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Some potential improvements to increase gameplay from the power grid, some of these are more applicable to a new station.
1: Directly connect reactor to main power grid at start of game. If engineers overdrive it, it will be noticeable by everyone. Make it an easy repair to have it routed through SMES like it is now.
2: Allow SMES cells to have a higher energy intake rate. Cause them to explode if they try to take in significantly more energy than they are capable of receiving (over 100% charge). Catastrophic failure for job failure is more interesting, and this is not the sort of issue that would be crippling, just noteable.
3: Create a HoloDeck that consumes tremendous amounts of power, but is a trivially reconfigurable space. Perhaps it could even function as an alternate pathway to space while activated.
4: Connect High Energy Science and the Engine. The same fire that fuels the engine could be used by Scientists for creating explosives. Additionally, high-energy science could gain the ability to make something other than explosives, portable high-energy reactors fueled by the total heat in a Gas Tank. These reactors could be used to fuel powerful asteroid defense shields, powerful pods, or other interesting gadgets. It partially merges two locations (two sides using a resource together is more conflict, more interaction, and more chances for something interesting), and it gives plasma research something that isn't clearly treacherous to do.
Personally my favorite is the last one, but it is a bit unrealistic in the current station.
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As far as I can tell, the first two suggestions seem to be largely aimed at punishing engineers at doing too well at their job and getting a good engine hellburn. I don't really know why having the SMES explode is considered an interesting failure state, it seems a pretty crippling issue to me. Furthermore, having the engine start hotwired and require rigging up to the SMES makes it a little too easy to cause a lot of damage to the station through sheer negligence, which I don't think should really be encouraged. Not a big fan of these suggestions.
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Also the holodeck seems like something that could just be implemented in VR, and having an easily accessible massive power drain on the station just seems like trouble, especially if the engineers don't set up the engine.
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Yes, I believe players should notice when a job isn't done or is done very badly. I think it adds to the game that people have to care about these things.
SMES blowing up is very minor compared to what used to happen. It used to be that when engineers screwed up, half the station got destroyed by a singularity.
That was too extreme and too common, in addition for being too easy for a traitor to do. That said, I did enjoy dealing with some of the major damage caused by the event, and it lead to a sort of natural disaster that made rounds more interesting. Again, it was too extreme, but large explosions centered around overcharged SMES cells seems like a reasonable and far more mild version of this.
Roles should influence as many people as possible, and the power grid is an interesting and underused way for engineers to be affecting the station.
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The problem is that these suggestions punish engineers for getting lots of power out of the engine, which most engineers would consider a job well done. This really just disincentivizes engineers from even touching the engine at all.
And very few people enjoy being overly dependent/affected by one department. The solars now start hotwired to the SMES simply because people got tired of running out of power if there were lazy/incompetent/no engineers.
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Nah man, things blowing up is too drastic. If things get too charged up, it should just be like a tripped circuit or blown fuse. A temporary but easily fixable blackout.
It would be nice if there was more equipment on station that warranted getting high energy outputs. There doesn't seem to be much of a point of getting a hellburn if pretty much everything will run on a lesser amount of power.
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At this point, the only perks to getting a hellburn running are that you have a raging inferno to toss things in and bragging rights because you managed to set up a hellburn, and maybe some APCs taking lessons from the Sith. Something more substantial results would make the payoff much more sweet.
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The suggestions aren't encouraging hellburns, though. I mean, having the SMES blow up and lightning shoot all over the station is clearly a Bad Thing, and all because you wanted to do your job really well. This isn't rewarding hellburns, it's rewarding people for never touching the engine at all. Basically in between the power drain machine and the exploding SMES, engineers would have to play a delicate balancing act with the engine just to keep the station powered adequately, and when most engineers are too lazy to even hook up a couple plasma canisters and shove some char ore in the furnaces there's no way anyone's going to bother.
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Frank_Stein Wrote:Nah man, things blowing up is too drastic. If things get too charged up, it should just be like a tripped circuit or blown fuse. A temporary but easily fixable blackout.
It would be nice if there was more equipment on station that warranted getting high energy outputs. There doesn't seem to be much of a point of getting a hellburn if pretty much everything will run on a lesser amount of power. I was piggybacking off of this, which encourages the idea of cool shit requiring more energy outputs, but not being too keen on explosive SMESs.
The fact that the suggestions in the original post encourage getting a lot of power (holodeck) while simultaneously making getting a lot of power a bad thing (SMESplosions) is very paradoxical and just kinda weird. I think, if we're going to suggest power grid updates, we should focus on the former and not include the latter.
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By all means bring up your own ideas.
Personally I think a part of the game is more interesting if it has both good and bad parts. Things that a traitor could exploit, in addition for reasons a normal person might be performing that action.
Do people really prefer that the engine is just kinda pointless right now? There is nothing good or bad you will really succeed in with it. It is just very flat.
Alcohol is just bad for you, but that doesn't mean it isn't used. The bad adds character as much as the good. The worst thing at all is for something to just be boring.
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What would be more interesting would be if there was more emphasis on channeling power around the station.
Feed more power to medbay, get faster cloning and robot manufacturers. Send power to research and get more effective artifact research and shorter cooldowns on the teleporter. Mining's asteroid magnet could get a better chance at pulling in rarer ores with more power.
Just don't overload an area or you you could blow out a fuse in the APCs and have to manually replace it.
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Instead of blowing a fuse on the APC, how about more hilarious catastrophic failures?
Like the cloner overloading and producing a never-ending wall of screaming clone meat, the mineral magnet pulling in meteors or entire asteroids at a VERY high velocity and the teleporter pad doing extraordinarily dangerous things even more so than it already does when improperly used.
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This seems like it would just make it too easy for a single traitor engineer to screw up the rest of the station easily. The problem with the suggestions, I feel, is that it makes it too easy to damage large amounts of the station through sheer negligence as opposed to now, where you have to put in some effort to mess things up.
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Engineers has always had the most destructive failure results.
I think it would be neat if doors would pulse random wires every now and then if the engine was running too high.
Other electrical appliances could probably also do a thing. Like the security camera computer would switch what camera it is looking at, and the security computer would randomize arrest status for some folks.
It would make running the engine at a balanced level a good thing. See how high you can get it without things going wrong.
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Making hellburns even more destructive is bad bad BAD, but there really needs to be something to eat more power on the station, because right now the solars provide more power than the entire station can possibly consume, even with big power-guzzlers like the telesci portal on. No matter how irresponsible people are with power consumption, the station currently cannot experience power issues of any sort unless someone deliberately vandalizes or disables parts of the power infrastructure.
Rather than adding things for the sole purpose of guzzling power, though, why not rebalance power production or consumption? Bring solars back to the razor's edge where it's actually necessary to be slightly responsible with your power usage if no one's running the engine.
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