Well, in previous posts I only pointed some stand alone problems that I saw in this proposal.
Now is time for a big one.
First of all - chamber idea is golden. It gives players a huge variety of choice, lots of interesting buffs can be added using chamber mechanics.
It also fixes problems with passive effects - such as their /to mass ratio, which leads to enormous block counts, their abusable inheritance.
It also adds some flexibility to this game, which starmade really lacks of.
Second - reactor hp is somewhat golden too. Ability to shut down enemy systems by considerably damaging them, vital weak-spots of any ships in form of reactors - it can enhance combat greatly.
But, I have some worries that this can lead us to infamous core-drilling and annoying lucky-shots. Mostly because we are not allowed to use multiple reactors at once - this surely will lead to the majority of ships having only one, big and easy to target reactor.
Third - reactors themself. I have mixed feelings about them.While chambers add a lot of depth to the ship design, reactors, the heart of any ship - they are almost completely depthless. Just place 2 types of blocks far away from each other and you are good. I understand that you wanted to create simpler power system than the current one, but this one power system lacks of hard-to-master part, while spaghetti lines had that part, for some degree. And I am not even talking about how illogical and unintuitive is the idea that stabilizers have to be far away from reactors to work properly. It's weird, but not that important.
Fourth - inner capacity and priority queue. This is rather interesting combination. For example, you can have a large ion weapon on the bottom of the queue, just to fire it once at the beginning of the fight. So, queue adds another bit of flexibility to our ships, and i highly appreciate that. Inner storage itself, as I already said, can lead to emergence of cheap and disposable one-strike ships. I like the idea of such ships, but they must be balanced well.
So, conclusion. Well, this one proposal is really solid. There are lot's of good ideas, but the reactor part is rather weak. I believe, that the good system mechanic must be based only on that system characteristics - such as form, block interaction, count, etc, it must give player opportunity to master it - to build such system more efficiently than majority of other players, and what I believe good mechanic mustn't do - is to notably encourage any ship shape over another ship shape. And that is what distance based reactor efficiency lead us to - it makes really long an thin ships more viable than compact, more axis-balanced.
Months ago, after a first proposal I made my own one. It's main ideas was to: instead of the restrictions, like in the first proposal, use encouragement, to increase game depth by making systems power consumption floating - adjustable by player in real time and counterbalanced by heat production. So, I maybe will create another one, by combining my ideas with ideas from this proposal, refining them, only to never see them happen. But the man can dream, cannot he?
