I"m interested in more feedback on the Omniframe design doc. Please post it here if you have it.
P.S. It's a good meme
I would like to suggest a dual power setting.
Nominal power would be the minimum baseline requirement to function, in other words it is the idle power draw when the part is not in active use. At no point can you build an omniframe with a nominal power requirement greater than the total power available.
Full Power would be the power draw needed to recharge the system back to ready status, or to power a system during active use. Because not every component of an omniframe may be used at the same time, the actual power draw on the frame will vary. Unlike Nominal power, full power *can* go over the maximum power output of the omniframe, *but* with potentially painful consequences.
Anytime the power requirement of all components shifts above the maximum output, your omniframe would operate at reduced efficiency in direct proportion to the missing power. For example, say your nominal power requirements is 8000 watts, and your reactor core is capable of outputting a maximum of 10,000 watts, but all at once you fire off all of your abilities while your shields are under fire and you are jump jetting away as fast as you can. Suddenly your power requirements jump to 15,000 watts. Your omniframe cannot supply 15,000 watts, only 10,000, which means that every item that is attempting to utilize full power will only recharge at 66% (10k/15k) efficiency. (Note that you could use any other method of determining penalty, this is merely the simplest)
For energy weapons that feed off your suit that would mean 2/3rd fire rate, your jumpjets would only provide 2/3rds as much thrust, shields would regen 1/3rd slower, and abilities would recharge slower, or do less damage, or both! Naturally you may not want your shields to recharge slower, even if you do go over the maximum power requirements. Thankfully there is a choice you can make to fix that. One option that each component has is to operate in
protected mode. In protected mode the components nominal power is set to the maximum full power rate, which means it will never experience slowdown but will be taking up reserve power that might be used elsewhere.
It might seem like the best idea would be to set everything possible to protected mode. However, as you get closer and closer to the cap it becomes more likely that any one or two actions will trigger the power penalty. In the above example, firing off any ability, or using your jumpjets will not incur a penalty because you have 2,000 watts of reserve power to play with. However if you protected your jumpjets and shields, suddenly your nominal power might jump to say 9500 watts, and you only have 500 reserve power. Where before you might have gotten away with using 2 abilities while on the ground without a penalty, now using even one could cause a slowdown.
There is a second reason you may not want to use protected mode on everything, and that is because it would still be possible to include the power allotment function to supply the reserve power available in your suit to overcharging your modules. The more reserve power you have on hand the more of a boost you will receive.
This system would require each player to decide exactly how much risk they want to incur. You can create a build who's max power usage never goes above the reactor output and as such will never have any penalties, or you can go the opposite route and make a high risk build where your components have large max power requirements and do much greater damage, but because of penalties potentially leave you extremely vulnerable. Again, it would all come down to player choice and play style.
