Gravity wells

[Bromley]

They're another of the things that always bugged me that now, thanks to RebEd, I can play around with.

 

The ideal would be a gravity well powered by a depletable energy source - the shield recharge source would do. Naturally, I assume that anything like that is impossible and that you only get on or off choices.

 

I've had another idea though. I've switched off the wells but given the Interdictor & the 7700 long range tractors (100 - longest weapon range seems to be 70).

 

Presumably someone else has tried something like this before. Were there any problems? Any other ideas?

[Bromley]

I had another idea. A low cost, high maintenance ship with really poor defence stats and a gravity well. That way they're easy to destroy, allowing ships to retreat if they have a couple of fighters available to suicide against the Interdictor.

 

The low cost to manufacture will make the loss bearable. The high maintenance will prevent you from having loads of them.

 

I'm not sure how the AI would react to a gravity well ship which is easy to kill. Does anybody know/have a good guess?

[Bromley]

Well, a little testing of the tractor idea has thrown up a problem. The AI retreats, leaving the poor caught ship to be blown up. Still, it does mean that the majority of the fleet can escape, whereas with a standard Interdictor they'd have all died.

 

My second idea (easy to build & kill, expensive to maintain) doesn't really appeal to me. Not that I know enough about the SW universe to know that those sort of stats would be wrong, but it just doesn't feel right.

 

I think that the solution will be to leave the stats, but increase the maintenace by a factor of 3 and the build cost by 2. That will make an Interdictor as expensive to maintain as an Imperial II SD and as expensive to build as a Victory II SD. The 7700 now has the maintenance higher than a Dauntless and a build cost similar to a Calamari Cruiser.

 

Seems a bit steep, but it should prevent the overuse of gravity wells that I remember from last ime I played.

[Jahled]

All this is largely pointless dude!

 

You should really be protecting most of your systems with fighter cover, with the presance of bombers. Bombers make piece meal out of capital ships, period. If one of your systems is attacked by an enemy fleet and you've got capital ships that you need to get clear (and escape all of that popularity dip lark) simply target all your fighter squadrons on the gravity well ship and then run...

 

You'll find also, the AI won't bother to much with such protected systems.

 

Ever figured all those enemy recon mission detections are up to?

[Bromley]

hehe. It's to stop *me* from abusing gravity wells, not the AI. As you say, if I need to get away then I'm bright enough to target them, but as I play the Empire most often the Rebs really need to be able to save their fleets more often .

[vakundok]

Well, actually the gravity wells are described by two stats: a 4 and a 100, but I do not have the time to test what they do (whether they do anything at all).

[Bromley]

Wow - where did you get those figures from? I was going to ask you if you're mixing up Tractor Beams and Gravity Wells, but the best tractor is 6/20 so you're obviously not.

 

4/100 looks a lot like a power/range stat (100 being the max range for TL as far as I can see).

 

4 is unlikely to be a power rating, as a well is a well. Perhaps it's a hidden system stat and could be compared with shield and weapon recharge?

 

Has anyone ever had a well put out of action before the ship was destroyed?

[vakundok]

Those are in the file Capshpsd.dat along with the other stats ...

The two well equipped ships have those stat pairs. If you set the gravity well with RebEd, it will also add or delete those.

 

At first sight they really look like a power/range combination, however, as I wrote I do not know whether the game uses those as statistic or only uses them as a flag.