Punish power failure with a debuff!

[wizardoftrash]

When a ship's power drops to 0, they ought to suffer some sort of penalty. This would take power generation beyond a matter of managing cool-downs for weapons, or beyond a re-gen value that needs to be X high to sustain systems.

When your ship drops to 0 power and attempts to continue to draw beyond your re-gen rate, you should be slapped with either a nasty power re-gen penalty, or a brief "complete power failure" where you get 0 power output for a brief period of time - The bigger the reactor/#of power blocks the worse the penalty.

This would provide an additional incentive to run a higher ratio of power capacity, but would also be the re-birth of the EMP effect module as a useful pvp tool. A ship specked in EMP would be able to disable an inefficient ship without destroying it by using EMP to trigger the Power Failure Debuff (PFD) in conjunction with a Stop effect module weapon.

This should pave the way to several new classes of ships. Up until this point the only thing you could do with an enemy is destroy, but being able to disable a ship in this way would create new role-play possibilities for law enforcement or even for traps! A big enough station could have an array of EMP/Stop weapons to hold invaders or snag freighters. Depending on how punishing the debuff is, it could add more diversity to the competitive pvp meta, and allow Energy Tanking to be a thing.

Depending on what the next power overhaul proposal looks like, a debuff like this could be adapted to suit the new heat system, and would open the doors to modules to counter its effects. Perhaps having a backup reactor would be a countermeasure against PFD, or a specific add-on for a reactor that acts like a capacitor and can be turned-on to end a PFD (but takes time to re-charge).

 

[Crashmaster]

When your ship drops to 0 power and attempts to continue to draw beyond your re-gen rate, you should be slapped with either a nasty power re-gen penalty, or a brief "complete power failure" where you get 0 power output for a brief period of time

This already happens in-game, though only for one second and there's no relation to the reactor size.

 

[wizardoftrash]

This already happens in-game, though only for one second and there's no relation to the reactor size.

What I mean by "brief complete power failure" here is that the ship would not generate any power for a few seconds (as an extra penalty).

 

[Crashmaster]

What I mean by "brief complete power failure" here is that the ship would not generate any power for a few seconds

This already happens in-game, though only for one second

 

[Nickizzy]

re-birth of the EMP effect module as a useful pvp tool.

I've heard of disasterous stories of ships that have just enough regen/cap for min passive and weaponfire, that get blown away by EMP folks that mess up their min-maxer. It works already. This would make it more effective.

 

[Calhoun]

I've heard of disasterous stories of ships that have just enough regen/cap for min passive and weaponfire, that get blown away by EMP folks that mess up their min-maxer. It works already. This would make it more effective.

EMP is exceptionally finicky. It's so niche there's barely even a point to it existing.

 

[Nickizzy]

EMP is exceptionally finicky. It's so niche there's barely even a point to it existing.

It's great as a partial effect to mess with min-maxers

 

[EricBlank]

Still very difficult to get an effective emp system against a ship of similar to your own mass. Usually need to outmass a tagret heavily to get an advantage from using emp or push/pull/stop effects. And at that point its usually just as good to simply bring more missiles, youre bigger than them and it still contributes to a fight where your opponent could have outmatched your emp drain.

A debuff on capacitor draining is certainly one idea, as is increasing the effectiveness of emp & company. Its difficult to think up a solution that can actually work without changing the meta such that its just a situation players immediately avoid. Making sure a ship has stable power generation for its usage is one of the most important things i test as-is

Larger ships needing more time to restart reactors after an outage does seem like it would encourage emp warfare on ships you wouldnt be able bring down if their shield rechargers had power, but again players might just build expecting to waste that extra power, and as it is to pack a sufficient emp payload to bring down a larger ships capacitor you yourself have to be large enough to threaten them with brute force, which kinda defeats the purpose.

 

[Lecic]

EMP is already extremely effective. I've built vessels that use it extremely well. Whenever someone complains about EMP being underpowered, I can immediately tell they've either never even tried it or are wholly incompetent systems designers.

Also, accidentally draining your power to zero happens constantly if there is server lag during a fight. Punishing players for that is a terrible idea.

Still very difficult to get an effective emp system against a ship of similar to your own mass.

Nope. False. Just flat out wrong. Sorry. A ship of average composition should be able to EMP another ship of average composition at least twice its mass, and it can make things very difficult for things larger than that for a while. If you make some defensive sacrifices and go full glass cannon, you can pin down something at least 5x your size. Just ask Matt_Bradock about his experiences fighting my little 6k mass EMP boat with much larger craft.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

If you make some defensive sacrifices and go full glass cannon, you can pin down something at least 5x your size. Just ask Matt_Bradock about his experiences fighting my little 6k mass EMP boat with much larger craft.

Damn right. Lecic is speaking from experience, his Deimos was about half my Archer's size and I was powergen capped when our ships clashed in an Ares Mod match. And I got pwned by that EMP gun that wasn't even 100% effect, so hard that I could literally do nothing other than watching my ship getting torn to shreds and cussing.

It still haunts me to this day.

 

[kulbolen]

Still very difficult to get an effective emp system against a ship of similar to your own mass. Usually need to outmass a tagret heavily to get an advantage from using emp or push/pull/stop effects. And at that point its usually just as good to simply bring more missiles, youre bigger than them and it still contributes to a fight where your opponent could have outmatched your emp drain.

wrong

 

[MrFURB]

I agree with the above points; EMP can be a very useful disabling tool.

EMP at full effect deals twice as much energy damage as it costs to fire, not counting the increased energy cost of having multiple outputs.
Utilizing a 50% EMP weapon is a good option to mess with the enemy's power layout while still having enough damage to outdo their shield regen. Not only are you still dealing 50% of your normal damage for that weapon, the enemy is losing 100% of that damage's worth of energy as well. Better than just straight damage and potentially better than damage+effect as well.