Power Levels

Power Levels are a scientific topic that hardly ever can be finished in this game.

You have 4 power system which of course run best if the power levels are high.

• Weapons (you should always keep this as high as posible since your weapons consume this power; it also helps to understand that you do alot more damage if your power level is high for each shot the game calculates the damage based on your current weapon power)
  

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  The Weapons subsystem affects the potency of your starships energy weapons. Increasing or decreasing power into this subsystem will have either a positive or negative effect on the damage modifier of the energy weapon. This subsystem does not affect Torpedo Launchers or Mine Launchers.

  
  

  If a player has 50 power in this subsystem it will allow each of your ships energy weapons to cause 100% of their natural DPS. Every additional point of power applied to this subsystem will increase overall DPS by 2% per weapon. As an example, running 100 weapons power will yield a 100% bonus to weapon DPS giving an overall amount of 200% of the energy weapons base damage. However, every point under 50 in this system will lower overall DPS of each energy weapon by 2%. This means that if a player uses 25 power in the weapons subsystem then every energy weapon on the ship will only cause 50% of their original DPS.

  
  

  The weapons subsystem power levels are capped at 125 power. Any extra power to this subsystem will not increase damage, but it does act as a power loss buffer.

• Shields (shield power increases your shield strength, shield hardness and also your shield heals; the higher your shield energy the higher is your protection)
  

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  The Shields subsystem controls how effective your Shield Array is at regenerating shield power every six seconds. It does not affect how much shield strength your shield facings have.

  
  

  50 power into this system represents 100% shield regeneration as given on your Shield Array tooltip. Every additional point of power applied to this subsystem will increase your shield regeneration value by 4%. Every point of power under 50 will reduce your shield regeneration by 4%.

  
  

  Higher shield power also improves shield resistance, from 4.2% shield resistance at 15 power, to 36.4 percent resistance at 130 power, according to the formula:(shield power/357.12)

• Engines (engine power has direct influence on your ships speed and on your turn rates; running low on engine power slows you down and prevents that you can turn your ship -> this has also negative impact on your ships defense values)
  

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  Power into the Engines subsystem will modify your starship's speed. Having 50 power in this subsystem will allow the ship to move at its base speed. Every extra point of power applied to this subsystem adds an additional 2% speed. As an example, running 100 power into engines will increase your base speed by 100%. For every point of power below 50, your base speed will be reduced by 2%. Increasing your starship's speed will also increase your starship's defense rating.

  
  

  Additional power to engines does not affect warp travel; it is strictly impulse engine power.

• Auxiliary (Aux power is important in many ways. In Aux2bat builds it is vital element which transfers aux power to the other 3 power systems to boost them. But Aux power also has influence on the ship performance in different ways (e.g. in combination with traits).
  

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  The Auxiliary subsystem affects Science Space bridge officer abilities as well as your starships cloak detection (also known asPerception) and if applicable, the potency of your cloaking system.

  
  

  Every point of power above 50 into the Auxiliary systems will increase your Perception stat by 2% and increase the potency of Science abilities by 2%. Every point of power under 50 in the Auxiliary subsystem will do the reverse and drop the modifier of abilities, perception and cloak effectiveness by 0.6% and 2% respectively.

  
  

  In addition, Engineering abilities that use the Auxiliary subsystem, such as Auxiliary to Structural, are affected by the power level in the Auxiliary subsystem.

  
  

Most important and also most difficult task is to keep all power levels high.
Perfect would be to have 125 weapon power and all other power systems constantly over at least 75.
One reason for doing so is the overall ship performance but also make use of the [AMP] function of some Fleet Warp Cores and also ALL Reputation Warp Cores (Reputation Warp Cores get the [AMP] when you upgrade them to Ultra Rare)

[AMP] increases your Weapon damage by 3.3% for each subsystem which has more than 75 power.
So under perfect conditions you can gain 4 x 3.3% Weapon Damage.
13,2% additional Weapon Damage is clearly a good motivation to take a closer look on power levels.

In the game you will encounter equipment with several mods like [EPS] or [EFF]. These have influence on your power transfers from one system to another.
EPS is a general bonus on the transfer rate from one power system to another.
EFF is small boost to the power system with the lowest power setting.
Both are very important as you can use them to increase your power levels where needed.

You also might encounter Warp Cores or Singularity Cores which have a [W->S], [S->W], [W->A], etc.
That are power transfer modifiers telling that a specific amount of power is getting transfered from one system to another (without that the source system is losing that power)
W->S would transfer 7.5% of your current weapon power to your shield systems without reducing the weapon power.

Due to possible EPS mods you might have raised your power transfer rates to lets say 200% which means that your shield would not only receive 7.5% of that weapon power... it would receive 15% instead.

As you can see you can play with the modifiers to reach the power levels that you need.

on the way to perfection

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The Following overview shows how power levels work and can be calculated.

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Ship Power Levels

Weapons power.

Weapons power increases the damage dealt by your energy weapons. An energy weapon that fires at 100 power deals twice as much as an energy weapon that fires at 50 power. Torpedos and mines are not affected by weapons power, so from this point on, for brevity's sake, I'll be using weapons to refer to energy weapons. Weapon power tooltip is based on a power level of 50.

You can 'overcap' weapons power, or get more in there than the cap of 125. 125 power is the 'soft cap' for weapons power. Going over that does not increase base damage - all of the calculations on the damage dealt by a weapon is based on your current weapons power of 1-125 (at 0 weapons power, it won't fire). The 'hard cap' for weapons power actually depends on the weapon.

The hard cap for weapons power (the point at which no more is effectively stored is a bit in-depth - TL;DR version will follow.

To start with, the first important thing is power drain. Power drain: The Experimental Proton Weapon drains 5 weapons power; turrets and the kinetic cutting beam drain 8 weapons power; beam arrays, beam banks, and dual cannons drain 10 power; dual heavy cannons drain 12 power; and the first weapon in a cycle to fire and the Experimental Romulan Plasma Beam Array do not drain power.

Firing cycles: every weapon has two basic parts to their firing cycle: the fire part and the recharge part. The damage dealt by the weapon, and the weapon power drain, occurs during the firing cycle. During the recharge part of the cycle, no power drain or damage occurs, and power can naturally flow back into the subsystem.

Beams (banks and arrays) fire for four seconds (one tic of damage per second normally, one tic of damage per .8 seconds during FAW) and then have a one second recharge (a 5 second cycle), dual cannons, single cannons, and turrets fire for two seconds (two tics of damage per second) and then have a one second recharge (a 3 second cycle), and dual heavy cannons fire for one second (two tics of damage per second) and then recharge for 2 seconds.

So here's what happens in an ideal environment where everything works perfectly (say you have 100 weapons power and 3 beam arrays, the base damage of the beam arrays is 50, with a tooltip dps of 40, and your power transfer rate per second is 10).

Time	Weapon 1 damage	Weapon 2 damage	Weapon 3 damage
T=0	100	90	80
T=1	90	90	90
T=2	100	100	100
T=3	100	100	100
T=4	n/a	n/a	n/a

What happens is the first weapon drains no power, so it fires at 100 power and does twice it's tooltip damage of 50. The next weapon drains 10 weapons power, and then fires at 90 power, doing 90/50*it's tooltip damage of 50, for 90 damage. The third weapon drains another 10 weapons power, firing at 80 power, and thus doing 80 damage.

However, one second after this occurs, the power (that already exists) seeps back into the system. Since it's one second later, and the ship has a power transfer rate of 10 power per second, it's at 90 power to start firing cycle two. Since the beam arrays have already drained their power for this firing cycle, the just deal damage based on the current power level of 90.

After that one more second, power is back up to 100, and it stays there until the firing cycle is complete. 4 seconds after the beams first fired, the beam arrays recharge for one second and deal no damage.

What overcapping does is a bit confusing, but it's similar. What happens, as best as I can tell, is that it preemptively readies your extra power (for that one second)to be trasnferred back into that system. So when your second weapon fires, it drains power, but that's instantly replenished by the power waiting in your 'overcap' , and so it's damage is still calculated at the 125 power. So for beams, since they do damage over 4 seconds, there's 4 seconds to get that power back. That's the overcap.

TL;DR of the above:

With beams, your max overcap is 4 times your power transfer rate per second. Thus, on single or dual cannons, or with turrets, your maximum effective overcap is 2 times your power transfer rate per second - there's only two seconds for the power to come back. And with DHC's, it's only got that one second, so the maximum overcap is just 1x power transfer per second (though your max overcap should be at least 2x, as you're likely to have rear turrets and a kcb).

Shield Power

Lucky everyone else, the rest of the power levels are simple enough. There's no overcapping, and what they affect is much more similar.

Shield power affects shield resistance and shield regeneration rate, and increase the shield damage resistance granted by Extend Shields and Rotate Shield Frequency. At 25 shield power or less, your shields will stop their passive regeneration. Your shields will regenerate twice as fast at 100 power as they will at 50 power, and have their base passive regeneration at 50 shield power. The formula, for whatever reason, for the shield damage resistance granted by shield power is shield power/357.12.

Engine Power

Engine power is used for one thing: getting AMP procs (see build anatomy, fleet warp cores for details). It also boosts speed and turn rate, but on nearly every ship, you just want to get it to 75 and leave it there. It does indirectly boost ship defense (to a point), as that's based on speed, but ship defense is capped, and most of the time, 75 power is more than enough to get you over that point.

Auxiliary Power

Auxiliary Power affects every science bridge officer except Science Team and Viral Matrix, and also affects Auxiliary to the Structural Integrity Field, Auxiliary to Dampners, and Auxiliary To Battery, in addition to the two Nukara Traits (which are, as a side note, fantastic)

Calculating the Plasmonic Leach.

To start with, by sometime tomorrow, manually calculating power levels isn't something you should have to worry about, as I'm working on something fun along that line. However, to manually calculate your leach bonus power, there's a fast way and a slow way (that's fractionally more accurate). You can mouse over a weapon, look for the line that says something like "to self +2.1 power per stack". Take that number, multiply it by 8, and that's your bonus power. The long way is like this: Take your skill in flow caps, multiply it by .08, and add 8. (note - in each case, that's bonus power to each subsystem - if it's stack is 2.1, you get 16.8 power per subsystem, for a bonus of 67.2 bonus power total to your ship). Meaning that a romulan ship with over 400 in flow caps would get more power from it's leach than from it's base settings.

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While in my eyes the damage calculation above in that table is very interesting i personally think that such standardized calculations are very confusing. Especially when you want to calculate damage.

For me personally its more important to understand how to keep my power levels (especially weapon power high)... its not important to me to calculate exact damge values like its done above... its just enough to know that the more energy my weapons get the more damage they produce... therefore i am most interested to see how the power levels develop during combat.

The example above also is very simplified, assuming 50 base damage and 100 power while with 100 power the base damage practically gets doubled. Its dont to simplify alot and the use of only 3 weapons lets the drain appear relative low. If you use 8 weapons the situation looks a bit different.

The power drain from 8 weapons is massive.

Assuming you use 7 beam arrays and one kinetic cutting beam, per fire cycle you would lose 68 weapon powr (51 if you use the Cruiser Command which reduce the drain by 25%).

Weapon enhancing powers like FAW however speed up the fire cycle which causes more drain during the same period of time.

If you have 125 Weapon power and you lose that much power without compensation then you also will lose damage output. Its important to have a high power transfer rate.

Like stated above the power transfer rate raises the amount of power that flows back into your weapon system per second and it increases your weapon power overcap.

Some people say that EPS = DPS and to a very large degree they are correct with that statement.

Keep an eyes on your weapon power and try to improve your overcap.

Attached to this post is a power calculator which might help you to find the best settings.