Could you elaborate a bit on the lack of trade off, or the lack of complexity within it? You could compare it with old power examples perhaps, as that's something we're all familiar with.
Game is fucked and unlikely to ever get unfucked, so heres a detailed tutorial of how I used to build a ship vs the new system:
Old (tremble before my wall of text):
Okay, I start of with a quick calculation based on how many weapons I want to get the power I'll need, I add a little more so that I can run shields and thrust. Next I estimate my final mass and multiply it by 1.5 to know how much thrust I'll need. Then comes placing blocks, I make about 10-15 vertical lines of reactors using it to dimension my height, I never go below 300m H on a ship above 50k because power lines become too inefficient for my taste, there a bit of redundancy built in too. Then I place roughly 10k block aux reactors 7 blocks behind the power lines, so that I don't have to worry about their explosions, I usually put them in pairs, so Ill put two next to each other, go 7 blocks above those ones, place two more, until I have enough e/s. Then I take power capacity blocks and place them around my power system, creating a shell, upon which missiles can hit and will do minimal damage to my aux reactors. The cap shell is usually about 5 blocks thick and 7 blocks away from the aux, not enough to stop a big missile hit. Now I decide on how many shields I want, I take approximately 60% of the recharge and 50% of the capacity and put it on the main entity, usually on the front, assuming I've covered everything I needed to with the power cap blocks earlier. Now comes docked stuff. I will have 4 main docked pieces: a primary docked hull, a docked thrust unit, and a left and right missile plate. The docked hull's primary structure will be spaced apart from the main ship in the same way the power cap shell was built around the power system. I'll put maybe 5 blocks of space inbetween docked hull and main entity. The docked hull gets the other 40% of recharge and 50% of capacity, I also give it about 20% of my thrust for safety. Then I usually do the docked thrust unit, it gets the other 80% (the 20% on the docked hull was in case the thrust unit fell off in combat) and thats really all it needs, maybe add 1 recharger for that free 220 shields. You offload the thrust so that you arent paying for it with od and ion effect passives. Ok, now we move on to the missile plates, they'll be docked to the docked hull (to decrease lag potential if docked hull comes off), basically just cover up most of the sides of your ship with shield caps and recharge, then add ion effect. These plates should have between 1-5 mil capacity dependent on ship size, and comparatively little recharge. They are supposed to only take block-damage-focused missile fire, and as such should not be easily hit when someone is shooting you from the front so that they stay up long enough to do their job (this is my most recent addition, and as such I never got to fight with them). Next we go back to the main entity and add interior, scanner, ion and od, chaindrive and jump inhibitors, all the sub-systems we skipped earlier. Ok, back to docked hull, now I begin making the actual exterior, which takes a long ass time (up to this point I may have put in maybe 2-4 hours, this step is at least another 4-8). Exterior needs to be at least 20 blocks away from the current surface of the ship, so that missiles that hit it wont damage anything underneath, and so that it covers the missiles plates, so that they can be of use later on. Now we add ion effect to the docked hull, it has 50% of my shield cap for a reason, it allows me to increase the total amount of shield coverage that I have on my exterior, if all my shields had been on main entity, I'd get 75% of that to protect the docked hull, if i put 50% on my docked hull, and inhereit 75% of the other 50% i get more total shields on my exterior. This may contradict the reasoning many people have behind using docked hulls, but I use them more for mass and health offloading than anything else, plus maybe some other stuff I don't want to tell. At this point the ship should be stupidly durable, while still staying nearly exploit free (depends on how you feel about docked hulls). For safety, I go around and place girders over surfaces that have animated blocks, decreasing lag considerably. Now for weapons, they sit on floating turrets above my hull, not only for the ease of angle usage, but also to act as another bit of spaced armor, sometimes I even give them spaced armor floating above them. Usually I have BBI and Missiles, supported by some cc, cb and bc.If I've got the time, I'll add something dumb like an enemy detector wired to a display near my viewing camera.
Sorry, I got tired towards the end of this, so I probably missed something, as I normally do with my ships.
If I'm lucky, I end up with something like this:
Two hangers and a 31 room interior, 315k mass. Good tmr, powerful alpha. Pretty much exactly what I think Schema would be proud of, seeing how seriously we took this game and made complex designs that fill rp and pvp roles well. This is the kind of stuff all the meta builders were making, and tons of people were aspiring to make (could be a little prettier though).
New power:
Docked shields don't work, so I cant use complexity with that. Shield spheres are too big for me to do anything creative with them without getting a stupid shape. Designing my power system to be complex and durable also doesn't work, because my reactor has to be all in one group, and therefore cant be effectively hidden, dispersed, or placed somewhere not obvious. No power cap, so I'd use a low mass block instead to add space, except I can't, cause you made them all heavy. Can't even use turrets right, because they don't fire in the right direction part of the time, and even if they do, they shred a reactor to the point that they cant actually hit it enough to overheat it because its com or whatever its target is becomes unrepresentative of the reactor. The one place I do see creativity is with chambers, but its not something that you can do fast, plus I don't play space lego games to stare at a menu, they also restrict you because they have set rc consumption numbers rather than being a system where a player can very precisely choose how much of what they want. So basically the only thing thats keeping me around right now is the scale the game has. No other game that I know of allows me to build a full scale Valdore, yet.
Also, no apologies for the wall of text, if you can't be bothered to read it, you don't deserve to know.
