In FO3 and NV (and before if you get down to it), all energy weapon cells are pretty much treated like individual bullets, instead of containers of electricity or electricity-producing materials

I'm kinda hoping that they implement a system where a cell is stated to have X charge points in it, Y maximum charge points it can hold, any given E-weap uses Z charge points per shot, and the cells are rechargeable. It would give energy weapons a different paradigm to keeping them properly fed compared to Guns.

I believe they did it for two reasons:

1. Inventory management would get tough. Cells wouldn't stack unless they had the same uses. So you could probably have up to twenty different energy cells.

2. It would probably become memory intensive.

I do like the idea of being able to recharge depleted cells though.. maybe have less cells lying around but whenever you use up one you get an "empty cell" item that you can recharge at the workbench.

1. That entirely depends upon how they do it; there's no reason that items need to be entirely identical when stacking unless they code the game to require it (which they shouldn't and I don't believe the old Creation Engine or Gamebyro required).

2. Completely false. Even if each energy cell used a 64-bit float and you have a million energy cells, that's still only 8 MB of memory. That's not enough to matter on current-generation consoles, and the game won't contain a million energy cells that need to be individually accounted for.

If we were talking about old-generation consoles you may have a point, considering old-gen consoles only had 500 MB of memory available. But that's not the case now.

If they did that, for the sake of fairness and balance, they'd have to start treating the magazines of firearms the same way. There wouldn't and shouldn't be any difference. Each magazine holds a certain number of rounds, and when you swap out magazines, you've essentially either thrown away every round that hadn't yet been chambered and fired, or you've pocketed a partially empty magazine. It would be the exact same thing. Each round is its own separate entity, but still needs to be loaded into a magazine, which is just a battery for bullets.

Problem is that you would end up with lots of half full cells and had to transfer charges between them. You would not like to go into a fight with an cell with one or two charges left.

Bullets are solved by ignoring magazines, it assume you have many filled magazines and swap, also assumed you top up magazines between fights.

Now transferring charges between cells are doable but not as simple as refilling cells. I have an feeling that the charge packs are not reusable batteries, FO:NV let you recycle them at an loss, it also let you convert.

Technically you could recharge if you had power but this would affect balance, perhaps let you recharge the weaker systems not microfusion

I dont really see the constructive reason to give energy weapons some new ammo management system, 3/nv system may not be realistic, but its simple and easy to manage.

Then we would need to implement clips for standard firearms. This clip of 5.56 has 12 rounds, this one has 23, this one has 5, and then reload them at a workbench. See where that might become tedious?

Play New Vegas.

Stacking multiple ammunition items when there are big differences in ammo count would be bad game design. There's no way of telling if you're going to need to reload, nor any reasonable way to switch to a less spent power cell. As for the memory thing, it's something they need to keep in mind. That feature alone wouldn't do it, but game developers need to be mindful of how much memory and processes their features take up. If they aren't, you end up getting a situation where you have a product that can do tons of things, but runs like crap because it has too much going on. It's called "Feature Creep", and it's a huge issue with software today.

...in hardcoe (ammo weight).

Pretty sure a few of the NV weapons by default used more than a single energy weapon cell per shot....

The gauss rifle is the first that comes to mind.