Walt Certainly I would prefer to make large reactors viable without power conduits though.
Dalas120 I'll try and flesh out ideas for moving walkways/crew a bit more, and come back with a more complete proposal.
Ok, here's an idea for balancing large reactors without needing power conduits:
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Larger reactors produce larger batteries. Larger batteries have 2x or 3x the power capacity, and visually look like several batteries joined together. Crew can carry large batteries at normal speeds just like normal batteries. When a large battery is loaded into a power consumer, any excess power vanishes (like normal). When a large battery is loaded into a power storage, the large battery turns into 2 or 3 normal batteries.
Larger batteries means that larger reactors can move power with less crew than small reactors, which should help to balance out how far they'll need to be from power-consuming components.
Picking up batteries (from all reactors but not from storage) should take much longer than it does now. Currently, picking up and depositing batteries is nearly instantaneous.
Longer pickup and deposit time makes walking time relatively less important.
Corridor buffs. Right now crew in congested corridors move at the same speed as crew in congested normal parts (weapons/engines/bunks/etc.), which is both an unneccesary weakness of corridors and seems unintuitive. Since uncongested corridor speed is double uncongested normal part speed, I suggest also making congested corridor speed double congested normal part speed.
Moving walkway buffs. The simplest way to do this is to buff their max uncongested speed, but I know that may not be possible for technical reasons. You said that if speeds get much faster crew will start clipping through doors and look strange going around corners. But moving walkways don't have doors OR corners, so would this still be an issue?
If moving walkways can't get a buff to max uncongested speed, I would suggest buffing their congested speed significantly and lowering cost from $200 to $150. This might still make sense even if it's possible to buff max uncongested speed.
Buffs to corridors and moving walkways make it easier to move supplies across distance, which benefits large reactors more than small ones.
2x2 reactor nerfs. I suggest lowering their power production, maybe from 1.5 batteries per second to 1 battery per second.
This both helps to avoid energy power creep (which is a concern with bigger reactors), and makes larger reactors relatively more powerful.
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So larger batteries let large reactors transfer power further with less crew, battery pickup delays make movement/distance relatively less important, and corridor/walkway buffs physically help crew get around easier. And weaker 2x2 reactors make big reactors relatively stronger.
Hopefully the net effect would be powerful, centralized large reactors.
