Guide status

• The following guide was written by XenonSurf on the forum for Rebirth v3.00 (link).
• XenonSurf last updated it for v3.53 on 07.09.2015.
• Minor edits made when the guide was copied over to the wiki on 31.01/2016.
• Rebirth v4.00 made some changes to boarding but not in a way that the guide should be broken.
  • v4.00 beta adds status report notifications during boarding, to indicate if any marines were lost.
  • v4.00 beta reduced marine loss when attack strength is only slightly higher than defence strength.

Introduction

When I started with XR a lot of Youtube videos have already been posted, some of them are very fun, but most of them have become obsolete not reflecting any more the newest XR versions. So watch them for your leisure, but don't expect these procedures to work when playing the newest XR 3.53 and beyond. Also a lot of guides only contain some vague advices, to say at least, which only makes you lose your time trying to reproduce them.

A successful boarding in 3.0+ can be resumed in the points below. I will introduce the differences and changes, present a very short ToDo list for successful boarding and then, for anyone interested, expand on the details.

I'd like to thank here in particular Snafu_X3 for his ideas and article named '1st Capping Tutorial (Titurel)'.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4520971#4520971
All this has inspired me to make a in-depth research about the boarding mechanism in XR.

All players who have been playing XR v. 1.xx should read the changes below, because the boarding will not be anymore a piece of cake.

Changes in v.3.0+ (tested with v.3.53)

Veteran and Elite Marines cannot be buyed anymore; your marines get promoted to a higher rank instead (Veteran, Elite).
If your Skunk is not exceptionally strong, stronger than the enemy's ship, then you MUST succeed with the missions given by Yisha during the boarding. Failing 1 of those missions is not yet a guaranteed fail, but failing 2 or more certainly is.
It's now possible to TRAIN the skill of your Marine Officer (or any other hirable crew). A 5-Star MO and the presence of veteran and elite marines will contribute *much* more to your ship's strenght and a successful boarding.

Very short ToDo list to board a ship successfully

Check your 'Battle Strenght' in the Skunk info and the 'Battle Resistance' in the enemy's ship info.
To give the Boarding command, your ship should be as strong or stronger than the enemy's ship. To make this true, you must destroy parts of the enemy ship or hull (or you are already stronger and can start the boarding asap).
Only then, give the Boarding command and succeed in Yisha's instructions.

Here are the boarding factors analyzed in detail:

1. Skill of Marine Officer and Distribution of Marines mk1/mk2/mk3

For marine losses occured, the code looks first at your marine skills, picking the recruit marines as highest loss probability.
Your attack strengh during the boarding is directly function of MO's skill and your Marine type.
Your strength may change once boarding is initiated, but the enemy's BR (in the enemy ship's Info) will remain CONSTANT. So it's important to damage him first, dependent on your Boarding Strenght before the boarding (Skunk Info).
After a successful boarding, any recruit marine has a 20% chance to be promoted to Veteran, and there's only a 2% probablility for a Veteran to become Elite. So once you have a good nr. of elites, better avoid doing foolish boarding attempts Very Happy
I haven't yet analyzed the numbers for the MO, but it's likely that the less marines you lose in a boarding, the better the secondary skill increase for your MO, and the higher increase in the % needed for his next higher star in 'Boarding Experience'.
All this means: Be sure to TRAIN your MO and re-buy recruit marines for a maximum (50) after you succeed, or you will occur more veteran or elite marine losses in a subsequent boarding, making your overall BS much weaker.

2. Failing or skipping Yisha's missions will likely make your boarding a failure

Except if you are in the lucky state of point 4 below.
For these missions, a provisory attack strenght AT is assigned to you dependent on the skills of your marines and MO.
You must succeed any Yisha's mission within 2 or 3 minutes depending on how much shield protection the targets have, maybe you can't do it with a simple mk1 cannon, also better bring a good nr. of missiles to speed things up. Your weapon choice becomes especially important for the high-class ships like Phoenix or the Fulmekron.
You may get a Hacking Mission if you have an appropriate drone loaded, and if you succeed, most parts of the ship will have its shieds lost making your task easier.

When you fail or skip Yisha's instruction for the first time, the minimum marine losses will be 15-25% and any other sub-mission will have MORE losses (less if you succeed but you still occur losses) and your nr. of marines get down fast. Eventually you lose the boarding.

If you succeed Yisha's missions, Your AT will go up and the better marines and MO you have, the better + bonus you get in your AT. This all happens in the background, once the boarding is started you don't get a chance to see these numbers.
To succeed, just be sure to do quickly all these sub-missions.
Or get tricky: In the 3rd submission, do NOT destroy the Drone Bay (for money reasons); your AT will drop back to the boarding start value. Be sure not to hang around during these missions, because destroying the targets is not enough, you have to do it within the time limit.
Assuming you succeed in the remaining sub-missions (else I don't bet a penny on you): You will for sure lose more than 25% of your marines and your overall BS after the boarding will also hit the floor. It's your choice Very Happy
If you are really good for skipping the 3rd mission and making the remaining 2, expect to be left with no more than 10-20 marines. With 3 marines left you FAIL the boarding. If I succeed the first 3 sub-missions, I'll for sure skip the Drone Bay mission on the 4th (not if I have a lot of Elites), but I'll have then to make it in the last sub-mission, and yes, this can also be the Drone Bay!
Incidentally, the drone bay accounts for a major part of the enemy's ship strenght, so destroying it will make a bording success a lot easier.

When AT + 10 > enemy BR , then you WIN.

This simple formula essentially means that if you start a boarding when the enemy ship is still too strong (BR), then you CAN'T win and you will lose your MO together with all your marines, even if you succeed in all sub-missions given by Yisha.
You won't see your AT value during the boarding, just concentrate on Yisha's instructions.

3. External factors that may cause a boarding failure

The formula above doesn't account for what happens around you.
Before the boarding, it's great that some neutral or friendly ships actually help you by attacking your target. But it's not so great once you give the Boarding command, because their attack may well cause the target to explode and kill all your marines in the process Evil or Very Mad
The key for success here is to NOT start the boarding. Just keep watching the show, maybe helping the attackers. Watch the BS and BR numbers until they get to the formula above. Then quickly start with the Boarding command before the ship is killed, but it's very risky. The critical point is the 2nd sub-mission (engines), only after this one your marine task force will be sent to the ship (1st sub-mission: yeah, yeah, no nasty surprises...destroy the Jump Drive; 2nd sub-mission: destroy the Engines; all others randomly give ship surface elements).
If you think the ship is going to explode (Hull=0) then by all means DON'T do the 2nd sub-mission!! Your marines will not get onboard and you only fail the boarding with no bad consequences. Use your Long Range Scanner to locate some cargo containers, a consolation price for your efforts Very Happy.

4. You have to get the enemy's BR minus 10 to your BS

You will then not suffer any marine losses and you succeed. You may be in that case before the boarding, maybe after damaging the ship somewhat, so check out the numbers, you have then a guaranteed win Smile
Early in the game, your BS is always inferior to all the ships (possible max. 252.5), this means you will have to destroy elements of the ship or the hull BEFORE giving the Boarding command so you get the enemy's BR down. Once boarding initiated, his BR will NOT go down anymore and it's all about succeeding point 2.

For my first boarding, I would get a L-type down to 30% Hull before boarding. Get it down more and your 'client' may explode...see point 3Smile
For really high-value targets like the Phoenix or Fulmekron, prepare yourself to fight against a horde of drones and escort ships that will make your life a painful one...You better take these out BEFORE the boarding! For such targets, I will join the fight with a good number of fighting escorts myself. Here it's important to send your supporting ships away before giving the boarding command, otherwise they will continue to attack and maybe destroy your prey. Against such targets, only at least mk3 weapons will be useful, don't expect to last very long with some mk1 piupiu gun...Also carry 2 specialized drones for refilling your shields, a real life-keeper if you are under intense fire.

As you progress in the game, make sure to TRAIN your MO and possibly get his skills to 5-stars because that's the critical factor. With a less skilled MO you can also succeed but it gets much harder. The MO's main skill, the Boarding Experience, is the most important and cannot be trained, this will only increase with a lot of successful boardings, so watch out when you hire him: look for a 'good' boarding experience! The secondary skills of a crew member are even more important, why? If you look carefully at their skills, you will notice that some skills are in bold. Only these will be subject to training, the other skills will remain unchanged. This means: When you hire a crew member, especially the Marine Officer, then chose one with already good secondary skills! The MO's skiil that can be trained later are 'Leadership' and 'Morale'. The 'Combat' skill can NOT be trained, as strange as it sounds, it is meant for the Defense Officer.
For other crew members, the Captain, Engineer and Defense Officer, the skills are important as well: A good trained crew will not only give you better response times, but also much more money value: A 'medium' engineer will repair the hull up to 75%, an expert engineer will make the same job to 90%. This makes a huge difference should you sell the ship! Note that you can fine-tune the crew's behavior in their Detail Menu. Things like auto-refuel and defense or attack attitude for the DO can be set here.

If you ever decide to sell a ship be sure to collect your crew and sell or transfer everything you have on board beforehand, every ware or drones left on your ship when selling it will only get you 50% value from the ship vendor. Maybe you should install a less experienced captain so you don't have to redo the training of the better one (you cannot sell a ship without captain onboard). Also before selling, get in an expert engineer to repair the hull to 90%.
For doing such subtle crew changes, and also in various other game situations, the MoreCrew mod is very useful because expanding the number of crew members your Skunk can carry. The crew limitation in the vanilla game is odd in any case because the Skunk is meant to be a larger freighter (carrying 50 marines!).

5. Advanced Boarding: Traitor drone

You can get this ROV drone by the drone dealer. Each drone will carry 10 mines for the purpose of sabotage. You place them on hard surfaces (stations, ships, maybe asteroids?) and then you detonate them remotly with a keystroke.

...

Children Display
all true

Mechanics

Boarding begins with the <player> first disabling the ship sufficiently for drop pods to be launched. This requires that all Matter/Antimatter Drive components and the Jump Tunnel Device component be in a destroyed state. Once achieved, boarding pods will be launched.

Boarding pods are small ships with low top speed and hull which make their way to a seemingly random point of the target's physical hull. Each marine assigned to the Marine Officer is given its own boarding pod. It is unclear if the Marine Officer is physically in any of the pods or if he magically teleports as long as at least 1 boarding pod makes it. Boarding pods are subject to ship combat mechanics and so can be destroyed if their hull reaches 0%, resulting in the loss of the carried Marine. If at least 1 boarding pod makes it to its destination point the boarding operation can continue, otherwise the operation will be a failure. After the last boarding pod leaves space by either arriving or being destroyed the operation will continue and fighting will begin.

Fighting has both a passive and active mechanic. Passively the Marine Officer boarding strength is periodically pitted against the ship's boarding resistance potentially resulting in marine losses. Actively the player is set boarding challenges to complete in a timely manner in order for boarding to progress. Boarding succeeds afters all active goals are achieved and several passive rounds are survived; boarding fails if all marines are lost.

Passive combat loss results are determined by the difference between boarding strength of the Marine Officer and the boarding resistance of the target. No losses will occur as long as boarding strength is larger by at least 10 points than <target's> boarding resistance and all active tasks are successfully completed. An instant wipeout of all marines can occur if boarding resistance is considerably larger than boarding strength. Losses will also occur if <player> takes too long to perform a set boarding challenge.

Once boarding succeeds the target ship ownership is immediately transferred to the <player>. See also JoeTheDestroyer's calculations

Boarding Resistance

Boarding resistance of a ship can be viewed in the target's info panel. The resistance is calculated from many factors which the player can influence. Nearby supporting ships (eg drones), ship hull and shield percentage as well as active ship components raise boarding resistance. Inactive drones equipped by <target> (ie not trade cargo) such as Cargolifters can also play a major part, whether or not they are combat-capable.

Boarding resistance can be minimized by destroying all surface components, removing all drone units and reducing ship shield and hull to very low amounts.

Marines

For the board option to be available the player must first acquire a Marine Officer and a number of Marines. How many Marines in his command helps determine his boarding strength for the passive boarding mechanic. The Marine Officer can be assigned up to 50 Marines in total.

Marines come in 3 different variants of increasing power and value. After successful boarding operations there is a chance that surviving marines are automatically promoted to a more powerful variant for free.

1. This can vary by around ±3k and assorted discounts from rep & smalltalking individual traders may also apply.
2. As of v3.x although a price is listed in the encyclopedia there is no place that trades these Marines, making successful boarding operations the only way to obtain them.