Buffing power tanks, and limited gens

[elijahpederson]

Currently, the way power tanks work, is that having more of them makes them extremely powerful. This means that in order to make use of power tanks, your ship has to have at least 5-4 hundred of them to take advantage of them. How about making power tanks decently good to start with? Here is what it could create.

Capacitor ships: Instead of generating the energy to power itself, this type of ship uses power tanks, this means it is really powerful, but it can only be in battle for a limited time as its supplys will eventually deplete.

This could be used for jamming and cloaking, allowing a ship to cloak and jam for a limited time instead of perminately.

Capacitor ships would probably not be the best in long term battle, but for hit and run attacks it could unleash A LOT of power in an extremely short time, maybe even allowing megacannons which have to charge inbetween firings

Normal ships:Have to generate the sheer amount of power so it can use all of its systems at one.

Capacitor ships:Can put out an almost infinate amount of power at one time, but has limited or slowly regenerating reserves.



Limited generators: It would be nice to have to fuel your generators, I don't like how ships generate an infinate amount of energy, there needs to be a limitation besides how many blocks you can buy, expecually since the economy is compleately gone cause of planetcracking (mainly on stations)

EDIT:Maybe instead make generators not generate as much power, as Gameguru said.



Cya now, this idea will now be awesome, or will be a humiliating failure i will regret for the rest of my life.

 

[Gameguru]

Thank god i am not the only one who noticed that Capital ships have the same amount of power (if not faster regen) then the first ship you star out with. I agree with you hole heartedly except for the normal ship part, i want ships that have SLOW regen rates of power but MASSIVE storage. For example, I would like the standard power tank to store 1000 power (and get rid of power genorators storing that much power to) and for generators generate 5 power every second. this would make it so you have to watch your power manage ment better. Right now, you need an insanly large amount of power tanks to get any decent power storage

 

[Steveo53]

Well right now power tanks benifit from being in big groups. so a 10x10x10 block will net you around 180,000 extra power to your pool.



I\'ve never even needed that much power even on big ships.. and thats a 10x10x10 area. thats so small when you look at the size of some of these ships.



And power regen on bigger ships is easily dealt with by just stacking long lines of power bricks. I like the mechanics how they are, but thats just my opinion.

 

[elijahpederson]

The normal ships were as an example of \"This is how ships are now\"





EDIT:I agree compleately

 

[elijahpederson]

I\'m complaining on the curve of how power tanks get better and better in groups, You have you have tons and tons of them before they do ANYTHING. Power tanks do NOTHING for a fighter, or a small frigate, or a cruiser, you have to have an already gigantic ship before you can fit in enough power tanks to actually make a difference.

 

[jzimmerman4]

That is true put you don\'t need a lot of power for small ships like a fighter, only large ones with massive weapon systems and turrets

 

[elijahpederson]

But power tanks are useless, Do you even use them at all? Of course not, a few power gens are at least 300 times as powerful. And as a user of ships which are small (cruisers, etc), I can tell you decent power tanks would be FANTASTIC.

 

[MrFURB]

On all my larger ships I tend to focus on massive capacitors rather than massive regen. When a ship comes at you with 20 billion power in storage and the guns to use them... Yeah, run. On my small ships that still get good bonuses from box dimensions I run full regen though.

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

power is not enough to get even a single shot off with a capital ships guns. Tanks are very much useful.

 

[elijahpederson]

I was saying does anyone ever use them on anything smaller than a capital ship? They are really good in gigantic numbers, but are useless in lower numbers. The curve gets really sharp with a lot of tanks, but one/a few tanks won\'t do jack shit.



EDIT: We both appear to have forgotten this, but i\'m talking about changing the generator and power tank mechanics, so power gens aren\'t as powerful, and making tanks and such better. See first reply to the post by GameGuru, he said it perfectly.

 

[elijahpederson]

Please tell me how that worked out in PVP, Have you got horribly murdered yet?



Actually, what your saying is a balance of capacitor and regen, which would actaully work quite good with the current game. I should try that.

 

[JaegerKor]

I agree that power tanks need a buff, really just at the lower numbers, it would make cloaking and rader jamming a bit more viable and it\'d be a lot more interesting to see limited time cloaks on ships than gaint cross permacloaks.

 

[Gameguru]

*swells with pride*

 

[Gameguru]

Possibly have tiers of power tanks. i.e. tier 1 is a buffed version of the ones we have now, tier 2 has larger storage capacity tier 3 ect ect...

 

[elijahpederson]

That may work, having some power tank types which are more expensive, but are better, But I say just tweak the math for how they work in groups.

 

[elijahpederson]

Thats what this topic was originally created about, but if you\'ve read the rest of the topic its evolved since.

 

[DracoNB]

Yeah there definately needs to be a change... right now its either you have enough power for everything and never run out, or you run out in a second or two (or have more tanks but takes forever to refill)

 

[War Dog]

Power tanks are very useful when making large ships where the soft-cap of 1,000,000-ish regen puts limits on what you can power.

But yeah the scaling at lower levels is ridiculous (ONE power for a single block and the core alone gives 20k).

 

[Stakhanov]

The current scaling doesn\'t make much sense. Power generation increases until it reaches 1m/s , then it becomes inefficient enough to warrant docking generator sub-ships and draining them. Power tanks rise in efficiency from waste of mass to vaguely adequate to neverending reserve.

The obvious result is that fighters never have to bother with energy management , and titans can field arbitrary huge weapon arrays still. The only merit is that titans cannot permacloak.

Both generators and tanks should feature diminishing returns (shipwide) with tanks starting much better , encouraging the use of mass-efficient fighters with low endurance. Energy costs need to be looked at , especially for cloaking - the mass penalty needs to come from extra cloaker blocks to specialize in that role , not lots of extra generators that can be used to rain death forever.

 

[elijahpederson]

if i could +1, i\'d +1