TL;DR
Accumulator output should scale the same as storage does as quality goes up.What?
The accumulator capacity currently scales at 100% with each new level of quality. The accumulator maximum power delivery in watts scales at 30% with each new level of quality.Either capacity should be changed to scale at 30%, or maximum wattage should be changed to scale at 100%. They should be made to scale at the same rate.
I, personally, think that power delivery should scale at 100% because of the implications of nerfing storage capacity for people's setups on Fulgura.
Why?
Grids with mixed quality levels for accumulators are very difficult to manage if you're trying to control where your power draw is coming from.Every step up in accumulator quality adds 5MJ of storage capacity. Every step up in accumulator quality also results in the accumulator being able to deliver 30% more watts of power.
Common: 5MJ - 300KW
Uncommon: 10MJ - 390MW
Rare: 15MJ - 480MW
Epic: 20MJ - 570MW
Legendary: 20MJ - 750MW
All of this makes a lot of calculations about accumulators and power usage rather complex. Most especially if you have mixed grids.
The system will pull from accumulators in proportion to what they can provide. So, if you have, say, a 1.8 MW load, and one accumulator of each quality level then after some period of time, here are the energy levels you'll see:
Common: 2.5MJ - 51%
Uncommon: 6.8MJ - 68%
Rare: 11.1MJ - 74%
Epic: 15.3MJ - 77%
Legendary: 23.9MJ - 80%
This makes calculating actual energy available on your network a nightmare. Most especially since the lower quality ones will run out faster and greatly decrease how much you can draw from the network vs. how much it's storing.
To put it a different way, at maximum power draw, here's how long each accumulator will last:
Common: 16 + 2/3 seconds
Uncommon: 25 + 25/39 seconds
Rare: 31 + 1/4 seconds
Epic: 35 + 5/57 seconds
Legendary: 40 seconds
If the output scaled the same as storage, all the accumulators would be at the same percentage and all would last the same amount of time at maximum power draw. And that would mean calculating how much time you have left would be just as easy as it is for the non-quality case.
The reason this concerns me so much is I'm trying to set up a grid that prioritizes solar power, and so also tries to prioritize drawing from accumulators. This depends on the ability to switch in other power sources when the drain rate on the accumulators suggests that you'll run out of accumulator storage before the sun comes back. But, if you have mixed accumulators on your network, this is all but impossible to do because the drain rate doesn't scale the same as the storage size.