New shield values?

[Cody38]

Previous to this patch, shield blocks didn't have a flat value. For instance (Not actual numbers) The first shield block would be 2,000 shields, the next would be 700. And then every block after that would be 1 shield point less, so eventually every shield block could end up being worth 1-2 shield points. Since yesterday's patch, shields have been given a flat value.

You may have noticed all your ships are having some power issues. That's not due to power being changed, that's due to the new shield values. Every shield block is now worth a flat 495 shield point, and every shield block after that will still be 495 shield points. This has taken my 2Million shield ship up to 1,699,000,000 (One billion six-hundred ninety-nine million shields on one ship). BUT, shields seem to take an excessive amount of power to recharge now, causing some of my turrets to be incapable of firing for a second or 2 if they are hit.

Now big tough ships are even tougher, smaller ships can have way more shields, and with the new weapons system where beam/AMC or super missiles seem to be the only viable option, the game feels a bit broken to me. Not to mention the issues in the other post I made, here: (http://starmadedock.net/threads/ai-turret-random-laser-deviation.1350/).

They mentioned changing the shields on May 19th, and I remember playing on the 26th for sure and these changes weren't here. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure this is new as of the recent patch.

 

[TwoNiner]

You make a very good point, I too feel that this has caused the game to become rather dull due to the prolonged combat between ships due to weapons not being able to break shields. However I believe that this rebalance is to allow space for the new slave and effect systems pre update ships. For example with the new update I would not need as many shield blocks to retain effective shields, thus I may replace some of my shields with the new effect blocks. The space remainding might even be enough to install a slave system for my weapons. It's all a matter of mindset, and I'm confident after fine tuning your ship you would find that this shield balance is far from unbalanced.

 

[Keptick]

My previously 6 million shields turret now has 350 million shields. I'm pretty sure that what you took for 1 billion is actually 100 million.

 

[Cody38]

My previously 6 million shields turret now has 350 million shields. I'm pretty sure that what you took for 1 billion is actually 100 million.

No it most definitely is a billion shields. I have a theory that mass has something to do with shields, as my friend's ship with 1.8mil shields was only boosted to 700Mil shields (his mass was around 100,000) and my ship with 200,000 blocks is at 1.7bill shields. But remember what I said, shield blocks used to eventually get to extremely low values, so all those blocks in my ship that were supplying me with 1 shield point are now giving me 495. I'll get proof it is a billion.

 

[Keptick]

No it most definitely is a billion shields. I have a theory that mass has something to do with shields, as my friend's ship with 1.8mil shields was only boosted to 700Mil shields (his mass was around 100,000) and my ship with 200,000 blocks is at 1.7bill shields. But remember what I said, shield blocks used to eventually get to extremely low values, so all those blocks in my ship that were supplying me with 1 shield point are now giving me 495. I'll get proof it is a billion.

So, having a higher ratio of shield blocks would actually give better shields? Interesting.

 

[Crashmaster]

Mine at 5.8mil is now 306mil, mass 67864, ship is almost entirely shields.

Also 12.2mil shield ships is to 550.5mil.

 

[Cody38]

So, having a higher ratio of shield blocks would actually give better shields? Interesting.

Yes, previously you could hit a threshold where each block was giving you one shield points (or some other low value like 50) so if you placed a 10x10x10 block (1,000 blocks) you would only get 1,000 shields. But now, that threshold seems to be gone, so placing a 10x10x10 now would be around 495,000 shields... or somewhere around there. I haven't done the actual numbers but I know that there is a flat value for shields now, and there wasn't before.

 

[Cody38]

Yeah my ship isn't a billion shields, confusingly enough it was a different number of shields last night. I didn't update or change my ship. It had 1,699,000,000 shields, and now it has 178,797,465.

 

[Cody38]

Just tested it, math is right. 10x10x10 of shields = 495,000 shields. And if you all remember your long sessions of shield placing to get up to a million+, you'll recall it wasn't just that easy.

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

Hmm... I kind of like the idea of not needing nearly as many shield blocks to get adequate defenses.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Hmm... I kind of like the idea of not needing nearly as many shield blocks to get adequate defenses.

I like that too but the problem is this leads to stalemates in battle. It's really easy to have ships that have more shields than their weapons can overcome. Dog fights in these ships and you run out of power before shields break or just have the fight take forever. The shield equation was come up with to be able to withstand a volley from a similar sized missile. Of course this doesn't take actual combat into account, shots missed, dodged, shield regen between hits. It is also much easier to jam shields everywhere in a ship when you cannot do the same with weapons as they have to be in arrays, this means most ships will always have more shield blocks than weapons blocks so a balancing shields based on a 1:1 ratio of shield blocks to weapon blocks isn't ideal.

 

[Cody38]

I like that too but the problem is this leads to stalemates in battle. It's really easy to have ships that have more shields than their weapons can overcome. Dog fights in these ships and you run out of power before shields break or just have the fight take forever. The shield equation was come up with to be able to withstand a volley from a similar sized missile. Of course this doesn't take actual combat into account, shots missed, dodged, shield regen between hits. It is also much easier to jam shields everywhere in a ship when you cannot do the same with weapons as they have to be in arrays, this means most ships will always have more shield blocks than weapons blocks so a balancing shields based on a 1:1 ratio of shield blocks to weapon blocks isn't ideal.

Yeah, I have 1,200 weapon blocks in 2 groups, and 1,000 shield blocks. I get 300,000 shields, but only do 1,920DPS per gun. This just means combat will be excessively drawn out, and if you miss or stop firing for 2 seconds, the enemy has all their shields back.

They really should've left out the Shield update til after all the weapons were balanced. Or just left shields the way they were. Big ships had a lot of shields, small ships didn't have as much. I'd prefer if shields were scaled to mass rather than a flat number. More mass = less shields per block. Less mass = more shields per block. Making small fighters and cruisers more effective, while allowing large ships to use their huge space to advantage.

 

[Joshakazam]

Yeah, I have 1,200 weapon blocks in 2 groups, and 1,000 shield blocks. I get 300,000 shields, but only do 1,920DPS per gun. This just means combat will be excessively drawn out, and if you miss or stop firing for 2 seconds, the enemy has all their shields back.

They really should've left out the Shield update til after all the weapons were balanced. Or just left shields the way they were. Big ships had a lot of shields, small ships didn't have as much. I'd prefer if shields were scaled to mass rather than a flat number. More mass = less shields per block. Less mass = more shields per block. Making small fighters and cruisers more effective, while allowing large ships to use their huge space to advantage.

I really like that idea of the mass to efficiency ratio. i love my small ships but they get blown out of the sky in one shot by even a slightly more massive ship and its annoying.

 

[BeefBacon]

Shields should be weaker than pre-update. Having extremely tough shields was a necessity when capital ship guns had massive DPS and RoF. Capital ship cannons are now much closer to what I always wanted them to be. Huge damage, but a low RoF.

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

I like that too but the problem is this leads to stalemates in battle. It's really easy to have ships that have more shields than their weapons can overcome. Dog fights in these ships and you run out of power before shields break or just have the fight take forever. The shield equation was come up with to be able to withstand a volley from a similar sized missile. Of course this doesn't take actual combat into account, shots missed, dodged, shield regen between hits. It is also much easier to jam shields everywhere in a ship when you cannot do the same with weapons as they have to be in arrays, this means most ships will always have more shield blocks than weapons blocks so a balancing shields based on a 1:1 ratio of shield blocks to weapon blocks isn't ideal.

Good point, shields need to be balanced to avoid drawn out battles.

IMO (and feel free to disagree with me here), they should be balanced such that even the most heavily shielded ship can eventually have its shields dropped by sustained weapons fire of any sort, as opponents you can't hope to make even a slight dent in make the game less fun. I think a good way to do this, while still keeping shields useful, would be to implement a "cooloff" period, where shields stop regenerating for a certain period of time after taking damage (perhaps the time could be proportional to the damage dealt, so weak, high-ROF weapons don't get an upper hand). So then it becomes a contest of DPS vs shield storage, as opposed to DPS vs shield regen. In some sense this happens to older ships right now, with the new update - their power generation simply can't keep up with the shield regen. However, this makes them unable to do much of anything else, which is not fun either.

That, and, as always, hulls need a bit of a buff...

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

Hull needs to be stronger and shiels are unbreakable it seems. I let two ships of the same type fight against eachother, I sat in one of them to see if the shields go down but.. nothing happened. The shields never went under 100%

 

[EricBlank]

That's the problem I've been having. It seems that if your weapons systems don't have a significantly higher DPS than your opponents regeneration rate, their shields will not be damaged. If its roughly equal (140 DPS vs 143 regen) then the shields could drop after several minutes of sustained fire. Its very easy to get high-recharge shields on a small ship. I'd personally like to see the post-damage recharge delay brought back. It seemed to work well.

 

[douglasg14b]

(This is coming from someone who last played 6 months ago. I liked some of the changes and wanted to give the game another look)

The delay shield regen was definitely broken. Shield should always be able to recharge as they are being shot, else you can have a single small ship be able to destroy the largest ship you can imagine. And a couple minuscule ships can destroy a large one given enough time to knock the shields down.

It makes sense that there should be a minimum entry requirement to kill something sufficiently large. Obviously you should not be able to gun down a several million block ship with 10 gun blocks over night. This was a problem when docking large ships was not possible a while back, making it impossible to keep them alive overnight when a new player can just afk in a 10 block ship and kill it over night. I support this change. Especially in large ship vs large ship battles (large is several million blocks). Where previously it was a 10 second or less fight before the enemy was cored due to abysmally low shield values.

A nice thing this can enable is a fleet battle. A large carrier can actually play it's part, without being an obvious target because it's shield would never regen as long as something hit it.

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But all the back and forth discussion for/against these sorts of changes can be resolved by granular configs. Being able to configure these sorts of mechanics for each server would allow the admins/members to decide how THEY want it, and not have to live with how the devs want it. Additionally, complete change-logs would be very much appreciated.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Why do people think the ability to customize all the settings is the end all be all to the balance debate?

While I absolutely support the configs in the game I cannot stand this "don't like it then change it yourself" attitude. The majority of the players and servers will want to play with vanilla settings, therefore vanilla has to be balanced right. Custom configs will be a great asset to niche servers but as a whole probably will not get used on bigger servers just to maintain consistency. One of the reason Starmade thrives is because of the ability to share ships, take them with you as you server hop or just between universes on your own. What's the point of building and sharing an epic ship if it is utter crap on the next server over, or you modified the configs how you like and decide to go online and cannot compete because all the servers use vanilla configs. "Check out my awesome ship it has 5 million shields!" shows you a ship with a single shield capacity module "oh yeah you have to download my config for it to be awesome"

(This is coming from someone who last played 6 months ago. I liked some of the changes and wanted to give the game another look)

The delay shield regen was definitely broken. Shield should always be able to recharge as they are being shot, else you can have a single small ship be able to destroy the largest ship you can imagine. And a couple minuscule ships can destroy a large one given enough time to knock the shields down.

It makes sense that there should be a minimum entry requirement to kill something sufficiently large. Obviously you should not be able to gun down a several million block ship with 10 gun blocks over night. This was a problem when docking large ships was not possible a while back, making it impossible to keep them alive overnight when a new player can just afk in a 10 block ship and kill it over night. I support this change. Especially in large ship vs large ship battles (large is several million blocks). Where previously it was a 10 second or less fight before the enemy was cored due to abysmally low shield values.

The game doesn't need the shields to be "balanced" to prevent small ships from killing big ships. Big ships have big guns, lot's of turrets, missiles... If you design a ship that can be killed by something a fraction of your size that's on you and not on the games balance. The shields should be balanced with focus on one fact and one fact alone, no mater what the shields will fail. This is the only way you can be certain that there will never be a stale mate. If two ships enter into battle then you can bet that one will leave victorious (short of both ships crippling each other at the same time). Several updates have seen ships that incapable of overcoming the combat regen of each other leading to unwinnable situations, and no mater how you spin it, that's just bad design.