I started thinking about the benefits associated with various batteries, and how we have this neat trade-off in terms of battery total energy and speed of wormhole jumps.

I think there's some interesting gameplay to be created out of battery construction.

Leaving the regen rates alone, since a lot is balanced on the back of that...

Heavy:

Up capacity to 800 (Good luck if you need to jump multiple wormholes, but in single sector fighting, this becomes the boss, also allows double quadrail shots)

Fast Charge:

Drop capacity to 100 (This becomes THE battery for long distance travel, put it in just about any ship and as soon as you hit a wh, you're basically through it)

Ultra Charge:

Increase capacity to 400 (becomes a versatile battery, capable of powering a quadrail, but will still lose long range races to the FC)

You forgot about grid power, these should be added in as new batteries and balanced around with grid power.

Shape may have missed grid power.

3 ravens or 2 widowmakers..... /drool

No, didn't miss grid power,

Grid power was a fix to negate the possibility of dealing with multiple extremely powerful weapons.

There's not interesting balance there, more grid = better

Here I wanted to point out that we could make our batteries fulfill more interesting roles just by tweaking the capacity, because of the time to charge, vs full capacity balance.

It'd be nice if some of the other batteries (like the Extreme Drain) that already exist were more... available too...

Ha. I have one Extreme Drain battery, obtained after an extremely annoying/boring and long series of missions. It is not worth using regularly or creating more of.

That said, +1 to all these changes. Maybe make FC 150.

+1. Give the Extreme Drain something to make it worth it, maybe forty charge but a thousand capacity, or sixty charge (eh) and a couple hundred capacity.

In a related thought....

The ability to combine multiple powerful weapons might be what is needed to derail flares as the go-to weapon for furballs, negating the perceived need by some to "nerf flares".

I think I like Savet's idea, and that it should be discussed in another thread.

As for the battery ideas, I love it. Its been a while since I've used Heavy batts, I stopped using them for versatility purposes since the batteries aren't diverse enough to bother fooling with them. I think if we did change the capacities it would benefit the game and make for some interesting setups.

+1

Actually extreme drain is really, in my view, only useful for the current iteration of tridents if you use the default turrets. But still then its not really that useful.

Yeah actually more battery options might change the flare dynamics around a little bit. If people can get a more useful battery for not taking a double flare setup because of grid power, it might promote other setups and it's developmentally more simple I would think.

It merits further discussion.

1+

I don't have any objections to raising the capacity of the ultra charge or heavy charge, but the fast charge is perfect just the way it is. A light repair module + a large port repair module take 246 units of energy to charge. Reducing the charge of a fast charge would make dual repair modules a useless setup.

No, it would just require an ultra charge.

Some dev input on this would be great.

-1 as proposed.

Powercells must also differ in GRID, despite OP don't wanna address that. Indeed, makes no sense that the lightest battery can support as many equipament/weapons as the largest one.

in real electric/eletronic world there are two defining stats, voltage and amperage. VxA=Watts. For both generators and batteries, as capacity increase it produces more Amperes, not more volts, fixed as eletric/eletronic devices require it to be fixed.

Our Powercells are generators coupled with battery. The generator relates to Charge Rate, while the battery relates to Capacity. The Grid is the Amperes, or the maximum amount of energy it can produce/deliver at any given moment. Contraring physics, size doesn't matter, and Grid is fixed as 20 for every single battery except Extreme Drain, that is even smaller, despite the name suggest that it should deliver more energy than others when request, but short-life charge. Vo-wiki Powercell table

Instead of this capacity-only change, what I'd change in powercells now would be Grid, making:
Extreme: 32 grid
Heavy: 28 grid
Ultra: 24grid
FCC, Medium: 20
Light: 16
Free: 12

Note that giving more grid, immediate power, results that battery drains much faster under larger loads, and weapon's Grid should work as a multiplier for power usage.

Episode 32: "Where Alloh fails to realize the gameplay implications of a suggestion"

I noticed the implications of OP, Shape, but I don't have to like or agree to that...

Alloh, here's what you failed to realize:

A) grid was already brought up, and since more grid is simply better, I pointed out that this was not the balance issue I was concerned with.

You have added a relationship between grid and drain under your scheme. This is a fine idea, but totally off-topic. I already stated in my original post that I was staying away from drain, because of how much re-balancing was involved if you change it.

Since Capacity has its own inherent set of tradeoffs (jump speed vs weapon energy) , Capacity can be balanced on its own, INDEPENDENTLY of grid and drain.

There is no reason for me to tackle every part of the battery at once, as you attempt to do.

When you find this kind of set of trade-offs inside of a system, it assists the game designer by allowing itself to be balanced alone. Balancing several things at once is often considerably more difficult.

B) MOST builds are currently unconstrained by grid, so it is only builds involving exotic weapons would be added to the game by this change.

If you changed it so that other builds WERE constrained by grid, you would simply be removing builds from the game.

Since grid (unlike capacity) is not a resource that can be used up at some rate (You either have enough grid to leave the dock or you don't), the impact on builds is that they either exist or don't exist. With Capacity, you can tweak it to make builds more or less effective.

Sorry for the (very) belated reply. After reading through the Superlight thread and realizing Inc wants documented debates on proposed tweaks, I realized I was not above bringing up this thread. As the author of the Extreme Drain missions, let me say when I tested them on the Test Server I thought the 48 regeneration would make up for the 5 grid... a couple years' experience shows it doesn't.

Put 24 grid on the Extreme Drain, and I'll change a line of text in the mission describing it. That's my 2cr.

There's one thing Shape's tweaks do not take into account: the license at which each powercell becomes available. The natural progression is Free, Light, Medium, Heavy, Fast Charge. Would this affect the proposed tweaks at all?

The Ultra Charge, Hive Fast Charge, and Extreme Drain are three rare(tm) batteries, and I think these could be tweaked more easily without upsetting the opening game balance.

Hive FCs aren't so rare if you kill a lot of hive bots. They drop in droves if you know which ones to kill, but then they're not supposed to be rare.

The Extreme Drain on the other hand is a huge pain to get, and really isnt worth getting as it stands.

+1 to the 24 grid idea There's some loadouts that could use that pretty well.