So, I've read the updated requirements for boarding, and if I understand correctly I meet them all, but I've tried a LOT of times and have never had a successful boarding action. I'm always told something like "Your crews attempt to board the enemy with boarding shuttles failed".

My ship is a Patton.
I have the boarding shuttles cargo bay.
I have the boarding ability.
I have 5 pirate crew members, 10 officers, and most of the rest of the crew is marines.

I reduce the enemy to below 25% shields.
I activate boarding.
I use five action points and...

Fail.

Over and over again. There's got to be something wrong.

Addition:

Also, the boarding in the manual mentions the short circuit skill is necessary in some way. To... open the airlocks? but the description in game just says it is an activated skill that makes the self-destruct system less likely to work. One of these is wrong, or it's both or something. In any case, quite confusing.

There has been some changes to boarding which are not reflected in the manual.

Here my experience:

To board you need:
- Boarding skill
- Boarding Shuttles orPirates as crew-member or fly a corvette

When the enemy ship has 25% life left activate the boarding skill. If some of the prerequisites are not fulfilled the skill will not activate and you will not lose AP.

If the skill activates you attempt to board. This is not 100% though and you might fail. Still, if the AP are used up and the skill vanishes you did everything correctly but luck did not favor you this time.

I think the short circuit skill means that you have a lot higher (100%?) chance to deactivate self destruction when you capture the ship. But I can't confirm that as by the time I have enough resources to start boarding I always have that skill.

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like I may just be unlucky. Can anyone who has had a successful boarding career tell me what their gut-feel success % looks like? Mine so far is 0%, probably out of somewhere between 15 and 20 attempts, but as I stated, I'm probably just unlucky.


Edit: Bizarrely, my very next boarding attempt was successful. Then in the very first action I selected 'commando strike' and my only losses were... 8 crew members who weren't supposed to be part of the strike. Ho ho ho.

15-20 attempts and no luck? It sounds that something is wrong there.

I would guess the success chance is about 40%. But from your description everything went right (only that the attempt fails).

What does the message say when the boarding attempt fails? Maybe the Short Circuit skill is more important than I thought, but the pirates in your crew should take care of that when going by the manual.

I only picked up the pirates for the last maybe 5 attempts. So if we say that

A. You can use the AP but always fail if you don't have someone to open the airlocks or the short circuit skill (this is true by the manual, except for the using the AP part)

and

B. I'm still pretty unlucky, but not wildly unlucky

I think we've probably figured out what has happened here. There's still only about a 1% chance of it happening 5 times in a row, but 1/100 happens all the time.

Well, I once captured a Stonewall battleship with an Avalanche cruiser using only a crew composed of 10 officers and the rest being entirely filled with marines, discarding all other crew types in order to succeed, since the battleship had more crew total than me, spamming commando operation all the while (since commando operation will only engage marines and droids; although there is still a slight chance that you will loose some other crew types). And it worked. So pirates aren't a must-have for boarding operations.