It turns out my first round of testing wasn't all that reliable because I didn't turn off weapons far enough from the engagement and auto-cannons have such hard-to-see graphics. After more reproducible testing, what happens is amusing and surprising. It's the capture buff damage (over time) that KILLs the target ship 100% of the time, and the normal weapons damage is what triggers the capture 100% of the time, if the buff is active, of course. The simplest fix (and also testing method) is of course to remove the DoT completely from the buff. I've done that and I get 100% reliable capture... from weapons fire. It seems that the entity condition IfOwnerIsAboutToDie loses some race condition to DoT but has no problems with regular weapons fire.

Turning off the buff's DoT completely is rather silly as far as gameplay goes (cast buff, then shoot the target like hell in order to capture it??), so I'm evaluating some alternatives that change the buff more substantially.

My first serious modding attempt was to change the buff damage type to a lump/one-time damage (instantAction buffInstantActionType "DoDamage"), perhaps to simulate the boarding pod's hull breaching damage. Alas, this also kills the target if it has less HP left than the buff damage, i.e. it also beats the IfOwnerIsAboutToDie check, with or without a two-second delay (instantActionTriggerType "OnDelay" delayTime 2.0). Although it's more playable than the vanialla DoT version, it's still pretty lame.

The last thing the corsev needs is a buff.

The main ability is demolition teams, not boarding parties....

And the "complaints" about the Corsev revolve around demolition teams instantly doing damage and thus being near impossible to counter without an AM depleting ability....

Don't get me wrong, fixing an ability to make it work as it should is always a good thing, but the ineffectiveness of boarding parties is small change compared to demolition teams, and the Corsev is already powerful enough without this fix...

I'm sure Ryat will defend Sel's online experience...

I guess we're read different threads about the Corsev. The demolition has an 8-second delay, but you have to be zoomed in to see the hovering icon. They should have added something to the infocard (at least) when that timer starts. It's possible to get away if you see it, although the AI obviously doesn't do that. The demolition bang could be lowered, but it doesn't seem overpowered to me at the moment. You need at least two ranks in it plus a boarded ship to be truly dangerous, which means at least a level 3 Corsev. Yes, that's a bit sooner than Mazra and not interruptible...

Actually, one problem I do see in BuffDemolitionTeamTarget.entity is that the AoE bang affects only enemy ships, which seems both overpowered and unrealistic (targetFilter... ownership "Enemy"). I had actually assumed that it would damage my own ships as well, so I always sent the suicide/fire ship toward barreling toward the enemy. Blowing it in an unsuspecting furball might indeed be a serious problem in PvP.

Indeed the damage doesn't have a delay. Which may or may not be another bug, given that it precedes the supernova style visual effect by the ~8 seconds...

Looking at files more carefully, there are actually three closely spaced delays. In BuffDemolitionTeamTarget.entity (which is the friendly ship, targeted by the ability) there's a 7.8s delay before the supernova visual effect plays and an 8.2s delay before the fire/suicide ships is MakeDead. In BuffDemolitionTeamDamageBoarded.entity there's another 7.9s delay before the damage visual effect is applied to the enemy ship. So the visual effects at least are more or less correctly timed/sequenced. But the damage applied to the enemy in BuffDemolitionTeamDamageBoarded.entity ain't so (has a delay of 0). I'm gonna change this one to 7.9s and see how it goes.

After a bit more testing, I'm inclined to agree that the Corserv explosions are a bit overpowered. I've totally destroyed two had AI fleets with a Corsev using the boarded bang. The first fleet had about 20 corvettes and died to a single level-2 explosion (probably level-1 would have sufficed.) Next came a bigger fleet made of about 15 corvettes, 10 Cobalts, and 15 Javelis (LRF). The whole fleet died in two level-3 explosions (from a now level-5 Corsev): first one took out the corvettes and heavily damaged the Cobalts. The few surviving Cobalts died together with all of his LRFs in the second explosion. My losses were minimal (4 ships, including the boarded/sacrificed ones).

Now, a level-6 Mazra would have probably annihilated this AI fleet just as well given that I had about 12 corvettes, 8 cobalts and 9 LRFs myself in support of the Corsev. But there's fairly substantial experience difference between level 5 and 6 for a capital ship...

I think the best way to nerf the explosions, but not too badly would be to keep their power as-is, but significantly reduce their ranges (which also go up with the level). Alas, it's pretty annoying that there's no clear range indicator in the UI for the Corvsev explosions... So a small range could turn out pretty frustrating in gameplay because of that.

Update: I still haven't found a way to display the AoE range (before it fires) when it's at-a-distance, i.e. the AoE is not on the caster, but on a target. I'd like to see the target display a circle around it indicating the explosion range before you commit, i.e. after you click the ability and hover the mouse over a target, but before you click the target itself. But there seems to be no way to do this in the current (1.82) version of the engine. So any attempted balancing tweaks by reducing the explosion ranges are likely to be annoying as hell by turning them into another mini-game where luck is a big factor... I've been trying to steer the Corvsev away from that and at least as far the boarding ability is concerned, I'm happy how my modding turned out. (I've played another TEC game with a Corsev as starting cap in the mean-time.) But for the explosions, it seem to be as-good-as-it-gets given the current game engine. A reduction in the explosion's power doesn't seem like a good idea, because a lot of barely damaged ships recover quite fast given their parallel health regen...

Thanks, furyofthestars. The main issue I see with any nerfs to either range or [by adding] delay for the demo team bang is the lack of clear UI feedback (explosion range and/or timer) during actual play. It's pretty easy to lose sight of whichever ship is going to go bang unless you're extremely zoomed in, so a delay is not terribly helpful for the defender [vs. the bang] unless you can tell how far you need to go away and how much time you have to do that. That's why I haven't gone forward with any of those... not for lack of figuring out how to chain buffs to actually get a delay; there are thankfully plenty of other examples of that in the entity files, e.g. how the Hoshikos delay their repairs (by one second, IIRC).

Oh, and its salvage team is bugged too, but in the opposite direction being way overpowered, by an order of magnitude vs. that the in-game description suggests. I had not even bothered with it because it looked so weak in the stats, but... quoting from another thread.

Correct. A bit of testing convinced me that the salvage team is hugely bugged/overpowered! At the highest of the ability (level 4, which requires the Corsev to be at least level 7 overall) it's supposed to give to give the Corsev 35% of max hull points of boarded ships that die (and 25% if they're not boarded.) But in an actual test play, twice I've got the Corsev from its about 4300 hull (at level 7) to about 2200 hull by focus firing 50 Disciples on it. As soon as I used demo team on a captured Discple, the Corsev's health shot up back to 3800 hull!! That is 1600 hull points it gained, when it was supposed to gain about 173 points (35% of the 495 max hull of a Discple I was testing with.) So it's really 350% not 35% of the boarded ship that blew. No wonder it's unkillable.

Oh, and the same Corsev gains about 1000 hull hp from demolishing an unboared (friendly) Cobalt; that's way more than 25% of what was this Cobalts' max hull of 714. So it's not just the boarded ships that are bugged/OP when it comes to salvage. The 25% or 35% are not taken from the max hull of the friendly ship that blows up (as the ability's description says), but rather from Corsev's own hull, which is vastly beefier.

I have some fun replays to watch at http://www1.zippyshare.com/v/77977742/file.html, which although done with the dev exe (so I could play both sides) play fine for me. In both of these, a [stock/unmodded] level 7 Corsev with level 4 salvage faces a Progenitor of the same level with a balanced choice of Shield Restore (enough to fully restore Disciples) and Malice.

The first replay you should watch is "crazy salvage2"; it shows the power of the maxed out Salvage by committing just 10 Cobalts on the Corsev's side vs. 50 Disciples on the Prog side. The Prog side simulates taking the bait of trying to kill the Corsev (first); the result is that the Advent fleet is quickly annihilated! (Ok, the lonely Prog takes a while to die.)

The second replay, "crazy salvage+boom", pits 40 Cobalts vs. 50 Discples (equal fleet supply), but the Advent does the smart thing and tries to kill the TEC fleet first (using Malice), and it succeeds. This temporary success delays the TEC a fair bit because the Corsev needs about 10 Cobalts to accompany it to be effective in its boarding; this due to the "randomness" bug discussed in the first three posts here, i.e. the more fleet it has shooting at its boarding target, the higher the probability of successful boarding is. The catch however is that in a real fight both sides would send reinforcements, so after all the initial Cobalts are destroyed (just the emphasize how few reinforcements the Corsev needs) I started to trickle in LF reinforcements for both sides. Not only did the Corsev live vs. a fairly big Advent fleet because the TEC can even scuttle its own ships to feed the Corsev (and scuttling a boarded ship even gives the bonus health), but ultimately the Corsev leveled up its demolition to the max (gained enough XP for that) and took out the entire Advent fleet because the Prog's Shield Restore simply doesn't scale up; not even Guardians or 3-lab shield/hull upgrades can save the poor Disciples. (And I didn't even bother sending Hoshikos or early LRMs on the TEC side.) Note that these games were carefully played to maximize the chance of victory for each side within the stated parameters; if something I've done (or didn't do) appears suboptimal, please ask here. I only tried to establish which of these fleets would win a duel with and without ship feed (set to be fairly equal as well) not other things like build another capital ship, make a bigger econ, or destroy the enemy's econ etc.

Anyway, in a broader perspective of other ships considered fairly OP (like the Prog), the Corsev is even more so IMO. At least the Prog can be rendered vulnerable by depleting its antimatter. Good luck depleting the TEC ship feed; all TEC needs to do is scuttle a couple of frigates (even scouts) every now and then near the Corsev to keep it alive indefinitely in enemy territory. It's true that if depleted of antimatter the Corsev would be rendered mostly harmless vs. enemy ships, but that's still better than dead, and it can still bomb planets etc.

EDIT: Alas, the simple/easy recording  "crazy salvage2" actually desyncs on playback; you can see the Corsev has enough AM to fire a demo team to feed itself but just doesn't do it and "stupidly" dies instead. (The second/long recording works fine though on a second playback I just tried.) I remembered testing the first one last night; maybe I did not. I tried making another recording like that just before I typed this, and that also desync'd thanks to the Sins of Some Game Developers. So, if you don't believe me that it's fairly straighforward for the TEC to win if the Advent focused on the Corsev, even with those heavily stacked odds, you'll have to wait until I manage to make a recording that doesn't desync...

Oh, and if you use those 7 level points of the Corsev to max out its demo team early, then the Discples all go out in two expolosions (which are capped 25 targets), with 30 or so Cobalts still remaining. (I actually have a successful recording of this, but it should be patently obviously from the other one what happens when the Corsev can do 1400 dps with explosions from the get go in that fight.) So demolition focus leads to a much, much quicker win for the TEC in this fight because the Shield Restore is rendered useless; it can't heal ships that die in an instant. In theory, you could time a SR so that it denies a successful boarding by making the ships under boarding last long enough for the capture-in-progress buff to expire without the ship dying, thus ultimately reducing/delaying the big [boarded] bangs, but in practice I've never managed to pull off such a timing...