[Suggestion] 3 Power Settings, On, Off, and Conserve

There should be 3 power setting to reduce player micro. On, Off, and Conserve.

On consumes even when negative, and tries to divide it's share of the pie.

Off turns it off until ordered back on.

Conserve turns it off if power is below a threshold, similar to how radar ceases function, except this turns power off when in the red but not completely out yet (15 percent?), and turns it back on when it goes back in the green (80 percent).

EXPANDED: This is another trickier idea, this required game engine hooks to be added and changed, some labor intensive work for devs. However, it would be nice if there was a "priority" setting for power too.

Priority means in case of a stall, it runs at full efficiency, and everything else runs even more reduced. The build efficiency at top shows the "non-priority" efficiency percent, anything priority runs at 100%. If too many things are on priority, priority is prorated as well, or perhaps if easier priority is simply disabled and priority stalls as much as non-priority, or the third option is giving priority an efficiency percent and anything non-priority is left with 0 resources so their build efficiency is simply 0 and they stop (it is possible to have a 0 economy and if divided the game could calculate non-priority having 0 resources available.

Because it would be nice to 1-click priority a single project and say to hell with the rest of the projects if that will win you the game. However, it requires the ability for the economy to give first dibs to economy drain to priority, and then calculate the "economy remaining after priority takes from the top", then apply that to everything else and calculate it properly in economy bar. Priority would thus be a huge workload for devs to add. However, Conserve is imperative and devs should add it plzty.

BOTTOM LINE, conserve will save people 20 clicks, priority will save people 20 clicks more. This is essential shtuff. Like my post, tag jables, do what you must.

When I need to conserve Energy I select all factories and press pause. 2 clicks. Then 2 more to start them back. If it's real bad... It often gets real bad, I will stop everything that isn't building energy.

Seems like a good idea.

Eh, 1 that is quickkeys, vanilla ones but still not mouse interface. Secondly, that requires your reaction, whereas the factory would manage it's own power otherwise. It takes 2 clicks to set it up pre-emptively with my idea, compared to 2 clicks to set up, possibly requiring more clicks to fine-tune, and 2 clicks to undo later.

My more complex "priority" idea just means giving 2 clicks to the power-builders instead of hunting down every other fabber or consumer and giving them the click and unclick.

Yeah I'm gonna nitpick cause I'm against automation like this. What if the only place you could get energy was in orbit and your orbital factory stops working on your solar arrays. Gg

1) don't use conserve if you don't want or suspect it to be inferior with your own gameplay.

2) don't set an orbital factory to conserve or if you do unset it when it starts building eco (what a lame thing, a factory able to build eco).

3) To be honest, this may be entirely possible already, to have a client side mod detect energy economy, when it falls below 25% it shuts off group 1 automatically, and when it goes above 85% it turns them back on, and it has an added power setting icon that all it does is assign structure to group 1 when you set it to "conserve". Then you get into the "lets ban client side mods from competitive play" arguement, and then its like "prove i'm using it biach", and then it becomes an arms race... this seems deja vu to another thread...

That is a very, very, VERY odd case.
If that really happens you propably already lost the game way before conserving kicked in.

Back to the OP:
That would in any case require a priority system. "Conserve" means "don't draw energy before all higher priority systems had thier share this Sim tick/energy tick.
Wich in turn could significantly up the cost of doing the energy part of the simulation.
And I think they might want to add dynamic power sources from TA (Solar Panels and Windplants) again.

So the complexity could quickly snowball into something like this (I wrote it for space engineers, but it shows how complex such "simple" stuff can get quickly):
http://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/discussions/2/35219681602765336/

TL;DR:
I agree it is good. I would totally like to have have it.
But it could cost a lot more programming and simulation time then is feasible right now. Especially with stuff like dynamic power sources maybe being added in the near to far future.

@zgrssd TA's solar panels weren't actually dynamic, they were planned to be originally though.

20 E/s set.

I like this conservation idea.

I like the idea of a single button that pauses everything non-energy construction related, but preserves all build queues. This could really help to get out of stalls easier and make multiplayer a less rage inducing experience.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but that part is already in PA, isn't it? Turn off the power for fabbers and factories and they'll stop building, but preserve the queue. Turn the power back on and they start where they left off.

Good idea, OP.

Yes it is in game but idea is to make it semi automatic.

Yes, I know, but I was replying specifically to philoscience's post, who I think just talked about turning stuff of while keeping building queue's. Hence why I said "that part".

Yes, I think if you turn off power for factories the build is preserved. However this ability could be extended to fabbers so that they will continue whatever build queues you had for them after you resolve the energy crisis, and the whole thing could automated to a single button instead of needing to select what you want to deactivate.

It also works for fabbers though. I had a team game once where I had accidentally done that. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why my commander and fabbers refused to build even though I could queue up everything just fine. It turned out that somehow their power had been turned off. I'm just talking about the on/off part here, not OP's idea of automatically doing that.

TIL!

That turning power on commander is great idea for a prank in coop game. Next time when me and my buddy get drunk while playing coop i will troll him.

My biggest problem when it gets real bad, is figuring out where the energy (or metal) usage is. I'd love a heat map overlay of recourse usage so I can quickly ID what is using up all my energy / metal.

I don't think that this is a good idea, for a couple of reasons.

Attacking somebody's power to cause them problems is a very powerful and important thing. If you can set radar (for example) to automatically use full power at all times then it negates some of the value of raiding power. The point of a raid on power is to force the opponent to scrabble around firefighting, therefore breaking his flow and putting yourself in a stronger position.

If there is an option to manually set priorities like this, then it will mean two things. Firstly that the strength of raiding an opponent's power is diminished, and secondly that it will become something you have to do, or you will lose. Much like adjacency in SupCom, there's no skill, or strategy, or choice involved in it. There will be an outright best way to arrange your priority list, and you can either do it that way or lose to somebody who has has done it that way.

It doesn't add depth, and it does add complexity.

I agree with eukanuba ...except the part where he dissed adjacency