UI: Energy use counter

[GoodMorning]

Yes, I know it's been suggested before, but it's one of the few things which I find I still miss.

And while I'm making requests (again):
A ship-information tooltip, good for custom ship inspection and build costs/energy numbers.
And a ship editor "power drain" stat, which assumes no damage and all modules running at capacity.

Does anyone else approve?

[chwooly]

Yes Yes 1000 times yes

[GoodMorning]

Are you sure about that?

Spoiler

Sarcasm and a dry sense of humour can be conveyed so much better vocally. Oh well.

[close]

[Relli]

I approve of these kinds of changes, for sure. I can never tell when I'm going to have enough power to build something new or maintain my fleet. The numbers we get are meaningless as there's nothing to compare them to. This is especially important when custom ships become involved. Players could, if they were devoted, determine and then memorize the energy drain of specific modules, and then start counting them up over their entire fleet...but should that really be something every player is expected to do? I've been playing a great deal over the last few days, and the one thing I notice above all else (aside from how glorious the music is) is that there's simply too little information available to the player. Anything additional that's added would be extremely appreciated.

[Karsten75]

We went over that power meter so many times. There jsut is not a model that makes sense given the huge fluctuations of energy demand and supply.

[chwooly]

You already have a meter on the ship sidebar to show how full it is,  Is there anyway to do a red line like we have in CW3 that shows it is overworked and underpowered?

While this doesn't address every concern, It would give you an idea of ships that are underpowered, This would be especially useful for when you have installed amp gems and want to know if you can provide enough power to make it worth while in a particular ship

[Laithaldien]

We went over that power meter so many times. There jsut is not a model that makes sense given the huge fluctuations of energy demand and supply.

How about average energy consumption for the last minute or so (and a theoretical max if every energy-consuming thing is in use)?

[GoodMorning]

I had considered a CW3-style moving average over the last five seconds or thereabouts.

[Kharnellius]

Going to chime in my agreement on this.  Energy management is a mystery to me.  I mostly just hope I have enough but never really have any idea how much starvation for energy there is.

Hate to say it, but CW3 did it much better.  This one is very confusing.

Perhaps use a metric like how Command and Conquer did it.  An empty vertical (horizontal would be fine too) bar will fill up with green a little more every time a power plant was built.  A yellow arrow with a horizontal line super-imposed on top of the green bar would show how much energy you were currently using.  If the yellow line went up above the green bar you would be warned of low power.  Building more power plants increased the height of the green power bar.  I recall the the green bar had little tick marks as well and if you were building a lot of power plants the game would dynamically increase the scale when you reached about 75% so that the green bar would never go out the top of the screen.

[steelwing]

I second the vote for how C&C did it.  Energy usage fluctuates in this game more than in C&C, obviously, but this game could use something similar.