Power Distribution On Your Flagship

What Is Power Management?

• In the upper left corner of your screen, right under your hull health and shields, there are now three power meters: one for weapons, one for shields, and one for engines.
  • These all start out balanced, at 4 bars out of 8, which is the same as it has always been (aka no multipliers).
  • You can now reduce any of the meters down to 1 minimum, or up to 8 maximum, so long as you work within the constraints of the 12 bars total that you have.
  • Increasing power to the weapons gives a bonus both to attack power and attack range.
  • Increasing power to the shields increases the rate at which they regenerate.
  • Increasing power to the engines increases the rate at which your ship can move, as well as improving its turning ability via extra thrusters (thematically speaking).

Power Management Table

	Weapons		Shields		Engines
Level	Damage	Range	Regeneration	Damage Taken	Speed
1	30%	90%	10%	130%	50%
2	65%	93%	50%	120%	65%
3	85%	96%	75%	110%	80%
4	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%
5	120%	103%	150%	90%	115%
6	140%	106%	200%	80%	130%
7	160%	109%	250%	70%	160%
8	180%	112%	300%	60%	180%

Why Does It Sometimes Automatically Change During My Turns?

• The power management stuff has some handy built-in automatic management to save you from having any inclination to try and fiddle with them every turn to be "optimal" (we're looking at you, manufacturies and energy producers in AI War).
  • If you are not attacking that turn, and your shields are not at full, it redirects as much of your attack energy as possible to your shields to help them recharge.
  • Previously, automatic power management would reduce your shields automatically if your shields were already at full. This made (mostly) sense when all the shield power affected was how fast shields recharged, but now that it also affects shield damage resistance, it's definitely not a good thing. So power is never automatically diverted away from the shields anymore.
  • If you did not give a movement order to your ship, then it redirects your movement energy in as even a split as possible between your attack and shields.
  • Why does nothing redirect to movement? Because by this point you have already set your course, and redirecting movement would only mess up your course.
  • All of this also helps to make your boosts very pleasingly contextual, because for the bulk of turns you would never want to fiddle with them at all, since they would automatically do the best thing for you. But when you have a different playstyle from usual, or want extreme maneuverability at the expense of shields (hey, you expect to not get hit, let's say), then you have that power now.

Doesn't The Auto-Management Then Just Make This Pointless?

It doesn't make it so that you don't need to use the system at all -- far from it. It just means you don't need to use it frequently, which is the idea.

• Consider:
  • If you decided "I'm not going to move this turn, so I'm going to crank up my weapons and my movement all the way down."
  • And then next turn "Now I need to move again, let's put everything back!" how slow that would be.

The auto-management keeps you from having to do the obvious stuff that the game can figure out for you.

• What it doesn't do is help with things like this:
  • "I'm low on health, so I'm going to crank up my shields for a while at the expense of... hmm, let's see."
  • "I need to really be able to maneuver around very carefully through this part, so I'm willing to sacrifice... hmm, let's see."
  • "I am so OP against these guys, I want to get this over quick. Nothing to shields, all to weapons, let's do this thing."
  • Etc.

Those sorts of larger decisions are the point of the power system, not moment to moment fiddling.

The Last Federation