Hello Dan,

I think I speak for every player in the game when I say that probably the most annoying task in the game is getting relays and -energy weapons offline before ranking up and getting them online afterwards. Especially if you're kind of higher rank and you got 10 pages of weapons, the ones you need to get off-line being (ironically) in the middle. Not to mention those sweet sweet times when you either rank up with them online or you forget to get them online after rank up and go to a good 8 hours night sleep.

The only reason they give -energy in the first place, as far as I can tell, is the extra money drain occurring from all that getting them on and off all the time then needing to repair them. At least for the ranks 300+ where your energy don't fill up in less than 10 hours. In my case, and I bet I'm not an oddity among higher ranks , it takes me days to fill up, even at max recharge rate.

Given that, here is what I suggest. Assume an 1 rank per day pace (you can get slower than that but I'm willing to pay ) , divide the repair cost for the relays and weapons to 10 ( or pick a number if 1 rank per day is too much) , add it to the upkeep and eliminate the -energy from the relays and weapons.

For example change the upkeep of HyperChannel Relays to 45 mil + 80mil =125 mil (if you go with the 1 rank per day idea) and eliminate the -120 energy from it.

Thoughts ?

+1

I like the idea although I'm going to bet it won't be implemented, just a random gut feeling.

Even if not -removing- the -energy from them, another idea would be a tab that has different "builds" for your ship. It would be the same as equipping and unequipping (items would still take damage when being unequipped like it is now), but instead of having to click through all those pages and such, you just click a "build" that you could set that has everything except -energy items on, rank up, then click the "build" that has everything equipped. Of course, you could individually equip or unequip, but still.


125mil is really not a lot of upkeep. I think if they were going to alter like that, the upkeep would end up being much higher (just a guess), especially since we have 3 Dark AssemblyBots for -15% total upkeep now.

+0.5 This is another option for the problem of -energy. I agree with Vette, that the cost would have to be significantly higher. I would love to see the alternate build sytem, be it separate tab or single click uninstall. But I'm in favor of any idea prevents losing 700 energy.

There are ppl with tiny energy pools thou... and planning afk time, especially when it's fairly long, is part of the game...

I would like something like this better:
A new module called capacitor. What it does is that it allows you to hold energy above your cap in the event of a full refill(rank up, GP, artifact) while doing nothing for natural regen
The capacitor will allow you to hold an extra amount that is up to its own capacity or the sum of the -energy of all ur modules, whichever is lower. and ofc... it needs to be researched~~

how about a new button/tab
ship configuration
that you can store certain ship configurations in.
rank up - stores all your -energy items as offline
recharge - stores all your relays online
max attack - stores all your attack/defense as online
etc...
this is configurable by the player. This could be a happy medium between what you propose (+1) and the current system.

I just get the feeling Dan doesn't want to change - it's been asked before.

The concept of the energy drain makes sense. Unless the relays are perfect conductors, they lose energy.

(By the way, I'm level 122 and it takes me over 24 hours to fill my energy bar with my best relays on)

I'm not talking about physics. I'm talking about how annoying installing/un-installing those modules get. I'm also offering a viable (in my opinion) suggestion to replace the credit drain with another which eliminates the annoyance. There are other suggestions that sound nice but this one (mine) it's extremely easy to implement. No extra missions,no extra research, no extra layout work just a bit of code change.

I see...
I tend to see the relays as a strategic part of the game, especially at lower levels. I won't go into to detail, because of the topic of higher levels.
I kinda like the capacitor idea.

+1 Even though it would be a tad rough at my current income to tech ratio, I'd still gladly pay a higher upkeep on relays and guns to keep from having to uninstall a dozen different mods every time I rank up. And sometime's it's not even your fault for the rank up. I tend to run into problems when I've locked a lot of bosses on the legion share, close to rank up, but ooe and then someone dissables a boss w/o warning. Bam, I just ranked up and lost 1/3 of my energy cap.