How does Tactical Speed affect battles?

Tactical Speed  - Max speed

Acceleration - Time it gets to max speed

Apparently, tho i haven't tested just going by what i hear from others. The speed of your ship adds to a "hidden" dodge or miss chance when other ships attack you, sorta like the jamming trait.. i could be wrong. If it is the case would be nice to be able to see the numbers for that on a ship.

And also generally, faster ships that you set as assault for example where they might protect bigger ships means they engage the enemy faster, potentially stalling them from getting into range of your other more important ships.. soo the big ships can shoot at them without retaliation. Tho in practice i honestly haven't seen much of a difference, then again i have never once used any parts that boost ship tactical speed.

Weapons have 360 fire arcs, but they also have ranges. A ship with a lot of thrusters will close on their target faster, which can be very handy if you have ships armed with kinetics (which have the shortest range).

They can also be handy on ships that have a role that starts them near the back of your fleet (like Capitals) that you want to close faster with the enemy than ships with other roles that start nearer the front of your fleet (although how useful this is depends on how you've designed your ships, what roles you've assigned them and how you compose your fleets).

One point about this i forgot to mention, i thought it looked funny to that they appeared to nearly "ram" each other. But as soon as you turn the camera view to something different then top down, they are in fact fighting at different heights within space. kinda just an top down illusion which makes it appear they are doing that.. that being said it does look funny, wish they kinda did a fly by rather then sorta stall and float up and down.

Yeah, it looks very funny.   I always want to yell at my ship captains: "Just let them come to you, you've got missiles!" hehe

That's an interesting idea, I might have to mess around with the ship roles more.

Thrusters add to the chance to miss of the opponent. I always equip thrusters if only to give a chance of the enemy to miss. On my super capital extra long range missile ships, I only put in a single small thruster. This means it will take forever to get to the 'battle' while still giving a small chance for the enemy to miss. This keeps my missile boat at stand off range as long as possible.....

Out of curiosity, how did you discover that thrusters do this? It seems intuitive, but I've never been able to find anything in the .xml that indicates this. Unless there is a hidden factor involving tactical speed?

I had actually thought about adding a small "jamming" percent to them, just because it made sense that more maneuverable= more evasive.

i only knew about it because Paul said thats what its supposed to do when it was asked in a recent dev stream.. if it works or not is another thing lol

Sorry for the necro, but thrusters, tactical speed, and acceleration are still all completely undocumented in the game. This is a pretty huge oversight in my opinion.

The Tactical Speed stat in the ship designer still has "Missing Info" as its tooltip. This makes me sad   :'(  . I don't like mysterious mechanics in a 4X, and just having a tooltip saying "higher tactical speed increases miss chances against the ship" isn't really cutting it in todays standards of tooltips, so please don't go that route Stardock  .

I believe adding thrusters to a ship can also increase 'evasion' which does increase the more and better thrusters you add to a design. 

At least this is what I have observed using medium hulls. 

This is incorrect. No amount of thrusters provides any amount of jamming. The only purpose they serve is closing range faster - which is good if you have a kinetic advantage and that's it. They really suck.

But if you put enough thrusters on ships battles stop making ANY sense at all.

I think I asked that question in the twitch chat.  Paul's response seemed rather.... unsure.  I really don't think he knows whether thrusters buff evasion or not.  Sad, because I don't believe they do and having a design option that is underpowered to the point of uselessness is worse than not having that option at all.

They don't. As Excelsis says, all they do is close range more rapidly. They also seem to increase the chance that the visuals of a tactical battle stop corresponding to what's actually happening, too (suggesting that perhaps they're not taken into account by the video).

The video takes them into account, but it isn't designed for crazy fast ships. Enemies will fire BEHIND themselves, you'll think it's a miss, and then your ship will zip across the screen just in time to catch the missiles or bullets. You can't tell what's shooting what because the ships could end up basically anywhere within a half second.

Poor dudes thinking it did something false,but it cannot be blamed when even the developer does not seem to know.Battles seem another part of the game left half designed.

I love the game, but there do seem to be a few important features that are missing. I mean im still waiting on some kind of planet invasion system instead of just a pop up window. Odd thing is that it was in the beta then it was taken out last minute as they were not happy with it. While i agree it wasn't very good i still wish there was something else added sooner rather then later.

i guess after a few expansions and when all the DLC finally comes out we will get what could be considered a "complete" game, compared to gc2 standards at least.