The Activation Block (v2.0)

[color98dove]

I was playing the other night, and started thinking about all them sci-fi shows that had ships with systems that could be activated and deactivated to either conserve power or what have you, and it hit me,

in star made you can not turn off your power hungry shield or change it in any way other then what it is, now this is not a bubble shield idea, its a on/off idea, the persons ship who turns their shields off while in hostile territory is an idiot, but alas i think for some play-ability, we should have this function in the game, as an option at least.

The other idea i had which i'm sure has been suggested before is to allow the shields to be colored according to what their doing, much like how that are now, but say i want then orange instead of blue and as the shields weaker, they get more and more faded, just a random thought, from a random player.

Thx for listening, hopefully someone can keep going with this idea, and possibly add more to it

 

[Visitor]

I guess it would be quite nice if most systems would have passive power consumption (low, obviously, per block but scaling accordingly with the size of whole subsystem) with ability to disable whatever one doesn't need to free the power for what's vital (with some short cooldown between deactivation-reactivation to prevent people from simply juggling all the subsystems).

Scaling power consumption would allow small ships to keep on trucking with their largely weak equipment, while enforcing certain planning and tactical maneuvering in case of big ships as currently fights between destroyers look like boring slugfests. It may also nicely tie, I confess, with the currently popular opinion about big ships being somewhat too powerful.

I like this idea. Quite much, actually. However, it shouldn't be in a form of a new block but new functionality accessible from ship's GUI. Generally though. it not only could help with current issues of balancing (though probably would require a tiny bit of balancing on its own) but would improve gameplay without, I'd assume, much additional work/coding involved.

I don't really personally care about shield coloring and I am perfectly fine with the way they are now. I'd have nothing against only if I'd be absolutely reassured that customization of such things won't add to the lag.