enough fighters to get the other guy out of his ship and into a Pod. So we need some more math here, we need to do 120 damage points to the other ship so... lets see here 120 / 1.4 = 85.7 We can't attack with a fraction of a fighter so I suggest rounding down to remain on the safe side of the battle equation that's 85 fighters Yep. That's the ticket. You hit Jobo with 85 fighters. He runs to the next sector and you chase him down. Jobo's ship still has fighters on it... Why? He lost shields.. You have to expect that. Lets look in on Jobo's ship after you attacked him. Jobo had 100 shields and 200 fighters at .6 odds that's a total of 120 fighters and 60 shields when the odds are figured in. Jobo's ship now has no shields and should only have 141 or so fighters on it. Remember you hit him with 119 points worth of damage ( 85 fighters and 1.4 odds = 119 ) Ok its time to try it again. You see 141 fighters Jobo didn't loose as many as you thought he would. But he did lose some so that means he's out of shields. You now want to kill off just enough fighters to put him in a pod... More math again.. 140 x .6 = 84 This is Jobo's real fighter strength. You need to kill them off so you do 84 / 1.4 = 60 The game tosses in a random factor in combat so 60 is what the math says you need. I would go with 58 or 59 just to be on the safe side and hope it worked. If the Gods of war were on your side (Random Combat Modifiers) you will put Jobo in a pod and the ship is yours. If not, oh well, you did the best you could possible do to remove the randomness from the battle. Better luck next time. Three of the ships you can buy at Stardock have Combat Computers that will allow you to determine the number of shields your enemy has on his ship. These ships are the Battleship, Missile Frigate and the Corp. Flag. Lets Resurect Jobo again and have at him this time with a Battleship. We will see if we can get him on the first attack. Remember what Jobo's Ct looks like? Jobo has 200 Fighters at .6 odds and only 100 shields at .6 odds. Of course we don't know that yet but lets see what happens when you move into the sector with him and hit the ttack key. You get a message telling you that Jobo's ship has 20 percent shields rating. Yep! That makes sense we know he only has 100 shields in this example and a Ct can have 500 shields so that fits. Ok we do the same math as above to find Jobo's real fighter strength 200 x .6 = 120 Now we need to find his real shield strength we can use math again to get the answer. Lets do this first 500 x .20 = 100 What we did here was take the max number of shields his ship can have and multiplied it by 20 percent that told us Jobo's ship has 100 shields. Now we need to find his real shield strength so we do this 100 x .6 = 60 That's his shields times his ships combat odds = real shields. We now add the 120 + 60 together and get 180 real damage points. So if we hit Jobo with 180 points of damage we should capture his ship... Our ship has 1.6-1 combat odds so we need to do the same math we did before to find out just how many fighters we are going to need to use. We do this 180 / 1.6 = 112.5 Again we can't attack with a fraction of a fighter so we round down. I suggest 110 to allow for the random factors of the combat calculation the game tosses in. With luck you will be the proud owner of a 1 owner Colonial Transport. If it blows up in your face.... Oh well at least your tried your best and were just unlucky. That's War! So the Formulas for ship capture you need to know are as follows: Enemy Fighters x Enemy Ships Combat Odds = Real Fighter Strength Real Fighter Strength / Your Ships Combat Odds = # of Fighters to Use. If you have combat computers on your ship you need to know the following: Max Shields for Enemy Ship x Percentage Reported = Shields on Enemy Ship Enemy Shields x Enemy Ships Combat Odds = Real Shield Strength Real Fighter Strength + Real Shield Strength = Enemy's Real Defenses Enemy's Real Defenses / Your ships combat odds = # of Fighters to Use If you are always blowing up ships try using a few less fighters to allow for the random combat odds. I was unable to determine the random factors that affect ship capturing. (I find it a waste of resources) I know that not all of you may have learned about percentages yet so here is a simple way to deal with them. If the combat computer says 45 Percent use .45 if it says 30 percent use .30 Note the decimal points are placed before the number. It's important you do that or your math will not be correct. If your already doing 2nd year Calc stop reading this and stop wasting your time attacking aliens. Your smart enough to know the cost factors involved and can easily calculate the loss in credits your facing by attacking aliens. Sure...Buying them is not as much fun but it is alot cheaper!