Spoilers and boarding

[smoelf (OP)]

This is the first game, where I have tried to do any kind of serious boarding action, and I must admit that my first attempt was quite surprising. There was some kind of spoiler race floating around in Sol and after taking out a few stealthed attack ships, I sent 4 parties of 250 tons each to board the last ship, which was ca. 50.000 tons commercial vessel. The boarding attempt was succesful, but after entering it only took a single round of combat to wipe out all four parties. While losing 1000 tons of ground units, I only managed to destroy 3x elite infantry, 1 resupply unit, and 1 anti-tank team, while losing 120 infantry with IPW and 30 infantry with CAP. Granted, this is still early in the game (16 years in), so my troops might not have been the best equipped, but I still thought it was a quite wild one-sided affair.

Is this common when boarding? Does it have anything to do with the type of spoiler (not sure which it is)?
Considering how fast they got wiped out, I'm not sure if using more troops would have been a solution, but in case there is a good rule of thumb, how many tons would be good to aim for?

In case it makes a difference because of relative tech levels, I'll list my designs here.

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Assault Marines
Transport Size (tons) 6     Cost 0.45     Armour 12.0     Hit Points 8
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.056     Resupply Cost 1.3
Improved Personal Weapons:      Shots 1      Penetration 8      Damage 6

Boarding Combat

Vendarite  0.18   
Development Cost  106

Code: [Select]

Heavy Assault Marines
Transport Size (tons) 12     Cost 0.9     Armour 12.0     Hit Points 8
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.11     Resupply Cost 6
Crew-Served Anti-Personnel:      Shots 6      Penetration 6      Damage 6

Boarding Combat

Vendarite  0.36   
Development Cost  150

[nuclearslurpee]

While losing 1000 tons of ground units, I only managed to destroy 3x elite infantry, 1 resupply unit, and 1 anti-tank team,

What happened is that the ship you attempted to board was a troop transport, and troops on a troop transport will fight back during a boarding action. 1,000 tons of infantry against ~25,000 tons of spoiler-level invasion troops will basically never end well. Against anything that's not a troop transport you probably would have been okay.

This being said, you should be aware that due to how boarding combat usually works (i.e., when the enemy ship isn't crawling with angry space marines), PWI is a very poor choice of weapon for boarding parties. During boarding combat, crews are modeled as INF+PWL with half the racial tech level in armor and HP, which means that if you have equal tech PWL is the best weapon for your boarding parties, and even against an enemy with superior tech PW or CAP are more than enough to penetrate and kill in one hit. In almost any reasonable scenario, PWI is just wasting valuable tonnage that could be used to cram in more, smaller weapons that would do the job.

I would generally recommend using PWL+CAP for boarding parties, even against higher-tech enemies the PWL act as effective meatshields for the CAP which will do most of your damage.

[smoelf (OP)]

What happened is that the ship you attempted to board was a troop transport, and troops on a troop transport will fight back during a boarding action. 1,000 tons of infantry against ~25,000 tons of spoiler-level invasion troops will basically never end well. Against anything that's not a troop transport you probably would have been okay.

Aaaaaha. Yes, that would be a very reasonable explanation. I suppose total destruction is a more suitable approach for this particular vessel 

[Ulzgoroth]

I would generally recommend using PWL+CAP for boarding parties, even against higher-tech enemies the PWL act as effective meatshields for the CAP which will do most of your damage.

Though this would invite countering by ship security detachments with heavy armor and weapons. Don't know if NPRs will do that, however.

[nuclearslurpee]

I would generally recommend using PWL+CAP for boarding parties, even against higher-tech enemies the PWL act as effective meatshields for the CAP which will do most of your damage.

Though this would invite countering by ship security detachments with heavy armor and weapons. Don't know if NPRs will do that, however.

AFAIK, they do not. If you're playing with multiple player races, of course there is no metagame as everything depends on what other races do.