Power Armor Batteries

[Gunner15960]

I think the Power Armor Batteries need some balancing and some changes. I'm really irritated with how whenever you equip a battery in your armor, charge it, and then remove it without it discharging, the battery is completely depleted. I once spent an hour or so charging 14 mk2 battery packs to accidentally ctrl click them back into character inventory to find out that it was wasted time. Please fix this! I would also recommend the charging abilities for the batteries change. I can understand if the developers didn't intend on any of your electric grids charging your equipped batteries, but it would be cool if a battery charging port is a building we can construct to charge a battery or 2 or 4.

[PsychoticLime]

I agree that charged batteries should theoretically stay charged even out of the armor's inventory, at least in principle; but this is a situation that becomes noticeable onky if you manually swap dead batteries with charged ones, which is a level of fiddling I would personally find annoying and never do anyway. Is there another reason for this change?

[BlakeMW]

It ought to be possible to use a mechanism like hitpoints of damaged items: each battery has a charge between 0 and full, but when you transfer them into your inventory you get a single stack with the charge averaged out. This way you never gain or lose charge by transferring batteries around, it merely gets redistributed.

[mrvn]

Maybe for batteries it is too much fiddling around but for roboports it's essential. You have to remove the roboport when boarding a train or you loose all your personal robots while driving around past ghosts.

[Aeternus]

The problem, the way I see it, is that batteries just load so damn slow, especially the MK2 variant. They are effective when charged, but not so much when you need to rapidly charge them. Why is there no means to have the power armor draw energy from the factory power grid (provided you're in a powered area) and charge it that way? Would be cute if you could take along a solar panel or 4, a couple of accumulators and a substation and set up a remote charging point for yourself while you do whatever it is you want to do far away from your factory...

[mrvn]

Or have an assembler taking depleted batteries and output charged batteries.

[bobucles]

Wiping the battery charge is a balancing mechanic for the very reason OP has tried to abuse. A backpack full of batteries represents unlimited power and armor modules simply aren't intended to work that way. Otherwise what's to stop you from doing the same with shields or roboports or any other item?

[Gunner15960]

Wiping the battery charge is a balancing mechanic for the very reason OP has tried to abuse. A backpack full of batteries represents unlimited power and armor modules simply aren't intended to work that way. Otherwise what's to stop you from doing the same with shields or roboports or any other item?

I don't believe it is an issue of abuse due to the fact of the equipment grid limitation of the armor. I may have 1 shield and every other spot filled with batteries so I don't concern myself with it running outta juice, but I limit my shield capacity. More shields=less room for batteries so it drains faster.

I agree that charged batteries should theoretically stay charged even out of the armor's inventory, at least in principle; but this is a situation that becomes noticeable onky if you manually swap dead batteries with charged ones, which is a level of fiddling I would personally find annoying and never do anyway. Is there another reason for this change?

I would agree with bobucles on the unlimited factor if your "hot swap" of batteries was a thing. I understand it is tedious to change batteries one by one, but if you have like 3 stacks of 50 fully charged mk2 batteries to auto replace when depleted, you will be unstoppable.

[4xel]

[...]you manually swap dead batteries with charged ones, which is a level of fiddling I would personally find annoying and never do anyway. Is there another reason for this change?

The thing is, appart for the not so usefull night vision, the only useful appliction of modular armor before you get portable nuclear power is personal roboport, and the way to go around lack of power is to mine by hand the bot trying to recharge at your armor (so they're always running on their free buffer). That is a blatant game exploit and requires even more fiddling.

Having a meaningful way to charge batteries make a lot more sense and less fiddling, having a meaingful way to recharge armors you don't wear equally makes a lot of sense and barely requires any fiddling at all.

It ought to be possible to use a mechanism like hitpoints of damaged items: each battery has a charge between 0 and full, but when you transfer them into your inventory you get a single stack with the charge averaged out.

Facilitating stacking is not even needed.

Why is there no means to have the power armor draw energy from the factory power grid (provided you're in a powered area) and charge it that way?

The reasoning behind this feature, or rather lack thereof, is that it would be OP. And it's complete BS reasoning.

Wiping the battery charge is a balancing mechanic for the very reason OP has tried to abuse. A backpack full of batteries represents unlimited power and armor modules simply aren't intended to work that way. Otherwise what's to stop you from doing the same with shields or roboports or any other item?

In no way would it be abusable. You can do anything a modular/power armor with charged batteries can do with a roboport, a stack of construction bot, a logistic chest, and a stack of walls and turrets (as well as some blueprints and a connection to your grid). It just takes a couple more clicks.

That's supposed to be a game about automation and that is some BS RPG kind of limitation.

If you had a way to charge batteries from your grid in a given lapse of time (I'd say bewtween 15 and 60 mins, possibly with losses during charging, and leaks when using or when not charging), portable nuclear reactor would still be a valuable improvement worth developping, but there would at least be some sense to using batteries. It would also enable new playstyle rewarding players thinking more than 15 mins ahead.


The only remotely good reasons I can find to defend the decision of letting batteries suck are

• It should theoretically teach people how to use construction bot, that is, using a real roboport
• It teases new players about things they still require research to unlock

[BlakeMW]

Wiping the battery charge is a balancing mechanic for the very reason OP has tried to abuse. A backpack full of batteries represents unlimited power and armor modules simply aren't intended to work that way. Otherwise what's to stop you from doing the same with shields or roboports or any other item?

Unlimited power? Try limited power, only until you run out of charged batteries. And you'd have to manually charge the things by swapping them in and out of an armor with power source. And it's scarcely a grievous violation of the laws of physics to be able to swap out depleted batteries for charged batteries .

And you can already do things like this. For example, sometimes I've made suits with like 12 MK batteries and a ton of energy shields, I swap out the energy shields for reactors to charge the batteries, then swap out the reactors for the shields when it's time for biters to die. You're basically invulnerable in a setup like this as long as the charge lasts. But it's already borderline too tedious to bother doing and annoying that it takes up inventory slots. "Exploiting" the ability to swap charged batteries would just be more tedium for not much benefit, you can't make better power armor setups that way because reactor-swapping already allows for maximally powerful setups, you just allow a longer run-time in exchange for a longer and more tedious recharging time.

[Kyralessa]

Instead of them keeping their charge or getting completely drained, what about having them drain slowly, say about 1% per second or something?

That way there would still be the restriction that you can't carry around charged batteries, but they wouldn't immediately lose all their charge if you accidentally remove them.

[bobucles]

It's not allowed because it's not fun to make hot swap batteries a mandatory mechanic. You may argue that "it's not mandatory" but if it exists then it exists to be used. It's not a fun thing to use.

The only thing that needs to get fixed are personal solar panels. They are simply awful and are literally more expensive per output than pocket fusion in every way. That is completely against the Factorio formula of low tech being cheaper than high tech which is used for literally every other thing.

[xfir01]

It really feels like there's a hole between personal solar panels and the portable fusion reactor. Maybe some kind of gas-powered generator that runs on flamer fuel?