Ship capture

[Emperor's Child]

Let's not forget that in most cases, "Loading up" on boarding teams has no practical benefit. Whenever you board another ship, ALL of your boarding teams will participate and those portions of your ship that held them will be changed to damaged. So you can only ever take over one enemy ship per each of your own ships every 2 turns since you must then repair the boarding party in your next turn.

Unless your opponent(s) are humans, you won't find much resistance to even one boarding team (the self-destruct device notwithstanding, which must be eliminated). So against AI opponents it makes little sense to put more than one boarding team per ship.

I've found that in the late game, if you have not yet scrapped your early game small ships, that they are handy as boarding ships. Your big guys you typically don't want to drop shields until the battle is decided, but you can convert your little guys with a boarding party and use them to augment your big ships. Let the heavies take down the enemy ship shields and, if necessary, chop enough hull away so that the self destruct device is eliminated. Then rush in with a small boarding ship and take it. This will keep your heavy ships with shields up to continue the fight. Also, if a large ship has been hit enough so that its shield is just about down, you may as well use that ship's boarding parties because next turn your opponents are likely to take it down anyhow (the AI will to continue to attack the damaged ship before moving on to an undamaged ship)