As it stands, silent running is in a somewhat strange place. Engaging it drops your shield if it’s up, cancels the shield recharge process if you’ve made any progress, and prevents said process from beginning until silent running is engaged. One of the biggest advantages of silent running is the ability to stop someone from getting missile lock on you. Since missiles are a major threat when your shields are down, this creates an awkward situation. Once your shield fails, you can periodically utilize silent running to avoid the missiles, but this ensures that your shield will never come back up, thus ensuring you remain in that shieldless silent-reliant state for the rest of the fight. What this leads to is one of three outcomes: 1) You fly a ship that’s dedicated to silent running, 2) You ignore silent running, and just try to get your shield back up, or 3) You just consider the fight lost when your shield fails, and run.
I don’t like this. Silent running is cool (HA HA), and I’d like to see it integrated into standard combat a bit more. To that end, I propose the following changes:
What do you guys think? Would this make silent running become more of an integral part of combat, instead of just the little side-gimmick it is now? If not, what do you think would? Do you think centralizing silent running is a good idea in the first place? Discuss!
I don’t like this. Silent running is cool (HA HA), and I’d like to see it integrated into standard combat a bit more. To that end, I propose the following changes:
- Shields still break when you enter silent running, but the generator stays on unless you manually turn it off.
- This is to allow the next two points to be possible. If you want to commit to silent running you still have the option to turn off the shield module (to save heat), but you’re no longer forced to.
- The shield recharge delay starts immediately, and the shield will begin recharging after it as normal. The shield can charge all the way to 50% as per normal, but won’t actually come up until silent running is disengaged
- The idea here is to make strategic silent running an interesting option while you’re waiting for your shield to come back up. You would no longer be forced to remain shieldless for the rest of the fight if you want to occasionally go silent. Recharging your shield generates heat though, so staying in silent running for more than occasional short bursts while trying to get your shield back up would be impractical.
- 16 second shield recharge delay is reduced depending on the percentage of shield remaining.
- This change is to make “hybrid” setups more practical. The justification behind this is something along the lines of the standard 16 second delay being a safety / reboot thing, and that it can be shortened by recycling shield power and safely manually dropping the shield. A ship with a smallish shield could conceivably go into silent mode to reposition, recharging it’s small shield while it does. Once the shield is ready and waiting at 50%, the little ship “decloaks” and gets a few shots in. When the opponent starts to get some hits in, the ship re-engages silent running, and repeats the process. Since they had a good chunk of shield left when they went silent again, the delay is shorter and they can get prepared for their next strike quicker.
- This also presents a shield-focused ship with an interesting choice when their shield is starting to get low: “Do I manually drop my shield now to save a little time on the recharge, or try to stretch the remaining amount as long as I can?” The longer you wait, the less saving you get on the recharge delay. The sooner you do it, the sooner your hull exposed. Exciting!
What do you guys think? Would this make silent running become more of an integral part of combat, instead of just the little side-gimmick it is now? If not, what do you think would? Do you think centralizing silent running is a good idea in the first place? Discuss!
