7.5 suggestion: Boost recharges more slowly while shield is recharging

[Falcrack]

I was thinking it would be good to have a bit of a compromise between the old system, where boost directly drained shield energy, and the new system, where shield strength and boost is completely disconnected.

I think the new system makes it too easy to simply boost your way out of danger. But the old system was far too unforgiving. I think a compromise might work. I suggest that if you are taking hits that drain you shields, you can still boost without draining your shields using your boost pool, but your boost pool will recharge more slowly while shields are also recharging. So if you land hits on your opponent, they can still boost without directly draining their shields, but their ability to keep boosting while their shields are low will become diminished.

[Raptor34]

Honestly what I would have done, though it's probably too late to suggest it now, is unify weapon, shield and boost energy, like how shield and boost was once unified.
Then I would have each ship have a default safety threshold. Which means it locks in 1/3 of the energy for each of the three systems.
What this means for the AI and general player is that you have more or less separate pools for each of the 3 systems. But for advanced players, you can instead choose to run it as a unified pool instead, so like you can boost away all your weapons and shield energy for instance. Or keep firing until your shields and boost are depleted.
So like if the shit has really hit the fan, and you are no longer shooting at anything, you can direct that power to boost instead to gtfo. Or if say you nestled into some nice little nook on a Xenon capital and are going to slowly snipe their hardpoints, you can redirect your boost energy to weapons instead.

Note though, I'm not suggesting power allocation like say X-wing or whatever, just a unified pool instead. See previously how shield and boost energy was a single pool. And of course, safety thresholds which hard locks energy to specific systems unless the player disables it.

[Eyeklops]

While I'm not super enthusiastic about the full decoupling of shield and boost (from a tactical perspective), I'm not sure how I feel about coupling the charge rate of shields/boost together.

When looking at it from a player-piloting side, my issue with boost & shield being pooled together (original X4 style) was getting alpha-strike'd or group focused in a small or medium ship and instantly loosing my ability to disengage via boosting. Watching the hull get shredded away while being a shieldless, boostless, and helpless sitting duck doesn't feel great.

I envisioned a system where boost & shield were pooled together, but the last 20~30% was always reserved for an emergency boost. Boosting would still remove shield and need to be used tactically. Taking hits would still remove boost, just not all boost.

That said, I get the feeling the beta shield/boost mechanic is probably set-in-stone and won't see any further dramatic changes. It's likely they would implement the coupling of shield/boost charge before other solutions.

[vvvvvvvv]

I was thinking it would be good to have a bit of a compromise between the old system,

I played Rebirth recently, and would rather not see any tie between boost and shields in any form ever again. I can only see it as a bad design decision.

To make a more interesting interplay with ship systems you'd need to model them, recreating elite dangerous approach. Where you have powerplant, power consumption, and systems have priorities. But that almost certainly is not happening. Because there's a lot of work and little benefit from it. TInkering with this in ED never really contributed much to gameplay.