Need Help Crew and leadership

[NostalgicPirate]

Hey,

Been playing the game vanilla (don't keelhaul me) and i'm dugging trough the files. I just notice that each ship has an minimum crew. I always thought that the icon of 1 soldier was amount of SOLDIERS/fighters you had on board.

I want to optimize my ship for boarding.

So what does your crew do when you are fighting/boarding.
Is it important to defend your crew. Or can you just let there blood flow.
And is your crew better with an high leadership

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Crew is crew. More crew helps in boarding.

Haven't the foggiest if leadership helps in the stock game.

 

[Grey Roger]

Some of your crew will join you in boarding fights. Don't take officers with you - in the stock game, even if they have high skill, they can't fight worth a hoot and are likely to get killed. So you plus some crew will be fighting against some enemy crew. Like @Pieter Boelen, I don't know whether Leadership has any effect on boarding. But more crew is certainly good because how many of your crew and how many enemy crew appear on each deck depends on whether your total crew is larger then the enemy's or vice versa - if you're in a little schooner and you try to board a battleship, you'll probably be on your own against a full enemy squad!

The minimum crew is the amount you must put on the ship for it to function at all. This is mainly significant if you win the boarding fight and want to capture the enemy ship, which you can do by putting one of your officers in command. There must be at least enough crew still alive on your ship both to provide at least a minimum crew for the captured ship and to leave at least a minimum crew on your own, which means if you're in a little schooner and try to board a battleship, and actually survive all the boarding fights, you still won't be able to take it because you don't have enough crew.

It is useful to defend your crew in boarding fights because the amount of crew who are visibly killed in the battle translates to a percentage of how many of your total crew are lost when the battle is over. If you've lost too many, not only will you probably not have enough left to capture that ship, but you're an easy target for the next enemy ship who wants to board you.