Shield Damage Overhaul Idea (Outdated and dumb)

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    So, as I play this game more, it has started to occur to me that smaller ships are worth nothing. Like, literally, they are completely pointless. They have horrible shielding, their weapons can't scratch larger ship's shields, and there's little that can be done in most battles with them.

    OK, SO HERE'S THE FIX:

    Shield penetration should be based on shield health and weapon damage.
    That is, if a ship has 2 million shields, a weapon dealing less that 400 damage a shot goes right through them to hit the hull. If a ship has 1 million, it's 200 damage or below.
    A ship having 200,000 shields would block most shots entirely.
    Weapon damage could seep past the shields less and less the more damage they do compared to shield strength.

    This would put back a purpose into smaller ships and add a new level of detail in how the damage system works.

    Our carrier ships would finally do more than look really cool while they deploy fighters!
     
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    Absolutely not. There is a place for small craft in this game, and once the HP and shipyard system is out, that place will be defined. For now, the solution is definitely not allowing small ship weapons to bypass shields.
     

    Auriga_Nexus

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    I had an idea that related to the weapon mechanics fix (http://starmadedock.net/threads/cannon-beam-rebalance-vs-missiles-realism-coooool.7214/), that would make armor more effective, and as I was iterating on that idea I came up with an idea that would make give smaller ships an advantage at least defensively. That is, nerfing shield capacity and regeneration based on surface area.

    The idea is that right now shields act as a barrier that completely encompasses the surface area of the ship, and as the ship gets bigger that surface area increases at an exponential rate. Because of this I think shields should in general have exponentially-increasing power costs on larger ships because they would have to protect a larger area. In other words, the larger the ship, the more shield generators and capacitors you would need to power a shield compared to a smaller ship with less R/C blocks for roughly the same effectiveness.

    There are two aspects to this concept - shield capacity and shield power. Right now shield caps create a pool of shield hitpoints that absorbs incoming damage. However, I think that the actual capacity of the shield should be the pool of shield capacity divided by the external surface area of the ship.

    To make this simple to visualize, were going to assume our ships are Borg cubes, simple deathblocks of a given dimension. Now assume we have a Borg cube that is 10x10x10 in its XYZ dimensions. Since it is a cube, the surface area is equal to the sum of the area of its 6 square sides, each of which are its length to the power of 2. In other words:

    SA(cube) = 6x^2

    Based on this, our size 10 Borg cube has a surface area of 600 [6(10)^2 = 6*100]. Now enter a larger Borg cube with a size of 50. It's surface area would be 15000 [6(50)^2 = 6*2500]. Out of the 1000 blocks on the size 10 cube (V=10^3 = 1000), exactly 250 (25%) are shield capacitor blocks. We'll ignore adjacent block bonuses and say shield cap is 100hp/block, so the size-10 cube has a total shield cap of 25000 (250*100). ,Likewise, the size 50 cube has a volume of 125,000 with the same percentage of shield cap blocks per total mass, in this case 25% of 125,000 or 31,250, with a total shield HP of 3,125,000.

    As you can see, if the same ratio of blocks are kept, by increasing the size of the second cube by a factor of 5 we've increased the shield capacity by a factor of 5^3 or 125. Both shield amounts are roughly average for that size of ship.

    However, now lets say our total shield capacity is spread out among the surface area to be shielded. The size 10 cube has a total shield capacity of 25k; divide this by the SA of 600 and you end up with a shield cap of 41. The size 50 cube with 3.1m shields would end up with 208 (3,125,000/15,000). Obviously these are both crappy amounts, so a system like this would also need a buff to how much shield cap each individual block provides, but I digress. The point is that, the ship that is 5x bigger now only has 4x the shields of its smaller cousin.

    Basically, dividing shield cap by surface area would make it so that as a ship's size increases, the effectiveness of shield blocks would decrease, and the ship would have to compensate through the use of an escalating amount of shield cap blocks. Of course, most ships are built more aerodynamic than Borg cubes and therefore would not suffer as much of a difference, but this makes smaller ships inherently tougher by making them easier to shield, and it also makes sense in realism terms.

    Likewise, shield regeneration should also escalate relative to surface area. However, rather than nerfing the amount of shield that each individual block regenerates, instead we should increase the power required to generate that additional energy by the surface area of the ship, because the larger the shield the more power it will take to restore shield energy. In keeping with the idea that the shield's capacity is being spread out amongst the ship's surface area, we'll say each point of shield regeneration costs 1 unit of ship power for every 10 block surfaces being shielded - therefore, a cube shaped ship with a shield regen of 250hp/s and a dimension of 10 would cost 15k power per second (250*600/10 = 250*60), while a cube ship of size 20 with a shield regen of 500 (twice as big and regenerates twice as quickly) would have a power cost of 120k power/second - almost 8 times the power usage for double the size and double the regen rate.

    So in the end, we are dividing a ships total shield capacity by its surface area, and multiplying the power cost per point of shield regen by the ships surface area.

    While this setup may seem unnecessarily harsh on large ships, keep in mind that large ships still have an advantage over smaller ones in terms of how much armor they can have. I mentioned an idea concerning armor in the aforementioned thread where armor would be A) significantly buffed, and B) would deflect damage that would penetrate the armor, passing a percentage of it to the surrounding blocks instead. This thread originally discussed changes to cannons and beams to allow for base damage armor penetration regardless of subsystems. Under this new weapons system, if a block is destroyed half of the remaining damage goes to the block on the side directly opposite of the side impacted, while the rest is divided evenly amongst the other 4 surrounding blocks. With this idea, destroyed armor blocks would still protect the blocks behind them by decreasing the penetrating damage while increasing the radial damage to the blocks sharing that surface - and since these would most likely also be armor blocks, the combined effect would be a shot that would destroy 1 armor block and weaken the others, but would not significantly damage the soft blocks behind the armor block.

    Of course, while armor would last longer and be more effective, it would still degrade as it got hit and unlike shields would not regenerate. Since the armor can't be repaired/replaced easily during combat, it would be more effective on larger ships with more of it.

    So basically, what I am suggesting with both of these ideas is to increase the protective effect of armor, while at the same time making shields more power-intensive and less effective as ship size increases. Larger ships would need to rely more on their armor for protection when surviving a firefight, whereas smaller ships with less armor would have shields to protect them instead. This would change the dynamic of gameplay significantly, as well as keep people from building these massive bleeding titans with 9-figure shield capacities that can tank indefinitely.

    Of course, this only fixes the defensive aspect - offensively larger ships will still have an advantage over smaller ones in terms of raw damage output. But a smaller ship is faster, lighter, and harder to hit, and without shields to protect it a group of small fighters could easily whittle down the armor and blocks of a larger ship, while the larger ship struggled to swat the flies taking bites out of it until it finally keeled over and died, metaphorically speaking. It would also make it to where even missile-pulse combos with massive alpha damage would not be able to 1-shot an unshielded ship... through it may be able to using a 1-2 punch, one to blow a hole in the armor and one to blow up what is inside. But of course, smart shipwrights could mitigate that risk by using armor internally as well and compartmentalizing the different areas of their ship.
     
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    jayman38

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    I had an idea that related to the weapon mechanics fix (http://starmadedock.net/threads/cannon-beam-rebalance-vs-missiles-realism-coooool.7214/), that would make armor more effective, and as I was iterating on that idea I came up with an idea that would make give smaller ships an advantage at least defensively. That is, nerfing shield capacity and regeneration based on surface area....
    Due to the open nature of how people can build ships combined with the concept of missile explosions effectively turning ships inside-out, I think that if this idea were to catch on, the change in shield power should be a function of mass (block count), instead of surface area. Plus, death to doomcubes.
     
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    Your suggestion is almost exactly like my response to the survey, but you didn't forget to square the side dimensions when figuring area.

    the change in shield power should be a function of mass (block count), instead of surface area.
    If mass or number of blocks were used to 'approximate' volume which then can be used to 'approximate' surface area, ships with non-cubic exteriors and having actual interior rooms would not be penalized.


    Here is the suggestion I put on the survey.

    1.Shields should protect all parts of a ship, including all docked units both those internally docked and external.

    2.Two ships each having the same number of shield caps but with one ship being larger than the other, the larger ship should have weaker shields due to the shield having to cover a larger area.

    3.Shields really only need to cover the exterior of ships but 'Bubble' shields are not workable due to technical reasons.

    4. Currently ships significantly smaller than their opponent has realistically no chance of even causing superficial damage to the larger vessel, provided that both ships were built with the same design philosophy, I.E. brick, role-play etc.

    5. I've read many threads proposing differing shield mechanics, some were unworkable due to current hardware/software limitations, many are overly complex, more are completely useless and some are just bizarre. The somewhat recent doubling of shield cap effectiveness to try to make combat last longer just allowed shipbuilders to increase their weapons and decrease shield cap count without reducing shield strength.

    6. A good number of shield change suggestions have some way to allow some damage to bypass shields, most seem to be complex and/or confusing.

    Solution: A ship with shields will have 3 stats for shielding.

    1.Total shield strength - based off number of shield capacitors, similar to current formula, maybe able to remove the part about diminishing returns.

    2. Shield recharge - based off number of shield rechargers, again can use formula similar to current, may even be able to remove 'combat' recharge rate difference.

    3. Shield density - total shield strength divided by 6 times the cube root of the total number of blocks in the ship, including all docked units (this will approximate closely enough the external surface area of the ship irregardless of design philosophy) When incoming fire hits the ship each hit/damage tick is treated separately just like it is now. But each damage calculation will now subtract the 'shield density' stat from the damage before apply the remainder to the actual block. This is done for every block in cases of blast, piercing and punch through. (may allow the elimination of the '7' block cap on damage for some effects) Also the 'shield density' stat is subtracted from the 'total shield strength' for each block affected. If the damage doesn't exceed the 'shield density' then the damage is subtracted from the 'total shield strength'. As 'total shield strength' goes down so does 'shield density'.

    Edit: Messed up the mass to area equation it should be 'total shield strength divided by 6 times the square of the cube root of the total number of blocks in the ship, including docked units.

    This should, with 2 ships of differing sizes with the same percentage of shield caps result in the larger ship having a larger total shield strength and a somewhat larger shield density due to surface area to volume ratio favoring the larger ship but still not have the larger ship be invulnerable to the smaller ship.

    It should also increase the desirability of weapons with longer recharge rates that deal higher damage per hit. It will not affect the cannon/cannon combo much at all, but it will make things like cannon/pulse or cannon/beam more of a threat due to their ability to inflict some damage before shields are totally down.

    Shield caps on docked units should either be included in overall shield calculations or be considered as off-line while docked to prevent turrets from having effectively stronger shields than the main ship. There are a few other concerns regarding docked ships and shielding when you take the new docking system into consideration. For instance when the 'magicnetally' docking takes place it will be possible for ships to be docked together, not just one to the other, but mutually docked one to the other. In cases like this it would be best if each was considered as separate ships as far as shielding is concerned.
     

    Edymnion

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    Well, two things:

    1) Of course small ships aren't worth anything compared to a big one in a one on one confrontation. Its why you don't typically see people with handguns on single outboard engine fishing dingies trying to take down battleships.

    2) Small ships are useful, but only in great numbers so that you can deliver death by a thousand cuts. A swarm drone carrier is currently a very annoying yet very effective ship design. One small drone is worthless. A dozen are a nuisance. A hundred are a problem. A thousand and your capitol ship is dead meat. Doesn't matter if your capitol ship can do 10 million damage a shot when 99% of it is wasted. The use of multiple smaller ships just means constant power drain on the capitol ship for no great return on investment.

    Its not that small ships are worthless, its that you aren't using them correctly.
     
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    NeonSturm

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    SkaireKrough I like your thoughts, but:
    Assume mass = a * b * c when a = b = c with no empty space
    Then square = a * b
    Concluding: shield-strength on the boundary box = linear proportional to c.

    But Weapon damage = exponential proportional to (a * b * c) -- focused fire!
    == A huge nerf to a big ship.
    For instance when the 'magicnetally' docking takes place it will be possible for ships to be docked together, not just one to the other, but mutually docked one to the other. In cases like this it would be best if each was considered as separate ships as far as shielding is concerned.

    No X3--XENON possible? (Ships made out of small triangles, but working as 1)​
     

    Keptick

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    I'd make a gigantic array of small weapon groups on a big ship and completely obliterate everything (i.e. this entire system is extremely flawed).
     
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    SkaireKrough I like your thoughts, but:
    Assume mass = a * b * c when a = b = c with no empty space
    Then square = a * b
    Concluding: shield-strength on the boundary box = linear proportional to c.

    But Weapon damage = exponential proportional to (a * b * c) -- focused fire!
    == A huge nerf to a big ship.


    No X3--XENON possible? (Ships made out of small triangles, but working as 1)​
    Have you considered that the most predominate weapon in use is a missile which is not focused fire? Also most focused fire weapon systems are not single barreled so the damage does get spread out some. This type of shield system would benefit focused fire weapons without affecting missiles much if at all. I do think that the calculation for shield density may need to be multiplied by a set constant to bring it up to a more effective level. Ideally if the battle was between 2 identical ships the shield density would be high enough that cannons or beams would be able to overcome it and deal some damage to the armor underneath. If both had equal number of system blocks in their direct fire weapon but one had more outputs the ship with fewer outputs would inflict more damage to its opponent while the other would wear the shield down faster.

    X3--XENON, never heard of it, have you ever heard of a Tholian Pinwheel? If the developers can make it so that 2 or more ships docked together could function as one ship that would be great, though I'm not gonna hold my breath until it happens.

    I'd make a gigantic array of small weapon groups on a big ship and completely obliterate everything (i.e. this entire system is extremely flawed).
    You did note that every block gets the shield density, not just the ones on the outside? All this really changes is that your weapons would deal some damage before the shields were totally down and if you actually deal damage to your target it means its going to take longer to get those shields down. Mass amounts of small calibre weapons would not see much change in overall effect.

    If you were instead referring to the OP yah, I agree its not a valid solution.
     
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