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Weapon power mechanics
mancom
Member Posts: 784 Arc User
I have always felt as if there are basically only two useful settings for weapon power in STO (at least in a PVP setting): full power to weapons and no power to weapons (usually in order to concentrate on aux instead). This does not appear to be a particularly good use of a weapon energy slider with so many settings between 15 and 100.
And in the early days of the game, weapon energy did not only depend on power levels, but also on EPS transfer rates. So the system has already been dumbed down once.
What could a more interesting weapon power mechanic look like?
Maybe fuse the two concepts of weapon power (which currently determines the strength of the weapon) and EPS recharge rates? I.e. lower weapon power means slower recharge to full power, but full power is an absolute thing depending only on the weapon and not on the power setting?
Or remove the "successive drain" mechanics that leads to the necessity of overcapping and replace it by "every weapon needs x power" so that the optimal weapon power setting would roughly correspond to the number of (energy) weapons a ship has equipped (and firing)?
What's your idea of an interesting yet accessible weapon power mechanic?
And in the early days of the game, weapon energy did not only depend on power levels, but also on EPS transfer rates. So the system has already been dumbed down once.
What could a more interesting weapon power mechanic look like?
Maybe fuse the two concepts of weapon power (which currently determines the strength of the weapon) and EPS recharge rates? I.e. lower weapon power means slower recharge to full power, but full power is an absolute thing depending only on the weapon and not on the power setting?
Or remove the "successive drain" mechanics that leads to the necessity of overcapping and replace it by "every weapon needs x power" so that the optimal weapon power setting would roughly correspond to the number of (energy) weapons a ship has equipped (and firing)?
What's your idea of an interesting yet accessible weapon power mechanic?
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The problem is that this can have an undesired effect in the metagame, for example, sci could have healing power + debuff power (subnuke) + damage throught energy weapons, this could lead to a useless tactical class.
In the end i think is a good idea, but they will need to re-balance a lot of things in order to have a healthy metagame (not that we have it now but..).
Vin Naftero@playhard88 - FED Sciencie
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beam arrays though, are made of individual emitters linked together in a chain. each capable of storing the power for their own shot, and able to fire intipendently. more importantly, all the stored energy in each emitters capacitor can be transferred down the array and combined into a single shot, you see this visually happen in the show. thats why arrays don't fire anything like they do in STO, they got arrays DEAD WRONG.
having up to 8 energy weapons fireing at once in the first place is also dumb, thats JJ or starwars. trek was always very minimalistic on weapons fire, few shots, great effect.
power it self is also poorly represented, each ship just gets 50 in each subsystem and thats it, defiant and odyssey both. here's a couple of facts about ship power in star trek
- even with warp field magic, the amount of energy needed to maintain c, let alone 3000 times c, would be thousands of times higher then the power demands in any combat situation. at sublight, any ship should have infinite power if the core is online.
- apparently the impulse fusion reactors are powerful enough to run a ship at peek performance in combat until they suck down all the deuterium on board, as demonstrated in nemisis, were the enterprise finally just ran out of gas.
-a warp core, combining M/AM, creates an order of magnitude more energy with less fuel input, then just burning deuterium in a fusion reactor. depending on how readily available antimatter is, probably determines what the ship is run on at sublight.
in game, sloting warp cores and impulse engines has no effect on your power levels, thats a whole thing that would need to be developed. so, it seems pretty silly to me to try to change the power mechanics so they make more sense, without hard core changes to the entire thing, so its at least more canon accurate.
I love when you get all canon-y up on this mug. Cryptic should hire you! The game would be better. They could at least hire you as an outside consultant to completely re-do how weapons and energy work in this game so it wasn't so simple and for babies.
Power Transfer Rate (Internal Systems) how power is transfer from shields, weapons and engines. By default it's 100%. That should be enough to do things. But when the going gets tough then you run into low power. AUX2BAT helps but where is the extra, extra power coming from. In Combat you need power to the ENG, Shield, Weapons. Most here seem to push the Weapon power higher then Shield then the rest. You could balance the power. I don't had run it to the max. I use healing more on shields. I've looked into better ENG that work in low power Combat situations. This is Impulse ENG not Warp Core ENG.
Should be able to stop the ship and send all power to the weapons and fire the fore weapons at the target. Also have shields up as well. So in this case divert all power from ENG to shields and weapons.
Time will only tell!
well my rants have a tendency to kill threads, like it did this for at least 24 hours lol. i sort of like applying reason and basic physics to trek science and seeing what the outcome will be, i'm that much of a nerd.
i would just throw out the whole 4 subsystems thing, that is just painfully simple. almost insulting what a simplification it is to such rich and complex source material, and a waist of game play potential.
weapons would always fire at "100%", maxing allotment to weapons power would just max rate of fire between weapon cycles, for better DPS. so, even a sci ship with weapons set to minimum could fire shots or a cycle at full strength, say only every 5 seconds, wile max to weapons ships might fire the same weapon once a second.
in concert to energy changes, i would modify weapons a bit. current arrays would be renamed beam banks, cannons and DBB would remain the same, and they would all have firing cycles like normal.
but true beam arrays, that only come in phaser and are only mountable on MOST fed ships, would not have fireing cycles. they would be limited to 1 shot at a time, rate of fire heavily determined by power to weapons. and no mater how many array items you have equipped, you would only shoot 1 shot at once, each beam item adding its strength to each shot. these would be front mounted only weapons in most cases, only something like the galaxy, with its main array that can completely cover aft as well, could equip these in aft slots. some hardpointing work on some ships might need doing, but it would be worth it, cause its fed faction, not some niche faction.
in addition to that DCs and singles would receive a 10% boost to flat DPS, to give them a reason to exist. DHCs would still be beter in pvp.
since power and minmax potential would probably be plentiful, for all items id give a mechanical limitation on how much power they could actually use or at least the limit they can benefit from.
id totally break up "aux power", and have a separate subsystems for EACH science discipline. particles gen, grav gens, sensors/countermeasures, flow cap, and decompiler. putting skill points into these systems increases the amount of power you can rout to any, its how good the system is on your ship. if you have 99 in a skill, you can put 50 power to that subsystem. at 200 skill, you can put a max of 100 energy in the certain subsystem
weapons, shields, engines, you can route 100 power to like normal, but items might not be able to get anything out of up to 75 or something. these items might have a lot of acc or crit mods, but max at 75, wile an unstable, experimental weapon might be able to utilize 100 power, but have no mods, be unreliable, and have negative to you procs or something
there would be the standard shield subsystem, that would basically perform as usual, but also a SIF subsytem too. your power level in each would determine how strong heals of that type are, not the now exploded 'aux' subsystem. the SFI subsystem would effect sub system repair, dampners, insulator effectiveness, hold and slow resistance, and hull resistance.
engine subsystem and impulse engine items would see big change. combat, standard and hyper would all react very differently, have vastly different performance and power optimization. combat engines wouldn't be able to use more then 50 engine power, be slow but make your ship very maneuverable. hyper would be more about speed and actually subtract turn rate at maximum energy levels. standard engines would be in the middle in basic form, but more specialized ones would have a very wide range of function, might have attributes of both other types. like a standard that acts like a combat but can use up to 75 engine energy, has high peek turn rate and speed than any combat as a result, BUT over 3/4 throttle starts drastically losing turn rate like a hyper would at max energy levels. a combat at full throttle would move a bit faster then this would at only 3/4, but have less peek turn rate, but only need 50 power.
shield types would see similar change. regenerative may need very high shield energy levels to have more then average regen with their low capacity, and covariant might need very high shield power levels or else they have a resistance penalty. Resilient would need at least 75 power before it has a bleed penalty, but can basically eliminate bleed with maxed levels. a standard shield might be the only thing sane to run if shields is ever a dump subsystem on your build. and like engines, may mix and max strengths and weaknesses
actually, aux power would be back, but it would actually be aux power, not sci/heal power. it would be a pool certain skills could draw on, to buff other subsystems or abilities, like it was actually used in star trek. aux would primarily be used by skills like AtB, AtS and AtD. AtB would be an even spread of the aux power to the weapons, shields, and engines, AtD its current effects by draining the aux power, and AtS would dump all aux power into the SIF subsystem, with bonuses on top of normal benefit, along with a small burst heal. since each is draining the power, you couldn't use it for anything else.
the EPtX skill would get renamed, ether fusion power to X, or secondary power to X. your basic power levels and whatever skill tree bonuses you have, is power from your warp core. these skills are your impulse reactors dumping power into ether engine drive coil, weapons, shields or the usable aux pool, basically acting like normal.
a skill called emergency power i would make an all captain skill. it would basically be that eng cap skill EPS transfer, and usable when your hull is at 50%. eng captains would get something new and better in place
instead of subsystem targeting, sci ships would get built in skills called aux to particles, grav, sen/counter, flow, or decomp, for each of these new subsystems. these can be cycled 1 at a time for full up time every 30 seconds, but will leave your aux drained that whole time.
oh wait, cant forget about stealth, i'd say that deserves a subsystem for sure. to keep its effectiveness window narrow, there's no way to boost the subsystem other then just setting the power high and spacing into it on the skill tree. i would think , if stealth was set to 100, and your not cloaked, you should be invisible to a ship without any power in sensors out to 10 range. when getting away, cloak or not, dumping power into stealth to hide you would probably be wise.
so, all subsystems would be as followed.
weapons
shields
impulse drive coil (engines)
SIF
particles
grav
sen/counter
flow cap
decomp
stealth
aux
11 subsystems, im gonna say you get 25 power to each, base. to be distributed as you please, 100 to 0.
the more i thought about it, the more i realized what a total game rewrite it would be. probably a balancing nightmare, but i bet i could do it.
a lot of this is based on my thinking lately, that its sort of BS how much less things you have to minmaxing in a sci ship and heal boats. aux and shields, thats it, all bases covered, dump kinetic, control, exotic damage and heals. its why tech doffs are fine, because your already spread much more thin on anything you can put it on.
its also probably BS that anything with a LTC sci can at least offensively control like a sci ship and damage like an escort. with these changes sci ships will have to minmax a lot more things, but with the built in 'aux to' skills can have a potentially huge lead on the effectiveness of sci skills over other ship types. also ideally healers would be left not able to minmax and be as invincible as they are now, but also have enough power that they might as well be trying to contribute DPS by dumping whats left into weapons.
Umm, A2B isn't what you think it is.
It is Auxiliary power diverted through the emergency battery to the other 3 power levels, it is an EPTX variant - it works on EPTX subsystems, not battery subsystems. Someone just broke it at some point and put it on the A2X, when it should be on both EPTX and A2X.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/1024030-release-notes%3A-october-10,-2012
Way way way back, if you wanted to be a DPS beam cruiser you had to use your engineering slots for EPS consoles. Likewise nadion inversion gave engineers a bufff that would let them somewhat match a tac/cruisers DPS. Similarly DHC's power drain meant there was actually a tradeoff for using them.
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