Re: Is this a bug?
 

CW I did not forget boarding parties, but IMO they are not very useful. Unless you use tactical combat you almost always end up with boarded ships that are severely damaged and useless. And with the self destruction device its very easy to make boarding impossible and destroy even the attacking ships. That are the reasons I almost never used boarding in SE III and it didn't change for SE IV.
Now is it realistic that the allegiance subverter works on a ship without crew: of course not, but I don't care about realism in a game. And is it realistic that if you destroy the master computer the ship will still be able to fire and to continue to move (even at very low speed) if no crew is on board???
I think the possibility to convert ships with master computers (after their destruction) gives much more challenge to the game: I play at the moment a very advanced game, where I am the strongest empire with more than double the score of number two. However number 2 are the CueCappa and I still loose some combats to them because of the conVersion of my ships with master computers (I use my AI modification of the CueCappa and they combine computer virus with allegiance subverters on their ships). Without that challenge I would stopped this game already.

Re: Is this a bug?
 

Without you being able to capture ships with destroyed MCs the Physic AI races would be at a severe disadvantage. I have yet to see a standard race use boarding or MC's. If it didn't work this way you would remove once of the game balances as everything has a counter, except the Talisman which should be change to 100% to hit IMHO.