Subset Games Forum

Sounds like stuff for another game and unable to be implemented in FTL.
I do remember playing one mod though where the Flagship had a lot more HP and it only made the battle more frustrating than exciting as I had no idea how much health was left on it and they couldn't really do much, even in the later phases.

You can checkout my Tachyon project.
It has both of these.

What you might be able to do is have the majority of the power come from the backup battery (you can increase the max level of the backup battery and it'll work as expected, simply increasing the power boost by 2 per level) and modify the battery charger augmentation to potentially completely remove the cooldown, that would mean each hit to your backup battery would reduce your available reactor power by 2, and fixing the subsystem wouldn't come into play until the next cycle. I don't know if the AI knows how to use backup battery, though, and even if it does it might not be possible to make the enemy ships not have enough reactor power to fully power every system except by spawning an ion storm at every beacon. I also don't know if it's possible to modify the battery charger such that the cooldown is 0.

The enemy AI will activate the backup battery whenever it is ready. I'm not sure either about the cooldown reduction but as you have anticipated, there is no way to have the backup batter scale with enemy upgrades. The battery is upgraded randomly as other systems, so enemies would usually get too much or too little power. CE explored this a little with certain enemies starting power starved, but having the backup battery available, allowing them to power some additional system upon use.

In Hyperspace Admirals we support ship cores to be targetable, but we aren't sure whether we really want that in the final game. It basically creates a pretty big weakspot that can easily cripple an entire ship or fleet, especially since we considered power cores to provide more than one power per level. Targetable power cores might make targeting anything else not worthwhile a lot of the time, depending on how intelligently the AI redistribute power. HA picture power as "processing power" used by systems to do their thing. Processing power can be shared across ships to some extend, most fleets spawn with a flagship that sustains most of the other ships. This way we can create a single high value target that can be also be better defended than the rest of the fleet. That also plays into enemy behaviours, enemy fleets are more likely to retreat if their flagship gets destroyed or damaged sufficiently. But all this is still experimental.

Sleeper Service wrote: In Hyperspace Admirals we support ship cores to be targetable, but we aren't sure whether we really want that in the final game. It basically creates a pretty big weakspot that can easily cripple an entire ship or fleet, especially since we considered power cores to provide more than one power per level.

Suppose the reactor/ship core had more defense or reinforcement. this way it would be harder to take down the reactor because (FTL analogy) it would be as if the system/room had high resist chance of system and hull damage. That way something like this would create a choice: Try and get the reactor/ship core down to take out power supply or attack other more vulnerable systems (in comparison)?

Also, answer if you can on why will there be a ship core in HA? If you don't want to answer this because directly saying what will be in the game is not something you want to do then that's perfectly fine and I'd agree with you for not saying anything. Just speculating