boarding ships?

[ɃƵ Crazy Cat Lady]

I saw there was boarding, but is it actual skill based sword fighting, or is it just strongest team wins?

[Kashra Fall]

There are three bars in tempest. Top one is sails, middle is crew, bottom is hull. If your enemy has more crew strength than you, the odds of you losing is substanially higher. Mainly, they have more crew members and those crew members are healthy, aka full hp.

To win boarding, you have to have tactics. You can't just go into it blindly like you would in say, assassin's creed black flag and just fight everything off solo (which was silly, but somehow fun,)

[EQ]

weaken them with scatter bombs or something like that also fire works but dont destroy the ship claim it as your own with winning boarding

[Vindred]

The easiest method I use is to have equal numbers of rank 5 and rank 3 crewmen on the deck. The rank 3 crewmen swing over to the enemy deck and tie up their shooters. While an enemy is fighting one of your sailors, they not only can't snipe you, but they don't take cover. Kill the ones that attack your deck first by clicking them so that your rank 5 pirates will target them (you will see a red target appear). Then, when all the ones on your deck are dead, target all the ones on the enemy deck fighting your sailors, then target the ones who aren't in melee.

As long as my crew is healthy, and their crew has been destroyed as much as possible with shrapnel or another anti-crew weapon, and I'm not attacking a much bigger ship than mine, this method always works for me.

If you don't have rank 5 crewmen yet, you can use the above method with any kind of shooters, which is every crewman other than rank 3. The rank 3 crewmen are very valuable because it exposes their shooters and prevents them from focusing fire on any one of your crew.

If you don't have enough rank 3 crewmen to use this "dynamic entry" method, you might try using several rank 2 crewmen for the stink bombs. Just don't use rank 3 crewmen in conjunction with this, or at least don't let them swing over to the enemy deck until it has been gassed as much as you're going to gas it, because it'll hurt them too.

Edit: Note that you only need to click enemy sailors when you have rank 5 crewmen, because you have to indicate their targets. Everyone else just shoots whatever they can.