I really wish it would do more...  like increase miss chance or dodge or something...


It is useful if you are doing mass drivers tech but in all my testing  it is better to add one more defense or one more weapon over adding thrusters.

Would it work if you put thrusters on a defensive assault ship ... the idea being to draw some initial enemy fire away from your slower escort ship?

(I find the AI will often prefer one particular escort instead of distributing the fire between several escorts)

Not really what i meant, since escorts draw enemy fire even without thrusters.

I usually set all my ships to 'capital' even tiny ships,,,, and one or two heavily defensive escorts. But if one escort has more damage or is different in some way to the other escort, it will draw all the fire, which is not good.... that is why i am wondering instead of having two escorts i can have one set to assault, with a thruster, it will get hit first, but then the escort will catch up and draw all the fire. So two ships guaranteed to share the load of enemy fire, that is what i am wondering thrusters might achieve?

What about carriers? a thruster on a carrier makes the fighters faster???

The .xmls for tactical drives do not list a bonus to jamming (aka evasion).  They list bonuses to tactical speed and acceleration.

However, one or both of those stats may directly effect evasion chance.  I've read a post where someone claimed this was true.  It's easy to test.  Evasion is visible in the battle viewer.  Send otherwise identical ships with and without tactical drives into a battle and see what the tooltip tells you.

BTW, tactical speed and acceleration are modified by hull size (this is NOT speculation) as follows:

Tiny +20%

Small +10%

Medium +0%

Large -10%

Huge -20%

No, they're to both speed and acceleration. Also, the base tactical speed, as defined in GalCiv3GlobalDefs, is 40, not 35.

As far as the subject of whether or not speed affects evasion, I am not certain, but I am rather doubtful. I have not thoroughly tested it, but it appears as though neither tactical speed nor tactical acceleration have any impact on actual evasion rates as seen in the battle logs; even with modded components giving +500% tactical speed and acceleration I did not see any significant difference in hit rates between ships with and without thrusters.

I too would like a bit more information on Thrusters. Back in Alpha/Beta it was said that they did in fact affect evasion. However now everyone is out testing it this appears to not be the case. 

This would then lead all of us to say NEVER EVER equip Thrusters on our ships ever. The cost/benefit to weight/space simply does not justify any when you would have better efficiency on adding defenses or more weapons. 

/cheers. 

It is kind of weird when you think of the huge list of features that could be included in the game, and the battle of compromise to decide which ones get in and which ones miss out.... meanwhile that is going on they spend resources adding thrusters to the game and they are of no use?

Ii is difficult to imagine the original people who first proposed the idea of thrusters had this outcome in mind?? Just imagine the idea of thrusters being debated and everyone debating it says oh yea, lets do that and make sure they are useless??? lol