Balance ship power, give use to powersupply beam

[Agent Zirdik]

This is less an immediate suggestion, and more a quandary about the implications of making the power supply beam more useful.

First, I notice how easy it is to generate sufficient power for a ship (excluding cloaking ships, obviously). I used to spend a lot of time making sure that I had enough room to stuff in enough power blocks to power my ship, but since I learned how to use the three intersecting lines of power blocks to create an efficient generator, I've found that I often wind up with far more power than I need for my engines, weapons and shields.

So what if power blocks were rebalanced such that if you wanted to have a ship that never ran out of power, you'd have to be very careful about which systems you prioritize such that haveing great weapons, shields, and engines would mean a gradual drain on power, no matter the amount of energy blocks you have. In essence, I'm suggesting that power work more like fuel.

This would mean that if you had a well-optimized war ship, you would eventually have to return to a station or power-supply ship in order to "refuel". The power-supply ship, in turn, would have reduced weaponry, shields, or engines in order to maintain sustainable power.

Obviously this would mean that ships would occasionally run out of power, so I think that zero power would only make you fly slower, or reduce weapon and shield efficiency. Additionally, there would have to be some sort of AI friendly-fire option to create automated power-supply turrets.

What do you folks think?

 

[drs93]

I hate people who build ships with infinite power/shields/other stuff. It is so easy to build an op ship in this game, cause there is no need for an interior or something like that. You can just take your energieblocks and place them somewhere in the ship, make a big hull around and your done. Thats why I like roleplay-servers more than others.

 

[Agent Zirdik]

Glad to hear I\'m not the only one who wished there was a little more drama to the game. I feel too self-sufficient. It\'s understandable, if you play alone, to not want to rely on others, but yes, I think that the gameplay, such as slowly draining power, should create more tension. And where there is tension and a reliance on others, great roleplay will follow!

 

[Terramort]

Greatly nerfed power generation would be much appreciated. I don\'t think it should be 0 regeneration, just nerfed. I\'m also in favor of making it so any block that uses power, has to be connected to power via Power Tanks or Power Blocks, so you actually have to plan and build a proper large ship, not just stuff shield blocks in every crack and shove a big generator in the middle.

 

[Agent Zirdik]

That\'s a great suggestion! Perhaps adjacency might be a little difficult, but definitely some sort of proximity rule. This would also mean that destruction of a localized generator would damage the efficiency of whatever subsystem it was built for!

 

[Terramort]

Aye. I\'m also all for making Power Tanks and Power Blocks explosive, so critical shots become devesatating if you don\'t build your ship right, or just solely focus on \"maximum yeild\" builds with no regard to anything but googeling metagamed ships.

 

[Morhe]

One thing I feel I need to point out, though, is that this would create problems for the current cloaking/jamming system.

If you nerf power regen down to around 20% of current and then drastically increase power storage to a rate where despite the regen nerf, ships can still last through a full 5-15 minute fight, you end up with an enormous power reserve that could be use to cloak/jam any size of ship for a good two or three minutes, while simultaneously making it impossible to make a true perma-cloak ship.

 

[Agent Zirdik]

@Morhe, you\'re right that the current suggestion would make cloaking into something that is temporary. But seeing as cloaking is broken to the point that you must choose between a ship that can\'t cloak for longer than a second and a ship that looks like a tangle of clothes hangers but can cloak permanently, I don\'t see why making cloaking something that is viable for a greater variety of but never a god-mode is a bad thing. In fact, I think that this concept your bring up of cloaking being a temporarary system adds a lot more value to the system itself. It means that pilots use cloak as a tactic to be employed strategically. It also means that people who are being harassed by a cloaked ship know that eventually the opposing ship will have to decloak in order to recharge.

Thank you for bringing up cloaking because the issue of power and cloaking/jamming are pretty intwined until we see what the devs have planned for tweaks to these areas.