To put things in perspective. Old power had passives, jammers, inhibitors, etc. that you could just turn on and off at will in battle, but you never ran them all at once. Each of these systems had drawbacks to leaving active that gave lot of reasons to toggle them as a battle ebbed and flowed. This encouraged advanced battle tactics and made a person's piloting skills just as important as the tech they were flying. Jammers draw a lot of power which limited your firepower. Inhibitors locked down your own jump drives as well as the enemy. Shield/armor passives had to be toggled at just the right times to prevent them from working against you as shields broke or came back online. Scanners, had to be synchronized with your alpha strike to optimise damage with accuracy.
Now you go in with what you have on and that is it because swapping reactors is suicide. This eliminates a lot of the tactical elements of combat.
I think a better idea would be to be able to have 3 states on chambers instead of two. (Active, Ready, and Offline). Active and Offline could work just like current chambers, but Ready would disable a chamber's effect and remove it's cost from your Reactor Points, but still hold a charge and cost power upkeep. Then you allow the player bind chambers to their hotbar; so, they can left click to toggle the Ready state or right click to toggle the Offline state.
This way, you can set a ship up with a more diverse selection of chambers, but it would cost extra upkeep to have everything at the ready. Instead of shutting down tactical options, this would open new ones up like choosing between setting jump chambers to ready or offline when going into battle based on whether you want to free up more power, or keep them warmed up for if you need them.
I'm not sure that systems 2.0 doesn't have new strategies, but it definitely requires some balancing. On a systems 1.0 ship, you could build all available computer systems into a ship and then CHOOSE when you used them during combat. Now you have to choose ahead of time what abilities you want, and then you are limited to those abilities during combat. You cannot have it all. So now a ship might be able to radarjam, but it can't scan well. A ship might have great defense, but it can't scan jammed ships, jam itself, NOR does it have buffs to shields. I think the biggest problem is that it's too restrictive right now, so players are not happy about the imposed simplicity.
But the great worth of systems 2.0 hasn't even begun to be realized yet, because it isn't usable in it's current state. For example, what if for systems 2.0, a server admin created custom chamber blocks for every effect, set different material costs to each, and then made them all cost 0 tech points? The end effect here would be to have a pretty similar system to systems 1.0 computers, in terms of ship building, To really replicate the experience, the game needs the ability to easily turn chambers on and off via the hotbar. But if done, then we'd essentially have extremely customizable effects. For example, "ion effect" might be recreated with a chamber, making your shields take less damage but your blocks take more while it was turned on. It wouldn't be that big of a stretch for the devs to implement this.
Here's another example of how things might be customized on a different server. Players spawn in with a ship which has 1 chamber on it. This chamber can be used to increase the power output by 50% of the reactor and add different pros and cons, taking up 100% of the tech points. This is a simpler server, so maybe we have "Explorer Class" and "Fighter Class" and "Defense Class" that the person can specialize the chamber to. Each one of these options gives different pros, cons, and abilities. This server might additionally be running a wrapper where mini-games are running all of the time. So a player gets a ship, they specify the chamber on their ship to be of a certain type, and then they go battle it out, or play capture the flag, or whatever. Maybe in one game mode a "fighter" ship has certain mobility benefits and does extra damage. A defensive ship might have better jump capabilities, shield and armor reinforcements, and a power boost. Then you have a "Scout" ship which has great speed, fast jump drive, great scanner, but has debuffs on armor and weapons. All of these ships would contain the exact same base blocks, but behave much differently depending on how their chamber is set.
So really the depth of systems 2.0 simply cannot be seen yet, because it will come in the form of customization across servers. On LvD I plan on having a lot of different upgrade paths people can take. I want to increase the various abilities players can have on their ships that they take into combat, and since we're a PvP server, I want to make it easier for people to reach each other in a timely manner to fight. So our server will be customized toward the best PvP experience we can provide. What I'm really hoping for down the line is the ability to add effects that chambers themselves then use as well, to really add depth to a person's chamber tree. And not only that, but I want to create custom chambers that cannot be crafted, but must instead be won through competitions, quests, and events that happen throughout the universe spontaneously or happen at regular intervals so people can plan for them. So to really build the unique ships, a player will need to be engaging in activities besides the hum drum of mining.
