Is it not kind of silly that some 500t boarding craft can cripple ships far larger than themselves with a few marines in a way that makes them objectively better against such targets than beam fighters? That they can seemingly sail past shields but my missiles can’t?
Obviously with shield recharge, I wouldn’t want it to be “any amount of shields disables boarding,” but at least making it harder in some way, or preventing heavily shielded ships from getting boarded through them. Thoughts?
Some science fiction takes the view that shields do not effectively block large large massive items like ships. Boarding shuttles could lore wise fall on either side of that line I presume. But it is not impossible to have a lore where shields do not prevent boarding shuttles.
Play wise not sure if it would be an improvement from a meaningful choice stand point.
I understand the point but… I have thoughts.
I’ve never seen an NPR use boarding. If this is something that they do NOT do, then I’m in favor of having something like this to reduce possible boarding as a cheese factor.
if, however, NPRs can use boarding, I don’t like things an easy push against the tactic. From a canon perspective lots of fiction has the concept of shielding being something that can be breached by smaller vessels (eg they get inside the shield barrier) so I like that.
Net-net I’m in favor of challenging the player over the AI.
If NPRs will use boarding, and shields will block boarding, then shields will become a more preferred means of protection than armor.
If you want to improve anti-boarding protection, you should do it for armor as well. Maybe limit the ability of boarders to penetrate armor to, for example, 5 layers?
Spoilers: The swarm uses boarding from time to time, but it’s almost always going to be a player initiating boarding actions, I think.
It’s pretty easy to cheese larger ships in a way that’s even more beneficial to the player than simply destroying them by swarming with smaller boarding craft. Once they’re on, they’re on, and it’s up to the crews to fight them off.
As it stands, they completely ignore all shields, and cut through any amount of armor by themselves, as armor only delays their inevitable ingress. This gives them even more penetrative power than mesons which CAN be stopped by armor, while trading range for an almost unstoppable killing payload.
Also seconding the suggestion to limit the amount of armor that boarding units can cut through as an idea. Just something to provide a bit more counterplay than “if this ball of boarding ships touches your fleet, you die”
Continued spoilers: I actually lost a ship to swarm boarding and it was great! I want to see NPRs do it lots more, but having gotten into the practice myself, it feels way too easy to just pick up free, largely undamaged warships.
The counter is not having shields block boarding or limit boarding to X layers of armour but to program NPRs to (at least occasionally) have ship security forces onboard. Boarding is difficult as it is unless you’re facing low-tech enemies.
If only the player is affected, then the player can decide which “lore” and “physics” they are abiding by, thus there is no action to be taken…
As a general rule, the boarders have to be of a significantly higher speed than the target, such that at like tech levels it usually requires some significant damage to the boardee to not have a “not insignificant” amount of the boarders to fail on the attempt.
Boarding pods and shuttles already have to survive the point-defense missiles and other weapons.
So does every other beam fighter, except they don’t get to ignore all armor and shields.
As for Pedroig,
As a general rule, the boarders have to be of a significantly higher speed than the target
Only if you want/need all of your boarding units to survive. Units with boarding capability have a 20% chance to make it even if speeds are the same, and with a 300% boost boarding craft with a nice sized engine, you can easily go over 3x faster than someone at the same tech level as you and 60% of your units will make it onboard.
Yes, but beam fighters don’t necessarily fly to point-blank range where ship-defenses are at their most accurate. And since ships have crews in the hundreds at minimum, you’ll be sending a whole lot of boarding pods just to ensure that something gets through.
Definitely not true that every beam fighter has to contend with point-defense weapons of the enemy ship.
It requires non-trivial investment to make ships that travel at 3x the speed of a tech-peer beam ship.
And you are saying that, after having made that investment, getting to lose “only” 40% of your units, after losing all the troops on however many ships were destroyed by enemy fire before arriving on target, and before losing however many troops during the actual boarding combat, and before losing even more troops when a captured ship is immediately targeted and destroyed by the hostile power, is…overpowered?
I don’t know, a 40% reduction in arrival force strength in that situation seems more on the harsh side, rather than evidence that boarding enemy ships is easy mode.
I do boarding assaults only against ships after shoting to them and reduced their speed to 1 km/s. And even so, I lost too many ships because of enemy weapons still working.
Please, don’t change this mechanics.
I’m also in favour of the current boarding mechanic, it is balanced, you can use it in limited cases, it is not always successful and it is funny enough.
Too much discussion around this thing guys 
Perhaps active shields should do damage to boarding craft? Say 5% of the shield strength is applied as sandpaper hits on the boarding pod (and as damage to the shield).
You can use cruisers, as their survivability allows you to ignore enemy fire while you approach and move away from them. If the enemy can’t move, speed is no longer a top priority.
But if you use HPMs, you also won’t need to install any additional protection on boarding ships. 
As I can see, not many people likes this weapon, but still, in my opinion, HPM is the best weapon for boarding of all possible.
Thanks of the suggestions.
As said in other discussions, maybe I’m unlucky, but I have often to face a lack of minerals making difficult to build large ships (or large numbers). Just enough to keep under control the Raiders… from them I capture several ships, using small fast unarmed assault boats (armour = 1).
I think the solution here is for some NPR designs to include troop bays. Perhaps a better idea is that I add some new component for internal ship defence, which includes a security detachment, doesn’t need a separate ground formation and can be replenished with ‘Add Replacement Crew’.
I like the internal ship defense idea. I’ve previously faked it with misc. components so it’d be nice to see it formalized.
I also like the security detachment idea.
Are there any plans to add NPR boarding actions? It would be awesome if players had to defend against this and actually strategic reason to station a security detachment on board.
SJW: One of the spoilers can already conduct boarding actions. I would need to add new ship types and operational groups to NPRs, but it is doable.