Why Waterworld will never have hoverboards

You can't [verb] in space. Unless you've got power.

One of my favorite terms from high school chemistry, which I often use as a metaphor in my job, is limiting reagent. Mr. Bloomfield explained with peanut butter & jelly sandwiches: if you have one swimming pool full of jelly, another full of peanut butter, and two slices of bread, how many PB&Js can you make? Just two; bread is the limiting reagent.

Games have limiting reagents. Some are bottlenecks to shoulder through, others are walls that send you rebounding. Often they are resources that need balancing, decision points that draw the player into the game and reflect one's play style. Where the metaphor breaks from chemistry is that often the "limited" resource is merely the one that replenishes the slowest or has the lowest value; games aren't one chemical reaction, but rather several repeated hundreds of times.

Eve has a few of these limits: there are millions of ships to buy, but I can only snag as many as my pocketfull of in-game currency will cover. There are thousands of world, but the rate at which I visit them is bound by the ship's in-game speed and my real-world time.

And then there's power.

A capacitor readout, showing a full charge.
From NevilleSmit.com

Power management is nothing new. Wing Commander's energy weapons sit idle while recharging if you go guns blazin' and drain them faster than they replenish. Three years later, X-Wing played it differently: you need to balance power flow to engines, weapons, and shields. To recharge weapons, recover shields, or improve speed, the player-pilot must sacrifice one or both of the other resources. It was a great way to bolster my awareness of what was going on around me: could I, for example, afford to zero out my shields and weapons to race ahead to reach an injured vessel? When I got there, did I reduce my ship to a relative crawl to rebuild both my offense and defense? Or would I be better off leveraging my speed and powering my weapons, to hell with the shields because I would destroy all the TIE fighters before they got a shot at me? Although not portrayed in the game, Mass Effect's tremendously rich codex delves convincingly into balancing power use, heat dissipation, and stealth in deep space.

Eve's power readout is prominently centered at the bottom or top edge of the screen. It's a glowing circle that, unlike the icons to fire guns or launch a menu item, you can't readily intuit its meaning. I remember looking at Eve screenshots and puzzling about this persistent decorative gourd in the user interface.

Now that I know what it is, I sometimes lose sight of it. It's pretty innocuous, slowly trickling full or evaporating as I do stuff. A few times, though, I told my ship to do something right now but it didn't do it right now, and that's when all of a sudden I noticed the glowing circle had abandoned me: I'd taxed my ship too hard, and it needed to catch its breath. While getting blasted by pirates. Oops. It's insidious, too: unlike every other interface feature, the readout is strictly informative: clicking on it doesn't bring up a menu or execute an action; all I can do is hover over it and bear the gradual change in percentage, up or down. Not surprisingly, lots of skills and gear affect the rate at which this supply ebbs, fills, and even how deep its well runs.

I especially like the conceit behind Eve's power management. One of the oddball things about X-Wing is that it asks you to believe that a thousands-of-years-old pan-galactic military-industrial complex can create tiny starfighters capable of interstellar travel, but that the only way to recharge their weapons or shields is to sacrifice speed. If I deplete my lasers and fly in circles for an hour without diverting power from somewhere, the lasers won't recharge one iota. That just doesn't parse.

Eve does it a bit differently. The ships, whether gargantuan titans or tiny frigates, have tremendous engines that power their massive hulls. These engines also feed a capacitor, which stores surplus energy. Why? Each bit of equipment has an activation energy tax: it takes a few megajoules to fire that gun or to flip on that scanner. Too many simultaneous draws, the idea goes, would overwhelm the power plant, so the ship uses the capacitor for when it's needed en masse. The orb indicates how full the capacitor is, but there's a massive powerplant behind it. If I repeatedly fire full barrages, I could drain the capacitor, but it will gradually refill as the power plant sends it extra joules, tick-tick-ticking as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. It's a nice texture in the game's lore, and I look forward to finding more of them.