[Mod Idea] Elite Power Distribution Pips

[Fatsack]

As fans of space games, I'm sure you're all aware of Elite Dangerous and it's elegant and genius power pip distribution scheme:

With 6 ticks of Power to distribute, 4 ticks max in either Weapons/Engines/Shields, each pip in a system increases a certain kind of buff, with the most typical distribution being 2/2/2 or 0/2/4 to maximize for a situation (fleeing/pursuit, tanking, attacking).

I've put a bit of thought into how it could be implemented into X4:Foundations elegantly, and this is what I've come up with.

1. Each tick in Shields
1a. Increases bonus shield regen rate with 0 delay (example, at max 4 ticks, 50% regen while taking fire, 150% regen out of combat)
1b. Improves boost efficiency (shield energy drained per second of boost)
1c. Increases boost acceleration

2. Each tick in Engines
2a. Reduces Travel Engine Cooldown (Faster Travel mode activation after getting hit)
2b. Increases Travel Engine Max Speed
2c. Increases Combat engines acceleration, max speed
2d. Increased Combat Thruster Acceleration, Max Velocity (lateral movements), Ship Turning Speed

3. Each tick in weapons
3a. Increases weapon range, projectile speed, and damage falloff minimum/maximum distances
3b. Increase Fixed/Gimbal weapon DPS
3c. Increase Turret rotation and targeting speed

So an even distribution would 2/2/2 ticks in Weapon, Shields, Engines.
You could do a 1/2/3, a 0/3/3 or 0/2/4 or 1/1/4 distribution effectively. In Elite the most common is 0/2/4, where you the skill is to update which system is maximized for the current situation (pursuing/fleeing, tanking hits, attacking).

Flee = Engines and shields - Evasive maneuver to let shield regen, use shield to boost away to cooldown travel mode and get up to travel speeds, max travel mode speed to outrun pursuit.

Pursue = Engines and Weapons - Enough speed to force victim to boost, enough maneuverability to track and hit evasive opponent, enough weapon range to keep travel drive surpressed, but if you miss you will have a slower acceleration into travel mode speeds than a fleeing victim, giving them a chance to get away

Siege/Engagement = Weapons and Shields - Maximize direct combat efficiency, capitals fast enough turrets to deal with fighters, enough in-combat shield regen to nullify turrets or a number of frigates, and enough range and main battery damage to take out stations and other capitals, making main focus of capitals in fleet battles to focus each other.

Honestly this is a feature I would like to see on all ships, that you could activate on the fly when piloting (using arrow keys, like Elite). It's also a very natural way to balance things.
If implemented elegantly, it could be tied in to pilot skill, where the star-rank of the pilot decreases the delay between updating power distribution and maximizing the pips.

[arquebusx]

As fans of space games, I'm sure you're all aware of Elite Dangerous and it's elegant and genius power pip distribution scheme:

It's certainly not unique to Elite Dangerous. It is very common in space combat games.

But it does raise the obvious in-universe question:

Why aren't the ship engineers putting power sources of sufficient capacity to max out each system group on those ships in the first place? The power pip concept assumes that the ship is under-powered by design. That seems weird.

(I'd understand it if the power distribution raising engines, weapons, etc. was only temporary and had to be dropped to defaults to cool down after a while, but I'm not aware of any games that do that.)

[Fatsack]

As fans of space games, I'm sure you're all aware of Elite Dangerous and it's elegant and genius power pip distribution scheme:

It's certainly not unique to Elite Dangerous. It is very common in space combat games.

But it does raise the obvious in-universe question:

Why aren't the ship engineers putting power sources of sufficient capacity to max out each system group on those ships in the first place? The power pip concept assumes that the ship is under-powered by design. That seems weird.

(I'd understand it if the power distribution raising engines, weapons, etc. was only temporary and had to be dropped to defaults to cool down after a while, but I'm not aware of any games that do that.)

Yes that's true, what I'm referring to as elegant is the game design of 3 distribution channels with 6 pips to allocate and a maximum of 4 pips. The way this works out when maximizing 1 system necessarily handicapping 1 other system and leaving 1 at nominal, or halving the other 2 systems, and its implications for game balance and added depth to the combat is what is genius. Easy to understand, hard to master. Watching youtube videos of top tier players and watching how they manage their pips while also executing different maneuvers and strategies based on their loadouts is very impressive and satisfying. Also as a player of Elite, learning how to manage my pips, and how they interact with boost and firepower, was very rewarding to feel the tangible increase in my combat prowess when I thought of way to maximize a maneuver by manipulating the pips.

In my opinion the pips in starfield, first there are too many, it is not as easy to manipulate on the fly, and thus clunky. And second, you don't get immediate feedback as the effects from each pip is small and suddle. So big swings in effectiveness at different systems take different timings based on the number of times you have to press keys to one select the correct pip category, and the number of key presses to get a system to maximum power. Elites design of the power pip system, the choice of buffs each pip gives you, and its interaction with the flight model and weapon/shield balance is in my opinion a stroke of design genius you don't see often.

tl;dr Yes, lots of games implement pips for power distribution, but Elite's design execution of it is supreme.

I'd like to see something similar in X4, have pilot star-rank affect how effectively BOT pilots manage their pips, and bring the focus in X4 from QUANTITY of ships, to QUALITY of ships and strategy. To this end I'd also like to see more accentuation of weapons niche roles, and maybe some different options for hull and shields, to interact with resistances against different weapons, etc.

[Hector0x]

For the player yes, but for bots it seems like an unnecessary performance hog. Extra system resources which might become available in the future should first be invested into hightened AI awareness about its surroundings.
Ships are still frequently fleeing into other enemies and freighters are still getting stuck inside station geometry. This should be improved first before thinking about more micromanagement for the AI to handle

+1 for shield/armor/albedo resistance stats on ships and penetration % on weapons

[arquebusx]

I'm still very skeptical of the point of it, as far as the game universe is concerned.

For one thing (and this goofiness infects Elite Dangerous, too), ship mods exist. You can apply them to any ship and boost various elements of weapons, shields, engines - permanently. A pip system would be functionally identical to hot-swapping shipmods around.

Except you don't have to hot-swap shipmods, you can install more than one, since weapons, shields and engines are separate categories. That is basically the same as maxing out all the pips on all the systems. Again - permanently.

So what's being proposed is a half-measure between stock ship and modded ship. It implies that ship engineers universally design base ship models that are under-powered, while at the same time in the same universe it's entirely possible to not do that by applying a shipmod that (in this context) supplies the additional power necessary to run the system hotter.

The one analogue I can think of in the real world that folks would be familiar with is the difference between permanently overclocking a CPU or GPU, versus using power management settings to squeeze out more juice for a short period of time. But the reason these two options exist is because the parts can suffer from heat stress over time, making (semi-)permanent overclocking much riskier than using ad hoc power management. (A similar analogue would be engine and drivetrain car mods, with exactly the same downside.)

So maybe the pip system would make sense if using it caused hull damage in any configuration other than balanced...? Otherwise, it's just too game-y, and makes little sense within the X universe itself.