Interesting point, Pithlit. Another way to tweak it instead of physically making the grav well smaller, just make ships fly through it faster than the grav wells of celestial objects (this mechanism already exists since ships fly much slower through solar grav wells). I'm not sure what would be involved in assigning a non-colonizeable celestial object a property of a colonizeable one.

I'm inclined to think the devs might have something up their sleeves as far as these things go, though, because whether or not their grav wells are smaller or not, they'll still remain empty spaces, with varying degrees of hugeness Their placement usually doesn't give them much strategic value, I've never in all my games seen a carrier-heavy fleet get ambushed (or even go through) a cloud that prevents fighter launch, for instance.

Thats actually an issue with scale -- stars have such a huge grav well that ships seem to travel slower, not that they actually travel slower.

Okay, point taken but it's essentially the same thing.. the physical representation of the sun's grav well isn't that "huge" compared to normal planets, but it's a lot more dense so you get pretty much the same effect?

yes, but this has been talked about since at least beta 2... if not earlyer.



well if these stars have such huge gravity wells, then they should make them seem that big. Size scale is one of my complaints about this game. A stars grave well "appears" to be about the same as that of a planet, and only slightly bigger then that of an asteroid. PLEASE fix this. if ships move slower so that they take longer to cross a stars grav well, then why not make them move normal speed and have the well much bigger.

this could be partly fixed by re-sizing the tactical grid. Right now it really throws off our perception of size, because the grid spacing is different for different class of grav well. A star has huge squares and an asteroid has smaller ones, rather then having them all uniform with ALOT more squares in a huge well then a smaller one.

I personally like playing with the tactical grid on, so this really bugs me in game play. Does any one else notice this? plus if they tweak with the grid spacing they could cause asteroid grav wells to appear much smaller, even if they arent really... same with the sun, they could make it appear much bigger, with out it actually being changed that much.

Yup, I would like a bigger star gravity well but have your ships move at normal speed as well....just checking, but ships around a star move at reduced speed, right?

I haven't used the nebulae yet, but an anti-matter heavy fleet in a starwell is much more powerful than one out of it. A TEC capship group is damn near impossible to kill in one, continual shield restores are a real bitch. I've taken advantage of a gas giant several times, hitting large fleets of small guys in one is perfect. If I had the oportunity sure, but I just haven't run into one in a good spot for ambushing or using as a choke point yet. It has to be really prime real estate to pick squadron lockdowns over orbital defenses.

To rephrase: I believe they took but haven't yet implemented.