Power profiles

[nazo]

One thing I think we could really benefit from would be a system of a sort of "power profiles." Specifically different profiles (let's say three?) that set different power management settings. For example, if I'm cruising pretty far out and probably not going to be interdicted, I see no reason not to just turn off things like shield boosters and weapons and save just that much more fuel as well as that much less heat to deal with. However, then I must remember to turn them back on later and if I'm being attacked or something at such time as I need them, going through the list flipping them on manually one at a time is trying to say the very least. (It's not even the time it takes them to come on that's the problem -- that is to expected and preferred behavior as it's there for a reason. It's having to manually flip through while under fire turning them back on.) If we could have, say, three power profiles that switch these things automatically, it would be a completely different story. Actually, more than three would be better, but it should be done in such a way that you aren't flipping through a lot of things (some of which could cause significant "reboot" time for components like the FSD or shields) such as perhaps by having either direct shortcut keys or, simpler still, just having a toggle that says whether one is enabled or not and if it isn't enabled it simply skips it when pressing the button to switch. I really don't think this would be all that balance breaking or anything since anything you could do with this someone can do manually anyway -- it just makes it easier to deal with and to remember things. Those who would do anything this could be "balance breaking" with would surely get really good at simply changing things manually and quickly. Not to mention external things like voice commands that can do all this via macros (but the game shouldn't require third party software to do such things...) which the game sort of can't realistically prevent even if it were balance breaking (in fact, I would argue that since voice command users can do this via macros, having such a thing built in would actually be more balance restoring...)

Oh, and it should definitely remember priorities. That is a key part of power management... I'm having troubles with some things causing my ship to forget module priorities from time to time and it drives me crazy because sometimes I deploy hardpoints and suddenly I'm dead in the water (so to speak) running on emergency life support... I guess this is mostly things like when changing stored modules or engineering, but it would be really nice if this problem "solved itself" so to speak by the power profiles remembering and just when I switched between them all the priorities were correctly set. Plus I can see uses such as, say, a trader oriented profile setting where a cargo hatch is high priority normally but perhaps lower during battle where you'd rather survive to fight another day if it came down to it but perhaps desirable to keep it high priority until it's certain that running is necessary.

I think this could really make a lot of power management a lot less painful for us all without really being balance breaking so much as just being significantly more convenient and less troublesome. Also, it seems positively ridiculous that in such an advanced future where humans travel the stars it's so hard just to keep from wasting power on things like cargo hatches that lead to empty cargo holds...

BTW, it would be truly useful if they could be set to trigger on certain events. For instance, one power profile that triggers automatically when hardpoints are deployed while another triggers automatically when they close. Perhaps one for stealth mode (why power shield boosters if you have no shields for instance?,) one for landing on a planet (I keep my vehicle hanger off normally because it's kind of a worthless waste of power out in space after all,) and a host of other things like that. This would make it surely necessary that there be more than three profiles available, but would also mean you wouldn't normally have to manually set them which could be great so long as there are sufficient contingency criteria available.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Nice idea.

I'd support this!

I'd like the ability to "lower" shields, which reduces power use significantly, but obviously turns the shields off.
The only difference being raising them brings then back online in a few seconds, providing your Sys capacitor is full.
Using silent running would drain the capacitor so a shield recharge would take the usual amount of time.

As for your ship forgetting power priorities, this happens if you Engineer or replace any components. It's caught me out several times. Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[nazo]

I'm not sure about the shield recharge. Perhaps turning it on and off should work the same as with a system reboot completely regardless of this (meaning that should be a separate suggestion more tied into just how the module itself is handled.) Namely, come to a stop and turn it back on. Actually, your capacitor suggestion is a good one because right now the reboot has potential to be balance breaking in the right circumstances and if it at least did something like wiping out the system capacitor (thus requiring that it actually has a charge first to even make this work) it would at least be an improvement. Something should probably be done to strike a better balance between it taking forever to reestablish shields from them being off and them popping back on at significant (albeit not full) charge if you simply reboot.

As for the module priorities, it's a little more complicated. For instance, being destroyed seems to cause some to reset to an earlier setting. I'm not sure what makes it "save" a setting exactly. It's not as simple as landing at a station first because I always do that before any bounty hunt runs or whatever. I think some other things can cause it to be reset too. Like I said, power profiles would solve this kind of by default since setting one would restore things to the way you wanted them without you even having to notice that they changed in the first place. (Well, I suppose it may not work if it doesn't recognize a module as being the same thing. Hopefully it would consider them more based on what type of module they were rather than exactly specifying precisely what module under what configuration. That would actually be more work for the system to keep up with exact modules anyway.)