A Bit About Combat Boosters

What are they

They are kind of like drugs, they enhance certain modules or attribute of your ship but with the risk of some penalties. We've been calling them combat boosters for now since the modules and attribute they tend to enhance allow you to perform better in combat.

Penalties? What penalties?

Similar to drugs in real life, the boosters have side effects. Before you consume the booster you should know what bonus it gives you and the list of potential side effects. It's a crap shoot, you get lucky and suffer none of the side effects (or ones you don't care about), but you could also be unlucky and suffer all of the side effects.

How long will the effects last?

It isn't really set in stone but the timeframe is in hours not days or weeks.

Can you give us an example of usage?

Sure can. Lets say we have a booster, let's call it a "Standard Blue Pill Booster". The description says it improves your shield tanking ability by giving you a 20% shield boost bonus. There is also a list of side effects that may or may not occur, including:

• 20% penalty to capacitor capacity
• 20% penalty to shield capacity
• 20% penalty to turret optimal range and
• 20% penalty to missile explosion velocity

There is a 25% chance for each side effect to hit me. I'm in a Raven at the time so I'm not going to worry too much about that optimal range penalty. The explosion velocity penalty isn't all that great but the capacitor and shield penalty can hit me pretty hard. I decide to take the booster anyway, nothing ventured, noting gained right? I get two penalties, the turret optimal one and the capacitor capacity.

Numbers and side effects may change but you should get the main idea how they work.

What about manufacturing?

The manufacturing process is pretty straightforward but interesting. First, you need to gather the ingredients at a starbase. There you can perform a chemical reaction to create the booster chemical. Latly, you need to "finalize" so it is ready for consumption, something you can do that either at a starbase or an outpost.

What materials are needed?

To make the booster chemical, you need certain gas cloud chemicals and common empire commodities. To actually finalize the reaction you need a recipe, similar to reactions involving moon materials. All materials will be attainable in 0.0 COSMOS regions and empire space.

That doesn't sound to complicated

Well its not if you're content with creating just a simple booster. Boosters will be available in various strengths. If you want to create the most basic booster you only need resources from a single 0.0 COSMOS region. However if you want to make something slightly more advanced, you need materials from more regions making the process a lot more complicated.

Can you give us an example of the manufacturing process?

Lets say we want to manufacture a "Standard Blue Pill Booster" as we've used in the example above. First I need to gather all the requirements:

• A reaction recipe which I can get from 0.0 COSMOS region,
• a gas cloud that spawns in a 0.0 COSMOS region and
• the catalyst which is an empire commodity.

I can take all this to a starbase and get a chemical reaction going in a forthcoming new starbase structure. The outcome of this reaction is a booster material.

It isn't however ready for consumption yet. The material is ready it just hasn't been packaged or encapsulated yet. We can either move the "unrefined" booster to a manufacturing starbase structure and create the "ready to use" booster or we can do it at an outpost.

What about the more advanced ones?

The process is really just an extension of making a simple one, except more complicated reactions where "unrefined" booster compounds from diferent regions need to be mixed.

This is going to be overpowered, its mass panic time!!!111

Well first off I haven't mentioned any numbers or any specific booster effects other than the hypothetical 'Standard Blue Pill Booster'. We want boosters to be a bonus rather than a required PvP component and they need to be balanced with their relatively complicated manufacturing process. Ideally, they would not be so powerful that everyone wants to have them to PvP but good enough so they are worth manufacturing.