I've taken a close look at all of the energy code.
I think the biggest issue right now is that, while the reactor generates energy at a constant rate, many items consume energy instantaneously. Energy consumption is also entirely decoupled from generation, which is why there's a separate "overload efficiency" to resolve energy deficit. The game will never prevent the player from drawing any amount of energy, it merely punishes energy deficit with far greater heat.
Put those two together, and it means that if you ever use an instantaneous energy draw (e.g. firing an energy weapon) while your capacitors are empty, nearly all of that will be accounted as energy deficit and incur an immense heat penalty on your reactor. This is a great way to damage the reactor and cook yourself alive, and not a behavior any player would expect.
My proposal to improve the situation is to entirely remove any instantaneous energy consumption from the game. Any such item should be converted to have its own built-in capacitor which needs to be charged before the item can be used. This would allow removing built-in cooldowns from energy weapons, instead allowing the player to fire them as fast as their reactor can fill that weapon's capacitors (assuming you don't melt the gun by doing so). This would also have the benefit of further differentiating energy weapons from other types whose cycle time would be a fixed property of their reloading mechanism.
In addition, I would like to introduce an energy management system with accompanying inventory sub-menu, which would allow the player to determine how the ship's energy budget gets distributed among components. This would enable the player to replicate that stereotypical sci-fi trope of "reroute all power to forward shields" and such, improving the depth of the tactical metagame, which is a primary goal of the gameplay design.
Then, instead of having a binary overload state with an "overload efficiency" value, we could have some reactors enable throttling that would have a curve determining reactor efficiency over a range of operating outputs, and let the player choose whether to overclock or underclock their reactor
Not sure yet how this interacts with the capacitor item... It's no longer strictly necessary, but it still makes sense to store energy during downtime to be able to spend it during bursts of high activity. How do we determine when to pull from capacitors, then?
Definitely useful for stealth reasons, so that you can straight up switch off your reactor so that it doesn't cook you while your radiator heat pumps are off.
I've taken a close look at all of the energy code.
I think the biggest issue right now is that, while the reactor generates energy at a constant rate, many items consume energy instantaneously. Energy consumption is also entirely decoupled from generation, which is why there's a separate "overload efficiency" to resolve energy deficit. The game will never prevent the player from drawing any amount of energy, it merely punishes energy deficit with far greater heat.
Put those two together, and it means that if you ever use an instantaneous energy draw (e.g. firing an energy weapon) while your capacitors are empty, nearly all of that will be accounted as energy deficit and incur an immense heat penalty on your reactor. This is a great way to damage the reactor and cook yourself alive, and not a behavior any player would expect.
My proposal to improve the situation is to entirely remove any instantaneous energy consumption from the game. Any such item should be converted to have its own built-in capacitor which needs to be charged before the item can be used. This would allow removing built-in cooldowns from energy weapons, instead allowing the player to fire them as fast as their reactor can fill that weapon's capacitors (assuming you don't melt the gun by doing so). This would also have the benefit of further differentiating energy weapons from other types whose cycle time would be a fixed property of their reloading mechanism.
In addition, I would like to introduce an energy management system with accompanying inventory sub-menu, which would allow the player to determine how the ship's energy budget gets distributed among components. This would enable the player to replicate that stereotypical sci-fi trope of "reroute all power to forward shields" and such, improving the depth of the tactical metagame, which is a primary goal of the gameplay design.
Then, instead of having a binary overload state with an "overload efficiency" value, we could have some reactors enable throttling that would have a curve determining reactor efficiency over a range of operating outputs, and let the player choose whether to overclock or underclock their reactor
Not sure yet how this interacts with the capacitor item... It's no longer strictly necessary, but it still makes sense to store energy during downtime to be able to spend it during bursts of high activity. How do we determine when to pull from capacitors, then?
Definitely useful for stealth reasons, so that you can straight up switch off your reactor so that it doesn't cook you while your radiator heat pumps are off.