Capture Watchtower Ships

[Bobwalt]

Will I still be able capture Watchtower ships after completing the story? I would dearly love to, at least, be able to salvage one. Heck, perhaps you could even increase the likelihood of one landing as I have only seen it happen once.

 

[Lostinwhere]

Yup, I capture them all the time. How often you come across them after finishing the main story depends on your progress when you completed The Last Watch. When I finished, I had only destroyed the first major hub array, Alpha. That left the other four major hub arrays intact and all their minor arrays. If you go after the minor arrays one at a time and leave the corresponding major hub last, you'll be spawning a lot of Watchtower ships as you destroy each minor array. Now if you've destroyed all five major hubs, then the chance meetings with Watchtower ships goes way down. There is a gameplay setting where you can increase or decrease the chance of Watchtower ambushes. I have it set to give the most chance and I still rarely see random ambushes. You can capture them on the ground, but they're not supposed be captured planet side. As you've probably observed, they tend to land quite a distance away and then immediately take off. I use this mod https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/2952 to greatly slow time and increase the speed of my in game movements.

 

[Kevin]

Now if you've destroyed all five major hubs, then the chance meetings with Watchtower ships goes way down.

So far I've only encountered WT ships two times after completing the MQ, both were battles between Spacers & WT. But thanks to a fleet with ships that have all EM weapons I was able to capture another WT ship.

There is a gameplay setting where you can increase or decrease the chance of Watchtower ambushes.

I thought that only affects WT ship encounters while the MQ is still open?

 

[Lostinwhere]

So far I've only encountered WT ships two times after completing the MQ, both were battles between Spacers & WT. But thanks to a fleet with ships that have all EM weapons I was able to capture another WT ship.


I thought that only affects WT ship encounters while the MQ is still open?

I believe that setting affects WT ship encounters after finishing the main quest as well. Twolargepepperoni would have to clarify.

 

[Bobwalt]

All this is something the designers can change if they want.

 

[Lostinwhere]

All this is something the designers can change if they want.

They've already added an option to make random ambushes more frequent if desired. If you want as many encounters with Watchtower ships as possible, track down all the minor arrays before going after their respective major array hub. Once you expose the minor array, you don't even have to destroy it. Just fire at it with an EM only weapon and that'll spawn a response. Then, if a Corvette, Destroyer or Battleship shows up, capture it. Drones you can't capture by design. You may be able to leave the system, come back and cause another response to spawn.

 

[Bobwalt]

Unfortunately, that ship sailed a while ago. I was going along and taking out the occasional listening posts I ran across in my exploration rather than go after the long list of posts I had in activities when I went to harper to turn in my latest batch of info when she informed me there weren't any left. I guess I was a victim of my own success. As to rearming my fleet with just EM weapons. that seems to me like a cheesy tactic. It does not sound like something a Fleet Commodore would do.

 

[Lostinwhere]

Unfortunately, that ship sailed a while ago. I was going along and taking out the occasional listening posts I ran across in my exploration rather than go after the long list of posts I had in activities when I went to harper to turn in my latest batch of info when she informed me there weren't any left. I guess I was a victim of my own success. As to rearming my fleet with just EM weapons. that seems to me like a cheesy tactic. It does not sound like something a Fleet Commodore would do.

When you go into your "Activities" section, do you still have the objective : "Locate Watchtower Array Hub Kappa" or any of the four remaining major hub arrays? You can actually turn in enough intel and purchase enough intel from Harper that she will tell you that that aren't any left. At that point, if you still haven't destroyed Upsilon and Omega, it's actually easy to track down all the remaining listening posts and arrays. Once you destroy Omega, then it gets very hard to find any listening posts. I don't use a fleet. I have the JJ U.S.S. Enterprise in a highly modded configuration. I have a set of EM only weapons that I modded in xedit stricktly for capturing ships.