I have also noticed that sometimes, you stick with 1 energy in storage and the things keep working for a couple of seconds, or just for a very long time, despite stalling on energy. Again, this has to be tested because I can't remember correctly and as I said in my previous post, the switching on/off seems random (The 1 energy case just adds to that confusion).
rootbeer23 wrote:
my hypothesis: the nuke builds at pw_gen/pw_used speed and the shield and radar are only active pw_gen/pw_used of the time.
This would be a nice hypothesis, however, Iszh already mentioned that it's wrong (on how it actually happens) for the nuke and nuke def. It should happen that way though, but it simply doesn't
Your hypothesis would not only be the right way for the nuke, but also for the radar, stealth, jamming and shield generators in terms of switching on/off. It is what the stalling idea describes. You come with a problem though. The game is continuous, by how much speed you actually build, so how are you going to decide when a radar should switch off and for how long?
Clearly, when you have 70% E income w.r.t. the output, at 30% of the time, the radar should be off. How are you going to do this? One second is 10 ticks in SupCom so clearly, you would want it off 3 ticks and on 7, in one second. This isn't going to be a problem for anyone playing (so it's a balance issue). You can continuously see the units (maybe no longer what they are, but certainly where they are). It's completely the other way around with shields. Having it off for 3 ticks and then charge, means that is actually off for 10 seconds, 3 ticks (number 10 made up, but that's no problem), then on for 7 ticks and then off again. So 70% energy income/output actually means 6% shield efficiency.
If take the intervals by seconds, it's a completely different picture. The problem with the radar is really starting to count by now, but 70% energy income/output still means 35% shield efficiency. There's a bigger problem when you make the intervals even longer. At for example intervals of 10 seconds, your shield would be off for the first 30 seconds and on for the next 70, but you're very likely to have solved your little energy crisis far earlier, then during the 70% E i/o problem, you've actually had your radar off the whole time.
So a better method is, rather than having the radar on/off time at 70% in a 70% E crisis, is to have the radar on all the time (apart from when you've shut it down manually, obviously), is this:
The radar has a certain range. If you are stalling energy, the radar range could drop. 70% i/o would lead to having the radar work at 70% range of its normal range. I know that the effective area then becomes 49% (70% squared) of its normal effective area (But I think that that isn't so bad, if you consider that electromagnetic waves drop in strength squared when the distance to their source increases linearly).
For the shields, you could do something similar. Have the generator give 70% of its usual SP to the shield and have the regen rate (both when the shield is up and when its down) drop to 70%.
I have no solution for the personal stealth and personal jamming.
This seems to be a much fairer and consistent solution than having things flicker on and off again, no matter how you put it (the current system, how it works, or how I think it should work, intended by the game makers). However, I'm not sure how changing it to what I just proposed will be taken by the rest of the community.
Statistics: Posted by Plasma_Wolf — 29 Apr 2014, 19:00
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