I am currently making a brief tips and tricks video for combat in endless space 2 and have come across a few questions I have not been able to easily find the answers too. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can direct me to the info or a DEV could clarify.

The topic in perticular pretains to advice on boarding pods. Here is what I know.

Boarding pods can be launched from most ship types and require the use of the laumching ships manpower to use. 

Boarding pods can be shot down by flak defense and cause no damage upon impact if they do make it to their target.

Each boarding pod that successfully breeches an enemy ship will unload X manpower/infantry onto an enemy ship which then do battle with the enemy ships manpower/infantry. 

The success of battles between the boarding party and the enemy ship is based on the relative strength of their factions infantry, so infantry buffs will imporve successful boardings/defense of ships.

Ships with less than full manpower have a penalty to their combat effectiveness when engaged with other ships. 

Some ship weapon mods will explicitly kill enemy crew reducing their manpower. 

One support mod (titanium shrapnel) will increase the loss of enemy crew by 25% for weapons mods.

Ok...that is where i am at in my understanding. Now for my questions.

Do standard weapons cause crew loss or only ones that note it in the description? If so how is it calculated and how does it differ from ones that note such info?

Does the support module (titanium shrapnel) increase crew loss caused by boarding pods?

Does (titanium shrapnel) incease enemy crew loss from all weapons or only weapons that specificly note crew loss in their discription? 

Does the +25% crew damage effect stack if you kit a ship with more than one of them? 

The most important aspect of all this whem giving advice of how to kit a fleet with boarding pods is understanding what the most effective means for reducing enemy crew are. Hopefully i can get the info i need here without having to experiment with trial and error to discover it myself...but that is my next step. 

Cheers and thanks in advance for any help or input. 

Noticed some very curious behavior in several lets plays I have watched. The infantry buff to boarding pods seems to have a larger impact than anticipated by the bonuses they claim to yield to ground battles. 

For example...using the generic T3 military boarding pods...they claim to do 5 crew damage per second for 5 seconds. 

Upon fully upgrading infantry the ground battle buff claims a 30% increase to damage vs infantry, with various other buffs to health and other troop types. 

In a recent video of ES2 by youtuber SB, his generic pods were doing 12 crew damage per second to a UE ship that I have to assume has no infantry buffs. 

That means his troops were getting a 120% buff to crew damage from somewhere. I am not clear how that is possible. I was unable to determine if and how many titanium shrapnel mods where in his boarding pod flotillias...and it doesnt seem to make sense that they improve BP damage to crew in my mind. 

If the infantry buffs do impact boarding pods differently than the tool tip outlines foe ground battles, perhaps it would make sense to update it to include exactly what is going on. 

My best theory is that each tier above the opponent your infantry is increases damage by 20%...as it seemed to me when he had tier 1 buffs they were doing 6 crew damage per sec. I will try and investigate this further in my own games.