Well, after reading the complete proposal I can say this sounds like a very well thought out setup. I like it.
The idea of specialization for passive ship systems is the real key here in my opinion, this will really deepen the game play and will force players to choose where and what their priorities are, or should be.
Adding the option that systems drawing from the power pool can have their priority set by the player, so core systems will have a smaller chance of failing in case of trouble, is a very refined and immersive aspect of the new setup as well. In a way this will place you at the helm of your vessel for sure.
I feel the next step should be to introduce some numbers to the whole concept so relationships get a bit less abstract and players get the opportunity to build some mock-ups using these numbers / sizes to see how this all fits in their favorite ship hulls.
All in all I'd say, full thrusters ahead and make it so guys.
Seriously though, find a better name for tech points. There are a lot more things you can call those that actually sound like something that'd come out of a reactor.
Without straining my brain:
- Transient Particles (TP, there you go, even the same abbreviation)
- Energized Particles (EP)
- Exotic Particles (XP - lol, since you mentioned tech trees)
- Cubatomic Particles (CP - a blast from the past, anyone?)
- Plasma
- Electromagnetic Flux (EF)
- Dark Matter (DM)
- Antimatter (AM)
What's good :
1) The chamber system may be used to add a great variety of neat kisscool effects. Variety is great.
2) You thought about switching reactors (therefore chambers), more dynamism is good. I'm bored of the usual routine of "jump into core, enable all passive effects, move and left click at eventual enemies"
3) The priority queue adds a form of power management to the game. I think we need this. (I don't really like that the system requires a new UI and doesn't seem to integrate well with logic though)
4) The built-in basic jump drive, I kinda agree with you on this.
5) You haven't talked about the old power capacity (or I've missed it), I assume it has been removed and replaced by each system "internal capacity"? Since it's unused, it's nice to remove it.
What's bad :
1) I don't really like how stabilizers and reactors are two different blocks that have to be placed far from each other. Why two kinds of blocks? Why this relation? Actually, I'm not even sure I understand the purpose of the current mechanics, I somewhat understood you want to limit the reactor size of a ship, but why would you want to do that? You told something about small reactors making it more manageable for you to change things later. To be honest, it sounds a bit like you're saying "we aren't sure what to do with them, so we'll have you build them smaller so we can change them again later with fewer problems" (not only is this discutable, but even if it's true there are more straightforward ways to do so)
2) Tech points? Why is there a need to introduce a new "resource"? Can't we just use power for chambers? We already have shield points, structure(/reactor) health points, armor health points, power… honestly I think there's enough values already. Besides power fit the bill. (some people have suggested this already, I agree with them)
3) I don't like the proliferation of menus (something addressed in a recent topic btw), and you've mentioned a couple new menus (power priority queue, chamber node type selection). There are at least two problems with an accumulation of menus:
- They clutter the UI, make it more complex and opaque
- They fail to hide unused (therefore useless) elements to the new player (I mean, new players probably don't care a lot about power management at first)
Personally, I'd also want to make decisions by placing blocks, not by pressing buttons, checking boxes and moving sliders once I've built my ship.
4) I still think this could have allowed for more dynamism. We need more things to make combat intrisically interesting, things that'll require a pilot's choice on the fly. Reactor switching could help with that but it sounds like something you want to prevent players from doing too often, changing the order of the priority queue could help, but it doesn't feel like something handy to change on the fly either (maybe because you didn't plan it to be). I'm mostly mentioning that because the old capacity seems to be gone and it could have been a very handy tool to balance temporary buffs or limited "overpowered" shots (which in turn are things making fights more engaging)
5) I feel like the reactors serve too many purposes, generating power (ie determining how many systems you can afford to use at once), deciding which skill tree you're using (ie determining which systems you are using), acting as the "core" of your ship (not very clear, but I understood you wanted RHP to replace SHP), setting the standard for other systems in the ship (chambers must be at least as big as your reactor). This doesn't sit very well with me.
6) Sometimes you link blocks with C+V, sometimes you have to physically build links (conduits), sometimes you don't link or physically link but blocks still interact (stabilizers/reactors), sometimes you need a menu to customize systems… this lacks consistency. Actually, I think the chamber system and weapon slaving system are two kinda similar systems which might be replaced by a single more general one.
7) Why making chambers explosive? I'm not really convinced by your justification (offering the choice to make them bigger to spread-out the explosion damage).
8) Why would conduits require power to function? Set aside from a roleplay perspective, what does it bring to the game?
9) While I agree that the current power systems has big flaws (namely, not intuitive enough, use weirdly complicated formulas, there's too big of a power gap between efficient designs and what a new player would do, it imposes too many restrictions on the ship shape) and has to change, I liked how "micro block placement" could influence it. Designing good reactors and shaping them in an interesting way nearly was a game in itself. I'm a bit saddened that we don't have anything similar in that system.
Seriously though, find a better name for tech points. There are a lot more things you can call those that actually sound like something that'd come out of a reactor.
Without straining my brain:
- Transient Particles (TP, there you go, even the same abbreviation)
- Energized Particles (EP)
- Exotic Particles (XP - lol, since you mentioned tech trees)
- Cubatomic Particles (CP - a blast from the past, anyone?)
- Plasma
- Electromagnetic Flux (EF)
- Dark Matter (DM)
- Antimatter (AM)
My headcannon now includes the idea that the Starmade universe is one in which the old atomic particle theory in which atoms were considered cubes that could bond at the corners of the cube is actually true.
Anyways, I think Cubatomic Flux would be a good name, to remix your idea a bit. Then, we could have a block to improve the spool-up time or something, and call that block Flux Capacitor!
Throughout this entire Devblog i have not noticed anyone mentioning the one main issue that would plague any power or systems update the most.
Adaptability of the blueprint system to make sure that any changes to the mechanics of the game would be seamlessly integrated into the Blueprints so they are not broken and we don't have to change and good portion of the ships that we have already designed.
Meaning that if you have a Blueprint for a ship that you have Designed before the power update and it gets migrated to the new power update version then the current power system is replaced with the newer power system and possibly give the player a mockup blueprint of their ship and allow them to place the reactors and other power related systems at the time they are being migrated so that ALL THE WORK BOTH THE DEVS AND THE PLAYERS HAS DONE SINCE THE FIRST RELEASE OF STARMADE IS NOT A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF TIME!!!!!
Throughout this entire Devblog i have not noticed anyone mentioning the one main issue that would plague any power or systems update the most.
Adaptability of the blueprint system to make sure that any changes to the mechanics of the game would be seamlessly integrated into the Blueprints so they are not broken and we don't have to change and good portion of the ships that we have already designed.
Meaning that if you have a Blueprint for a ship that you have Designed before the power update and it gets migrated to the new power update version then the current power system is replaced with the newer power system and possibly give the player a mockup blueprint of their ship and allow them to place the reactors and other power related systems at the time they are being migrated so that ALL THE WORK BOTH THE DEVS AND THE PLAYERS HAS DONE SINCE THE FIRST RELEASE OF STARMADE IS NOT A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF TIME!!!!!
How did schine manage to make this proposal even worse than the first one. You are making pointless simplifications that remove the challange for players. The only reason there is a playerbase is because the game is complicated enough for people to spend years innovating and still not reach perfection. You are removing many players point to playing this game all in the name of "intuitive simplifaction". And what the fuck is this tech points thing. Ok the reactor design is shit, but might be the only way to move forward. But this techpoints thing, what the fuck is even the point, you are removing complicated and calculated decisions in the ships manufacture, such as what effects to use and how much and how big your jumpdrive is and what size scanner and inhibitor and replacing is with a completly made up out of your arse system all in the name of simplification. If you want a simple game, go and play minecraft
StarMade is not 'Released'. It is in alpha.
In such a time, the community should expect drastic, game breaking changes.
[doublepost=1495025455,1495025351][/doublepost]
Ahem, kindly re-read/re-watch the video. You still get your system complexity. This system can provide buffs to your systems, not outright replace them.
Please stop. Docked power cells are just straw mens that we agitate to scare people. Docked power cells are not efficient, and reliable. Except with clipping but hey, that's something else.
Yeah, that's (part of) what I was talking about. Clipping isn't an easy thing to patch out of the game, so I'd rather just preclude the intial possibility.
Yeah, that's (part of) what I was talking about. Clipping isn't an easy thing to patch out of the game, so I'd rather just preclude the intial possibility.
Several months ago, we shared our concerns about the current power system with you, and at the same time, present a power system proposal that would tackle some if not most of the mentioned problems.
We’ve received a large amount of constructive feedback since then through posts and other power ideas you came up with. We greatly appreciate that, it gave us a lot more insight to further refine our own ideas.
At first, we tried to salvage the original proposal as much as we could but in the end, too much was adjusted and there was little cohesion left between our core mechanics. We reached a point where we just wanted to start from scratch again, keeping our vision and your feedback in mind.
This also explains why it took us this long to get another proposal ready for public.
Goals/Rules
First thing we did, was figuring out which criteria our new system should fulfill.
These are the ones we used for power and anything tied to power consumption:
Predictability: Placing a block leads to predictable outcomes
Simplicity: The game should only describe the rules to the player, not telling the player exactly what to do
Make every block matterwithout losing its importance with different ship sizes
Depth: The system needs to have equally viable choices within each possible situation, creating additional gameplay possibilities where possible, keeping complexity unchanged.
Performance: Game limits must not be avoidable, using the least amount of these limits is better to minimize any potential exploits
Performant: Must perform well from a game engine perspective
Creativity: Allow as much creativity as possible
Logical: Needs to make sense to the player
Solution focused: Must solve any current game issues with that particular system
With these goals/rules, we went over the current power system and any of our new ideas including the heatbox mechanic we shared before. We combined the things we liked into a new system that is explained below.
Power System Proposal 2.0
We came up with a system that is thought out quite well. Along the way, it has changed several times and there’s no doubt we’ll have to change it even more. Additional preliminary play-testing will help us nail down those specific mechanics if we’re planning to go ahead with this new system. This new system would also coexist with the current power system but hidden away through a config option.
When building this system from the ground up, we incorporated other aspects into it to address several flaws in systems such as weapons, jump drives, warp gates, cloakers and radar jammers. Those systems require more work but adding the possibility for reactors to influence them gives us a lot more flexibility to adjust it even more if needed.
The power system consists of 3 major components:
Reactor <-> Stabilizer relation
Power Usage/Consumption model
Chamber Tree
At the end of this Power System Proposal, there are a few info-graphics to help visualize the system a bit better. Make sure to read through this proposal first or you’ll be lacking context to interpret those infographics correctly.
Reactor <-> Stabilizer
Purpose: to not restrict player creativity, while still being manageable on all scales.
This defines how big your reactors can be without allowing you to fill the available space entirely and still have it function properly. That way, any ship size should be easy enough to manage when it comes to power and all of the blocks that depend on it. We can easily add more depth to the power system itself if we don’t have to worry that it will contain too many blocks at a certain ship size.
Our original heat box and power pylon ideas showed us that trying to accomplish this can lead to a series of restrictive rules of what you can do. Making the entire system harder to comprehend and decreasing the amount of freedom the player has.
The bidirectional relations between so many systems made most ideas invalid from the start, requiring you to constantly update any other part of your ship when adding or removing something else.
We decided to go for a 2-way relation between 2 specific power blocks, nothing else would affect them:
Reactor blocks, they give you power
Stabilizer blocks, these are needed to get 100% efficiency on the Reactor blocks.
To prevent a player from filling his structure with as many Reactor and Stabilizer blocks as possible, we add a single rule:
The stabilizer groups need to be a minimum amount of distance away from any reactor group. The distance needed between the Reactor and Stabilizer groups all depend on the reactor sizes of that entity.
We use the total Reactor block count to determine the optimal distance between every Reactor and Stabilizer group. Doesn’t matter how big or small each group is, the minimum amount of distance you need to reach 100% efficiency will be the same for each.
The reactor’s power output depends on the stabilizers, and the amount of stabilizers needed depends on the reactor block count. This simple relation is unaffected by any of your other ship systems such as thrusters, shields and weapons.
Both block types are equally important and require protection + decent placement to make sure you keep the power flowing after sustaining damage.
Power consumption model
Purpose: to create a system so that all reloadable systems are more comparable to systems that have a constant power consumption, essentially leveling the playing field.
Internal capacity
Weapons, tools and some other systems now have their own internal power capacity, enough to fire themselves once. This power capacity would slowly discharge over time so you need to have some power recharge to keep it topped off.
After firing it, the internal capacity would recharge using the available recharge rate. The maximum amount of power recharged for that system would be limited by its reload speed.
Priority queue
A system to prioritize power consumption in case you don’t have enough to run the entire ship. There would be different groups such as weapons, shields, thrusters, … with most likely sub-groups. We would have a fixed number of priorities you can use, and all systems with the same priority number would share power equally.
For docked entities, they just walk down towards the main ship till they find an entity with a powered (active) reactor. They would use the priority queue and power recharge of that entity only.
Chamber Tree
Purpose: adding a large amount of customization and depth, creating a whole new layer of gameplay.
It allows us to move several ship systems into one cohesive design.
This system can be compared to skill trees used in other games. The difference here is that you’re physically designing and building the skill tree, which consists of building chambers and connections in order to progress down a pre-made tree.
Reactor Chambers: tree nodes
Reactor Conduits: tree branches
Main Reactor
The main reactor group consists of a single block type that touch each other. Power will scale linear which means only the block count will affect its statistics so it’s easy to build them. The shape and reactor placement matters way more than it did before if you also have to build it in tandem with the stabilizers and make sure they’re well protected from weapon damage.
Each entity gets the same limited amount of ‘Tech Points (TP)’ to spend and only 1 active reactor group per entity is allowed at any given time. You do have the ability to put other inactive reactor groups down that you can switch to later for robustness and versatility. You spend these Tech Points for each Chamber that is connected to the current active reactor group.
Chambers
Each main Chamber Tree grouping has a corresponding Chamber Block you can place.
Using the above example, these would be:
Shield chamber
Mobility chamber
Jump Drive chamber
Electronic Warfare chamber (Cloaking/Scanning)
Chambers are built by placing a touching group of touching Chamber Blocks.
Each chamber you build represents a node in the chamber tree, The shape of each chamber doesn’t matter, only the block count does. It needs to reach a certain size compared to the biggest reactor group on the entity in order to function. It does not matter if the biggest reactor group is inactive or active. This is to avoid exploits of building small reactors with low chamber requirements on huge ships and then switching the active reactors when needed.
In order for a chamber to be activated, TP’s (Tech points) have to flow into it. This happens at a fixed pace such as 1 TP/ 1 sec per chamber and only when it is fully filled does it activate before it moves on to any of the other connected chambers.
Disconnecting chambers manually will immediately make those chambers non functional and the spent SP’s get added to your pool again.
This means that while players can design ships with multiple configurations and switch between them, it will not be as viable to do so in battle, as the configuration has a ‘boot up time’.
Conduits
These are lines of blocks that physically connect chambers with each other. On top of that tree is always the main reactor. However, a chamber can also be linked to other (inactive) reactor groups.
The conduits will require power per block to function although this is only a concern if you spread out the chambers as far as possible.
Reactor HP
Right now, we’re leaning towards removing SHP and its penalties. Instead, we’ll use Reactor HP instead. The existing system balance would need to be altered to counter the removal of the SHP penalties although not by much. The idea is that if someone targets a specific sub system such as thrusters (and they have the ability to roughly find them), they would be able to kill enough blocks to effectively disable it without relying on SHP penalties to do it for them. Overheating/loss of control would then be tied to Reactor HP and/or to a future mechanic such as hacking.
Reactor HP would be the same as Structure HP, but only the active reactor and its linked chambers affect it:
Reactor: 100 RHP
Conduit: 25 RHP
Chamber: 50 RHP
Each chamber is classified in 1 of 3 stages. As soon as the RHP% reaches one of the stage thresholds, all the chambers of that stage would have their effects disable.
Chambers would also be seen as unstable, meaning that they would do additional explosion damage if destroyed. It would scale in such a way that going above the minimum block count would be a viable option to spread out its explosion damage. Your ‘oversized’ chamber would still lose a similar amount of blocks, but because you have more RHP in the pool, it would not affect you as much as if a minimum sized one was used.
Reactor Switching
With only 1 active reactor on an entity, switching to other previously inactive reactor groups will give you a lot more options when it comes to versatility and redundancy. Activating/deactivating reactors can be done through logic (with sensor support) or through hotbar slots.
The current and maximum amount of RHP you get of course will change if you switch to another reactor. Each reactor group that was damaged when it was active, will remember their current and maximum RHP. If you ever switch back to that reactor group, it will use those values again unless you did a global reboot.
The linked chambers for each reactor don’t care if they were ever damaged, the max and current HP will always be reset for them if they become a part of an active reactor group. However, their size still needs to reach the minimum size requirement (determined by the biggest reactor group on the ship) in order to get their effect.
Building/Crafting
There would be some GUI based information such as the ability to see the entire tree without having to build something first.
The chambers themselves are built with the specific major branch block placeholders that you need to craft. By going up to these groups and pressing a key, you’ll be able to select which node you specifically want.
Chamber Tree Example
Extra
For this reactor system to work properly with existing mechanics, we had to include some extra rules and special cases:
Logic interaction
Ability to turn reactors on or off. Toggling between states will have some form of penalty/spooling up time tied to it.
Sensor blocks would work with reactor size, combined with the ability to turn them on or off you could disable turret based reactors if not providing power, allowing the turret to inherit from a bigger reactor in another chain or to automatically switch over to other backup reactors.
Docked entities
All effects you get from the chamber tree nodes are only inherited from the 1st encountered entity with an active reactor. If the active reactor is already on the entity itself, there’s no inheriting. The same applies for inheriting power regeneration and the power priority queue.
An active reactor and its stabilizers form a bounding box which is only used to check between docked entities. If either bounding box overlaps, the lowest child entity will disable the reactor and this keeps happening going down the chain till there is no overlapping.
Information warfare
Knowing where the reactors are of your opponent’s ship is quite important now and we don’t want people to just randomly shoot ships either. Going back to the old core drilling where you always knew where to shoot is not an option either. The ability to find reactor related blocks is something that will be tied to the scanner blocks and also the Scanner + ECM tree with the reactors.
In best case scenario, you can see exactly where they are, lighting up green through the hull’s ship. This would of course scale properly with transparency and intensity so that the most important reactors are easily seen
In worst case scenario, those reactor groups would not show up or appear bigger than they are and they may even move around randomly (scrambled).
In which scenario you end up depends on how strong and upgraded your scanners are, and how many points the enemy invested into countering it.
Other Systems
Thanks to the new system, there are a lot of great new gameplay elements we can add, as well as improve on old ones.
Weapons
Passive effects were always a bit troublesome. They require ratios to mass, which creates a dynamic that leads to a lot of blocks. Solving the effects via the chamber not only give the effects a lot more purpose, it also makes the whole thing a lot more consistent and logical.
Jump Drives/Jump Inhibitors
Jump drives as well as inhibitors would be changed in the new system to be more fitting for the needs of the players without resorting to chain jump drives.
Since it is clear to us that every ship is eventually fitted with a jump drive, we would just give every ship a very basic one from the get go. The chamber tree then could be used to specialize ships for jumping, increasing jump distance, reducing recharge speed or other buffs like usability in combat.
Cloakers/Radar Jammers
The new system also allows us to finally implement information warfare in a consistent and logical manner. Ships can be specialized for hiding information or for finding information. Ship cloaking and radar jammer as well as countermeasures can be moved to the chamber tree, as well as mechanics to determine the actual outcome of information warfare.
FEEDBACK:
I think this is a great update that will make the game much more fun, and pleas get rid of the HP systems. They make battles take ages, once a friend and I had a 1K block ship battle (very tiny) and it took an hour for me to loose, honestly a fight between 2 equal fighters should take maximum 2 minutes.
Also pleas add a feature where I can switch to the core-structure I am looking at when pressing SPACE in bildmode, editing docked entities is just pain right now, and I never build in the game without admin mode and quick core jumping for that reason.
Pleas make sure to make weapons more customizable, right now there are only 3 weapon combinations that are the best and used by most experienced builders.
Regards /Gmodism
(Imho, in no specific order)
2) Tech points? Why is there a need to introduce a new "resource"? Can't we just use power for chambers? We already have shield points, structure(/reactor) health points, armor health points, power… honestly I think there's enough values already. Besides power fit the bill. (some people have suggested this already, I agree with them)
Without tech points, bigger is better. Larger ships could fit more chambers and do more things easily.
3) I don't like the proliferation of menus (something addressed in a recent topic btw), and you've mentioned a couple new menus (power priority queue, chamber node type selection). There are at least two problems with an accumulation of menus:
- They clutter the UI, make it more complex and opaque
- They fail to hide unused (therefore useless) elements to the new player (I mean, new players probably don't care a lot about power management at first)
Personally, I'd also want to make decisions by placing blocks, not by pressing buttons, checking boxes and moving sliders once I've built my ship.
Pretty sure the only new menu will be the power queue and maybe a revamp of the structure menu.
4) I still think this could have allowed for more dynamism. We need more things to make combat intrisically interesting, things that'll require a pilot's choice on the fly. Reactor switching could help with that but it sounds like something you want to prevent players from doing too often, changing the order of the priority queue could help, but it doesn't feel like something handy to change on the fly either (maybe because you didn't plan it to be). I'm mostly mentioning that because the old capacity seems to be gone and it could have been a very handy tool to balance temporary buffs or limited "overpowered" shots (which in turn are things making fights more engaging)
Switching chambers is a thing. It doesn't happen instantly, unlike current passives, but this is a good thing - you need to actually use your chambers strategically rather than just flipping them on and off willy-nilly.
5) I feel like the reactors serve too many purposes, generating power (ie determining how many systems you can afford to use at once), deciding which skill tree you're using (ie determining which systems you are using), acting as the "core" of your ship (not very clear, but I understood you wanted RHP to replace SHP), setting the standard for other systems in the ship (chambers must be at least as big as your reactor). This doesn't sit very well with me.
Wait, chambers must be at least as big as your reactor? Apparently I missed that :\
6) Sometimes you link blocks with C+V, sometimes you have to physically build links (conduits), sometimes you don't link or physically link but blocks still interact (stabilizers/reactors), sometimes you need a menu to customize systems… this lacks consistency. Actually, I think the chamber system and weapon slaving system are two kinda similar systems which might be replaced by a single more general one.
Agreed... Kinda. I'll have to get my hands on the system itself before I can decide whether or not it really is too many different mechanics to accomplish the same goal, but I was thinking about this.
7) Why making chambers explosive? I'm not really convinced by your justification (offering the choice to make them bigger to spread-out the explosion damage).
I see it as a way to end the current, rather boring process of just shooting out blocks for minutes on end and watching an SHP bar go down. In Sci-Fi, reactors and other hardware tend to explode dramatically in combat. Once this system's in, we just need particle effects and then that will be adequately reflected... yay!
8) Why would conduits require power to function? Set aside from a roleplay perspective, what does it bring to the game?
It's possible to have multiple conduits, and so this was added to counterbalance the potential for people to create huge conduit spam and make their systems impossible to disconnect.
9) While I agree that the current power systems has big flaws (namely, not intuitive enough, use weirdly complicated formulas, there's too big of a power gap between efficient designs and what a new player would do, it imposes too many restrictions on the ship shape) and has to change, I liked how "micro block placement" could influence it. Designing good reactors and shaping them in an interesting way nearly was a game in itself. I'm a bit saddened that we don't have anything similar in that system.
I won't miss it, personally. It took strategy, sure, but for me it was more annoying than fun. I find the strategic building elements of the new system to be far more interesting and enjoyable than trying to separate lines of power spaghetti and force them into the maximum possible dimensions.
Sry, I could not bring my self to read through seven pages afterall. Therefore I just leave my thoughts on this here without connection to whatever is currently the topic.
First: On a whole the proposal sounds interesting and worth a shot.
Second: Those stabilizers (like mentioned somewhere before) do indeed sound very similar to heat sinks.
So how about naming them something like that and have them interact with with stars.
From a ceratin distance to the star the reactor start loosing regeneration and you need more stabilizers over the minimum to counter this effect.
The star's effect get's stronger the closer you get and at some point the sun damage kicks in.
This damage can be turned into a power regeneration penalty with enough stabilizers and doesn't affect the ship at all with even more stabilizers.
This would add another layer of specialised ship's that are supposed to operate closer to star's.
And while we are at it, we might as well add a heat effect modul for weapons.
So, since all weapons will have inner power storage enough to fire it once, what will prevent players from building One-Strike Ships - ships with huge alpha strike weapons that uses that inner charge to fire them once and easily annihilate any ship of your size or even bigger.
Especially since you only need to destroy the reactor of your enemy.
Read it all & love it all! - I can't wait to try out building with the need of actually connecting things physically, designing nice specialised systems rooms that are roleplayish yet functional, armor-covering conduits and systems room walls, etc. Oh, the enjoyable complexity this update will bring! So excited about all this!
Congrats guys for planning out all of this, and wish you fun and success with the implementation!
A lot of people seam to be complaining about not being able to have multiple reactors on at once. However I think this would actually be a great addition because it creates a meaningful choice dichotomy of switching reactors to enter a new configuration/as a backup against the consequence of needing to "reboot" your ship. Also it creates a meaningful buff to emp's as ships hit with them would be weaker long enough to take advantage of the emp (as apposed to how it currently is where everything recharges quickly) as well as creating more tension in fights in general.
Oh dear the firestorm over the idea of tech points. O_O
That said CPU Cores or Reactor Cores sounds a whole lot better. Making it so you could break a main reactor down internally into smaller sub reactors would likely go over better for enhancing systems and weapons. Also you could add a computer system of some kind that'd allow this kind of modding to the ship/station systems and weapons while the power system could do the power allocation you've got up already.
Also you could use the power allocation system to do the enhancements in place of tech points. This kills 2 birds with one stone.
So question. Super-small ships (my preferred play style.) Does this system work for really, really small ships, or is it going to force me to build bigger? Put differently, does this system increase the minimum mass for a viable ship?
While reading all this comments, my opinnion gets more clear. The first purposal for the power overhaul was better.
The first purposal had less complexity then this one but more then the current power system. The new purposal is more then a power system overhaul. I think, the better way is let the systems be separatly. Power system for themselves as shield system, or effect system or weapon systems.
I think the better way is to rework different systems separatly to be more flexible, if something doesn't work, or a better solution is made.
I think, the biggest problem of the old system is the huge amount of blocks, needed to have a suitable amount of power. This problem appears in nearly every system, effect, power, shield, weapon.
So more power is needed with less blocks, but the new problem is the huge space, that isn't necessary anymore, so players could fill the space with other systems. I think the Heat boundry box was a very good idea to solve the problem. Also the idea, getting more power with more chambers, was a good idea, because you could place them where you want and this is like having a bunch of reactors all over the ship.
The idea having a bunch of reactors instead of one big reactor is more rational and pragmatic thinking in a realistic way.
Distributing the power to the systems from different reactors is easier, because you only need small power distribution nodes instead of gigantic power distribution nodes, which could overload because of the immense power flow from one big reactor.
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