Boarding wtf

[Caldari Navy]

Why boarding is so hardcore unfair now
I have 3 times bigger strengts than enemy mining ship whith medium marines i havr 450 /65 and enemy ship always kill all my marines egosoft can u explain howw to do boarding now ?

[Caldari Navy]

Congrats you effectively killed boarding feature in game can u remove it in next update.

[Caldari Navy]

So after 3 hours of boarding operations of antigone l miner 2500 marines lost i boarded it whith argon behemoth thenhad only 8 crews omg congrats egofot im done whith this game u lost me here thats my last post btw

[BitByte]

X4 boarding works same way as before except that now going through the hull phase does not take so long. Especially if you have high skilled marines (high level veterans or elites) it happens even more faster than before.
Boarding strenght is not the number you should only look but also pay attention your marines skill level AND target ship marines quality + service crew quantity.
If you send low morale recuits to fight against high morale veterans and ship full of service crew then result will be massacre. Also each round you loose the fight defence team gets more experience / skill and they are more tough to kill (same happens to your marines when they win).
More discussion and explanation about boarding mechanism can be found from here.

[Candaan001]

Especially if you have high skilled marines (high level veterans or elites) it happens even more faster than before.

I've noticed a huge improvement in boarding time and successes since the update.
I sent a handful of elites with a boarding party, grabbed a glass of water from the kitchen and they had not only breached the hull but had almost finished the final stage.

I've always loved boarding operations, but now I can actually see the value of leveling up my marines!

[BitByte]

I've noticed a huge improvement in boarding time and successes since the update.
I sent a handful of elites with a boarding party, grabbed a glass of water from the kitchen and they had not only breached the hull but had almost finished the final stage.

I've always loved boarding operations, but now I can actually see the value of leveling up my marines!

Skilled marines have been very efficient already before 7.x. I played hundres of hours v5.10hf3b (in fact I only "tested" 6.x less than 60h until returned back to 5.10 due suicidal Xenon which I couldn't accept) and I had lots of highly skilled marines for boarding. If ship needed to get captured fast and there was plenty of crew I usually used almost 4 stars veterans or elites as battle could be over even there was still near 100 service crew left against my 92 marines (I used Rattlesnakes as boarding ships).

What update did was improve 2nd phase in overall.
Before 7.x 2nd phase went much faster if you had low skilled marines whom performed boarding (even faster if they didn't have marine skill at all). If there was single elite included then it took really long.
Another thing what affected to 2nd phase speed <v7.x was hull integrity - weaker hull faster passthrough.
Now in 7.x hull integrity does not play anymore so big role. In fact it looks that better keep ship higher condition than before.
And phase 2 goes faster with skilled marines and they need wait / help less skilled group members and that increases time. But even if you would use less skilled marines phase 2 takes fraction of time (<5 minutes vs >20 minutes) it took before the update.

[MKL81]

Congrats you effectively killed boarding feature in game can u remove it in next update.

That is weird because, as BitByte wrote, my impression is that with at least somewhat decent marine crew you can board ships much more effectively now, and ship hull integrity does not pay that much role in the duration as it did in 6.xx. All in all, my boarding ships doing fly-by boarding can take over targets much faster than before. I did hundreds of boarding in 6.00 and easily did 100 or so of them in 7.xx and safe to say my observations are completely contradictory to yours.