Wednesday 12 September 2012

Game Mechanics Revealed: EPS Flow Regulators



Welcome to the second installment of Game Mechanics Revealed.  Star Trek Online is filled with vagaries; the devs are not forthcoming with clarification; the forums are a source of confusing and contradictory knowledge; the chats are rife with conjecture and misinformation.  In this series, I will attempt to find the answers and dispel the myths that plague our game.

My partner in science is the ever patient and ever enthusiastic @JeanLPicard.

Game Mechanics Revealed: EPS Flow Regulators

Many sources on the forums insist that adding EPS Flow Regulator consoles will help mitigate the large energy drain of cruisers firing many beam arrays at the same time.  It has also been discussed in chat that these consoles boost the Starship Electro-Plasma Systems captain skill and therefore provide a benefit to Emergency Power to Subsystem abilities.

Premise

1) EPS Flow Regulators either prevent energy drain or boost power return time when firing weapons, therefore increasing damage output of a cruiser firing many beam weapons at once.

2) EPS Flow Regulators improve Starship EPS skill and therefore boost effectiveness of EPtS, EPtW etc.

Experiment

1) The aggressor cruiser is armed with 8 polaron beam arrays.  Polaron is chosen because its proc has the least effect on survivability in a stationary test. At 5 km range and 125 weapons power, the aggressor fires broadside at the target until the target is destroyed.  The test is repeated with 4 EPS Flow Regulator mk xi consoles.

2) Basic test of power boost when using EPtW1 in Earth orbit.

Results
1)
Time to Kill Galaxy Dreadnought (seconds)
Test
Control
4x EPS Flow Regulator
1
47.5
49.5
2
50.0
49.0

2) Base weapons power is 52. After EPtW1 activation weapons power is 80, regardless of how many EPS Flow Regulator consoles are used, and tooltip damage readout remains equal as well.

Conclusion

This console does nearly nothing.  Other than switching quickly between power modes, and maybe coming out of full impulse, there is practically no benefit to EPS Flow Regulators at all.  There are much better consoles out there, various Armors and Platings, SIF Generators, RCS Accelerators, use engineering slots for the Borg Console, buy some of the fancy specialty reward pack consoles off the exchange (subspace jump is pretty useful and affordable), do anything other than EPS Flow Regulators.

No comments:

Post a Comment