What use is boarding strength?

[jlehtone]

I had to board ships like a maniac to try to organically grow a suitable team.

That is what I've done. Well, not "like a maniac". Just boarding here and there, mostly for fun.
My first Elites were in the fray too, but since they seemed to die well, I shifted to retiring them.
Whenever a marine becomes Elite, she is transferred to bar and another ~3 star recruit enters
team. The bar (an Asgard) has now almost 200 Elites.

When H became a target, I did took 16 of them. About Jace Dehaan level warriors.
About 1430 Boarding Attack Strength. Five died. Irrelevant, for objective -- get the ship -- was achieved.

[stooper88]

So, to reiterate, what use IS boarding strength? Absolutely NONE (and in this case, maybe thankfully so).

Reckon in this case it's absolutely vital... It's the ONLY indication of how tough the fight's going to be (unlike conventional ships where you can scan the ship, check the precise quality of each marine that's defending it & compare them directly to your own). Without it who'd know what sort of attacking force is required to have even a remotely decent chance of success.

Indeed, in this case (Xenon H specifically), the boarding resistance holds some relative meaning. But I'd argue not a whole lot. Too often the outcome of a battle will be completely at odds with the outcome projected by the boarding strength and resistance numbers. Hence the recuring frustration among players and the topic of this thread. Out of curiosity, I retried the H boarding a dozen more times and achieved a 75% success rate, albeit with much greater losses (ranging from 8 to 14 casualties during "victories") never again reproducing my original success with just 6 losses. However, this disproves the myth of requiring 16 five star elites to even have a chance, which likely stemmed from the advertised 1600 boarding resistance. As others have said, players might as well never see the ratings and just play using intuition and experience. In the case of the H, having no a priori knowledge could prove initially costly, but not insurmountable.

Congratulations on your victory by the way, damn good feeling when you steal one of the tough targets.

Thank you. Upon discovering the H and realizing its uniqueness, I couldn't help but be compelled to capture one. All other ships can be brute forced, eventually whittled down through attrition using even raw recruits, but not the H. And so THIS ship became a grail in my view which became an obsession.

I had to board ships like a maniac to try to organically grow a suitable team.

That is what I've done. Well, not "like a maniac". Just boarding here and there, mostly for fun.
My first Elites were in the fray too, but since they seemed to die well, I shifted to retiring them.
Whenever a marine becomes Elite, she is transferred to bar and another ~3 star recruit enters
team. The bar (an Asgard) has now almost 200 Elites.

When H became a target, I did took 16 of them. About Jace Dehaan level warriors.
About 1430 Boarding Attack Strength. Five died. Irrelevant, for objective -- get the ship -- was achieved.

Belated congratulations on your victory as well! The retirement bar idea holds a lot of promise. I was actually thinking to "career change" some of my marines into construction duty on builders as I'm now splitting focus between boarding and station expansion.

The reason for my mania was that I'd placed the cart before the horse. I'd isolated an H long, long before I had any marines even close to ready to board one. In my universe, the first two previously encountered H ships were swiftly destroyed by local defense forces (but only after my forces had eliminated all other Xenon threats). It being rarer among the Xenon capital ships and I realizing I couldn't dare to capture one in Xenon space, I became determined to preserve the next one that emerged in commonwealth space. And so when one arrived in Hatikva's Choice, I dragged it over 100km away from its gate in the direction of empty space. But over time, despite my best efforts, its location crept ever closer to the sector core. By the time I'd captured it, it was just 66km away from the contested gate and was periodically drawing attention from ARG scouts, which I was sadly becoming forced to take care of. So I knew time was running out. If I didn't assemble a qualified boarding team soon, then there wouldn't have been anything left to board.