game running slow motion?

[w.evans]

Oh, marines blitz really fast. Not sure anymore, but I seem to remember some tests where it was over in less than a minute, so five minutes should be plenty. (I vaguely remember counting the seconds, not believing how fast that took, then doing it again just for the hell of it.) Of course, you'll need time to get back in your ship, strip off the turrets, and launch marines.

I figure that by the time you get to the point in your game where your marine force overpowers other ships' defenses by so much, boarding simply isn't all that important to you anymore, and might as well get it over with quickly. From an immersion perspective, well, really really good troops overpowering their opposition should be able to do that. The threshold for it is set pretty high though: your attack strength will have to be more than a hundred points above the boarding resistance of the defending ship. (A hundred points is 20 elite marines from vanilla, or 200 recruits)

I don't know about ship hacking, unfortunately. Been spending a lot of time with the Boarding.xml script, and I can tell you that it's not there. Shouldn't be a big problem to extend the time of effect. But if the shields don't recover after the hacking, hm, sounds like a bug.