Let's say ships in a friendly system with a generator never lose charge, but regenerate charge more quickly if they are in close proximity to a reactor. Having to manage the energy requirements of my local defensive garrisons would be incredibly tedious and demand attention that I would rather devote to my main assaults.
Totally with you on this one. I agree that it would be too tedious to micromanage, and I also like the reactor proximity thing.
Assuming "one reactor in a planet" heals the ships up at 100% of their regeneration capacity, then it should work. If you had to have a variable number of generators on a planet, and depending on the ratio of generators to number/tech level of ships you had it would charge at a different rate, you'd go quickly insane. Plus you'd probably have to retool the costs of generators and so on, since with almost every assault on a planet, you'd first have to build a dozen generators "charge up" your guys after each assault.
The main issue with this charge thing is that assaulting a planet already gives a strong benefit to playing gopher with the wormholes (pop out, smack a few targets, run back and heal at your safe planet, repeat; it is the only way to really assault the massively overpopulated planets), and this will just will just give additional benefits to what feels like a cheap tactic. The benefits gained from even a half dozen well protected tech I engineers is far more then the cost of having to whack extra reinforcements due to time taken to get out and back, and even the attrition costs of sniper turrets/ships.
Also if all it takes is a generator on the planet to recharge, and you've got portable generators, it just ends up being another thing to drag through the wormhole when you've secured your starting area, like a couple of science labs/scout starship/engineers/whatever.
It just seems to be a large cost in time/attention/GPU (since you'll need to draw the charge bars like health bars so you can tell what level your ships are at, since it's actually even more vital to know then your health if you've got a bunch of ships doing half damage), for very little "fun". It also increases the learning curve too if it's going to be a core mechanic and not something you can turn on/off so it should be as simple and as obvious as possible, and some of these suggestions have been rather complicated.
As Admiral said, having ships lose charge when firing seems like a good plan. At the moment I'm inclined towards the idea that movement itself has no effect on charge levels. This creates the potential for a passive-move command, ordering ships to move to a location whilst conserving charge for attacking a specific target.
Well, this is fairly counter to what I was thinking, but this does offer more strategic opportunities, especially with a passive-move mode (which I wouldn't want to add without a feature like this). This basically makes the charge almost a cross between ammo and fuel. I wonder if that will be confusing.
I'll vote for "yes" on this one. I'd rather not have to worry about trying guesstimate as to whether I'll have enough charge to attack after I've travelled all the way across the planet or not, that's pretty much the definition of brick-wall style learning curve.
If there was a way of automatically calculating it, and colouring the part of the line where I'd have less then 25% charge to attack with on a move order for most of my ships, and assuming that all ships had about the same amount of energy-use-per-second it could tell me how many game seconds for the selected ships I could attack for at the end of the move, then I could cope with it.
But I'm starting to think the simple concept of "you need energy to keep ships operating" has quickly morphed into something that only a grognard can love.
An attempt from a different perspective, trying to reward the player rather then punishing him (and hopefully being a little simpler as a consequence):
Ships gain "overcharge" from sitting around doing nothing (or even defending) in a generator-enabled planet. Say for the sake of an argument, each minute they sit on the planet, gains them a 1% bonus for 30 seconds, maxing out at 20%/10 minutes, which ticks down every 30 seconds whilst they're running around on a planet without a generator until they're back at baseline.
The next extention to this is the number of generator energy points you've got on a planet affects the speed of overcharging. You can display a planet wide basis the ratio of (ships total energy on planet)/(generators total energy on planet) as the recharge speed, maxing out at 200% on the display planet wide.
You can combine this with mobile generator ships. Assuming that a hostile world actually has a -200% drain (which should be the inverse of the bonus above if I've got my math right), then add the mobile generator's bonus to it in the same way you handle the static generators. That way you can slow the decrease of your bonus, plus it gives you an incentive to quickly take out the AI command center and build one of your own, even if it's risky since you can then get an instant bonus from having your stack of generators actually giving you a positive value, rather then negative (since there's no -200% penalty, or whatever), so it gives you a small help to clean up the world that you've essentially conquered, just not wiped out all the enemies yet.
Especially important for early game when bombers vs a force field can take way too long.
There's other tricks you can do with this as well, like having the computer prioritise charging up lower-charged units, by cutting back the charge to the better charged ones and boosting the under charged ones more, so that your attack/defensive force will even out it's overall charge level quicker leading to less stuff the player has to mentally juggle around in combat.
Hopefully this all made sense.
