Golioth wrote:
I am confused as to what the Research into energy actually does. can anyone clarify ? =)
Energy is what lets you do everything in this game. Researching Energy gives you two things, reactors and relays.
Reactors increases the maximum energy you can store while relays increases how fast your reactors charge (reducing the max slightly).
At the beginning, you have 100 energy that refills at 1 energy/3 minutes or your bar is filled every 5 hours. While that is good, for most people, that is wasteful as they sleep/work more than 5 hours so are losing 'play time' as they can't recharge their energy any more than maximum.
At level 1 research, you can have 3 +10 Fusion reactors bringing your total energy up to 130. The refill rate is the same but now it takes 6.5 hours to refill the bar (allowing less 'waste' time).
Your first relay is the Power Conduit. This gives you a +1 recharge rate on your energy at the expense of 5 energy. So if you install the max relays, you will have 110 energy but your recharge rate will be 1 energy/2 minutes, 56 seconds. I'm not doing the math on how long it will take you to fill. You can see it will take less time.
Basically, the further you get, the more energy you will need (missions cost more energy, NPC/PvP uses energy, etc). At the same time as taking more energy, you will want to refill your energy faster which is why you will want relays.
At my current research, I refill 1 energy/1 minute 21 seconds or 44 energy/hour (vs base line of 20 energy/hour). I am continually trying to reduce my recharge time so I can play more.
(The one trick about this is before level up, uninstall all your relays in install the max/best reactors you can get. At level up you get refilled so that is a good chunk of energy that would be lost if you have reactors installed. I 'lose' 280 energy on a level up if I have my relays installed).
