Boarding

Like pirates in the real world, startship captains can attempt to board other vessels once there shields are down & hull is less then 40%.

A person's Crew-Combat level determines the effectiveness their crew have. A 10 (default) combat level ship with 100 crew would be outnumbered by a attacking-force of 50 men from a empire whom's C-C level is 21 or more.

This means military ships can be stolen and used back against the enemy! However, boarding a ship, as in the real world is a risky move. It leaves the attacking ship and stolen ship both with either a under-crewed crew complimant or barely any, both ship's at least damaged with substaintial damage to the stolen ship, and slow speeds to escape due to this damage.

The stealing of a ship tends to only occur therefore when: A very large fleet from a alliance attacks a smaller one from a individual or alliance ~ Each player can afford to independently beam a small % of it's crew from it's ship's over to the enemy & leave the new attacking alliances fleet containing the stolen ship's with a slightly smaller % of crew.

A alliance or player wishes to make a morale-demoralising flagship steal.

To aquire a strategicely located space station to use as a forward operating base. Space stations can be taken over to repair friendly vessels and provide substaintial shielding and hull if managed to repair. An example would be when the once-federation-owned Deep Space Nine station was over taken by domininion to serve as a forward base against enemy Federation & Allies forces.

A player or alliance wants to build a quick army and uses large amount's of crew to generate a armada of seemingly random ship's.

A player wants to aquire a vessel for its superiority in terms of hull/shields etc.

When you beam 'crew' to a spaceship, they automatically attack it.

Your C-C level is timzed by the crew you have.

The result of this is you attack strength.

Their C-C level is timzed by the crew you have.

The result of this is their defence strength.

if your C-C level is 15 & you attack with 100 crew, that's 1500 attack strength.

If their C-C level is 12 & they have 120 crew, that's 1440 defence strength.