Tractor Beam III useless

[Ed Kolis]

This might have been noticed ages ago, but it could easily be fixed in a mod and/or patch - the Tractor Beam III is useless, since it pulls ships in by 4 squares, but its range is 4, so it can't GRAB ships from far enough away to move them 4 squares, making it no better than the Tractor Beam II, which is cheaper!

[geoschmo]

So technically it's not useless, just a little inneficent.

[Will]

I don't know if the game still does this, but I believe any excess "damage" from the tractor beam not used in pulling in the opposing ship is applied to the opposing ship. So, if you use a T-Beam III at point blank range, four damage would be applied to the ship fired upon.

Now that I think about it, could be an... interesting weapon, if it still "works". I really only noticed it when I put a bunch of T-Beam, weapon, Repulsor weapon combos on a starbase, and made all of them Massive mounts (the overkill didn't occur to me, I just wanted range). It might be able to be modded to a weapon a la Graviton Hellbore, only... different

[Taera]

all damage from T and R weapons applies as effect + normal damage. So if you make a tractor do 500 damage it might well kill a ship. Same with Warp guns.

[Pax]

I've always thought Tractor beams shoudl have a longer range -- say, damage^2 ... so a TR3 which does 4, should reach out to range 16. The idea is to get things closer, right? So, why would you use such a weapon, if you're already darned close to begin with ... ?

Repulsor beams, OTOH, should have range inversely related to how hard they can push, IMO. The further out a single Repulsor can kick you, the less it should affect you with each "kick".

[Andrés]

That's one of the things I made in the Star Wars mod. Shor range beam weapons combined with long range tractor beams.