TL;DR - Orbital Bombardment until Noble is alone. FEW Low attack strength units attempt to route the noble. Savescum.

Orbital bombard the troops one by one until the noble remains. You just want to keep the noble alone. Orbital bombardment works great for this, but you may also want to send some units that may or may not be sacrifial lambs. Or highly armored units so they survive by routing.

Use a few select (possibly expendable) troops with low attack strength. You want to maximize the amounts of times you hit the noble with the least amount of damage. High accuracy and low strength is ideal - the low strength is critical.

You may consider using several weak units, but depending on what version you are playing with, the damage distribution can quickly become very random and suddenly kill of the noble. Few units are safer.

Careful with using multiple units in an attack that share the same attack type.
When a unit takes damage, it checks for rout at the end of that combat phase.
This means that 1 indirect low strength followed by 1 direct low strength followed by 1 close low strength attack has the (theoretical) best chance of non-fatally wounding the noble. If you send 4 tanks with close attack, you will use ALL your attempted hits on the noble BEFORE the noble checks for a rout. Close attacks also gets 4 attempted hits, in contrast to indirect which gets 2. Again you may kill off the noble with those 4 attacks PER UNIT.

Bear in mind that capturing nobles is difficult - you may wish to save\reload until you get some good RNG.


With this information in mind, I wish you the best of luck ^^

Thanks for the well wishes!
I also found an old forum on the interwebz (kborek(dot)cz) that described basically the same tactics:

Originally posted by Post by Sukayo » Wed Aug 18, 2004 10:07 pm:

Quoted text
Easy with original EFS and/or NOVA, hard/impossible in HYperion, but there you can build them.
How? 1st destroy all the escort troops, normally a suicide mission. If the noble is left over alone, then come with a low damage/high accuracy/high agility unit (Trackers in NOVA are working well) and hit the noble lightly, while stayomg unwounded. The noble will route, and you can capture him ......

I am on Hyperion, so I am guessing that the Nobles have been buffed so much so it is almost impossible in the early stages.
I just remembered that I used to have lots of Nobles, but I forgot that you can build them in Hyperion. So that is probably the way I got them..

While I do agree with the above, I think I finally found a way to increase the odds of capture. It does involve playing the system, but then again, so is save spamming. You need to control the church on the planet before you attempt a capture. You need to lower the loyalty of your target and the only way to do this (as far as I know) is to switch planet sect. Every time you confirm the change, all units not belonging to the new sect will lose -5 loyalty. Units belonging to the new sect gain +5 loyalty. Just keep switching back and forth between your houses sect and something different then your capture targets sect until you get it down to zero. Now the noble is much more likely to run after taking slightest damage and will not rally even if he should wipe your attacking tracker out with his counter.

A word of warning: the unit retains its zero loyalty after the capture, so it is very likely to rebel soon afterwards. This makes this method only viable for nobles and maybe officers whom you can retrain into blademasters or spies/assassins. After retraining new units will belong to your houses sect and will be as loyal as the rest of your troops, Anything else - you are better of disbanding (just like with plague). I usually ferry my captured nobles in transports around the orbit where they can't rebel until I research the technology necessary for retraining,

Hope this helps. I'm playing vanila btw., so I'm not sure this strategy is viable for Hyperion or Nova.