what I love and hate about watch tower

[CMDR_MAXSON]

First of all I love that Watchtower Finally adds some difficulty to the game that was sorely lacking. It also adds fleet mechanics that make it shine

I hate that Bethesda has not yet added Individual body part HP pools so Giant Mech Watch tower bots can't be destroyed piece by piece disabling their abilities.

Also not a fan of how You have very limited control of the fleet so everything ends up just being killed.

I hope Bethesda in the future adds larger capital ships that you can disable the turrets and generators and board.

 

[kinggath]

Right! The lack of destructible body parts in the engine is crazy - they had such an awesome system in FO4, no idea why they didn't just bring that forward.

We've got requests into Bethesda for some more power over the UI so we can hopefully let the player issue some commands to their fleet in the middle of the action. Right now it's basically impossible unless we were to create a "command weapon" which would be pretty lame to have to sacrifice one of your three weapon slots.

 

[RandomWanderer]

Right! The lack of destructible body parts in the engine is crazy - they had such an awesome system in FO4, no idea why they didn't just bring that forward.

We've got requests into Bethesda for some more power over the UI so we can hopefully let the player issue some commands to their fleet in the middle of the action. Right now it's basically impossible unless we were to create a "command weapon" which would be pretty lame to have to sacrifice one of your three weapon slots.

It's worth a weapon slot. But probably unnecessary. You could give commands to the fleet just by shooting at stuff.

For example adding a "Follow my lead" mode in the terminal settings. So any targets you shoot at are tagged with whatever weapon type you use (damage to hull or EM for boarding) and all ships attack those targets with the same weapon type.

Would make it possible to disable one specific ship for boarding while nuking the rest.

But that would be feature creep and I think we already got enough for 10 euros.

Add it to the sequel

The only thing I don't like about watchtower is that it ends.

 

[Villager]

Wouldn't a new suppressor type weapon sold by Gren work for the command weapon? The weapon could work as a regular suppressor and also send a command to other ships in the fleet not to fire on that target.

The Good: After running through the mod a few times, this seems a fairly quick, easy and fun way to get levels for a character. It's not too difficult (about comparable to the Freestar Ranger questline) and although only a few new POIs are added, there's enough variation in them to keep from seeming too same-y. It's also fun to see Stardock get built up as you go.

The Bad: There's an awful lot of killing. Would be nice to have other options to deal with listening posts and such. Most of my characters would honestly just skip to a new universe ASAP in any Watchtower universe after the first. There's nothing in any one universe worth all that blood. Watchtower also is so pervasive that it can distort the way a character gets developed, especially with a new character. The Not Yet Watchtower creation only partially fixes that.

The Ugly: The third character that I ran through Watchtower was level 96 starting her second Watchtower universe. Unfortunately, this universe did get rather repetitive. Nearly all the listening posts were smaller (got five Alphas in a row at one point) and there were few mechs, but all the troopers were a special level 100 Warden type that you normally only see during the assault on Heimdall station. The Wardens were very hard on any companions and lack of mechs ended up forcing her to raid Vulture's Roost to get AI and mech components for the mech skydrop. She's one of the few of my characters that's okay with the required wholesale slaughter (for various reasons) but probably will drop Watchtower in subsequent universes for her if she can expect more of the same.