Turret/Docked ship changes

[logo1575]

I going to guess that this has probably been suggested previously but I'm going to throw this out there anyways, I think it would be a great addition to the game if when docking ships or turrets they shared the shields and power with the ship it was attached too instead of having an independent shield/power system. I also think it would be extremely helpful if you could change the AI system to where you could enable/disable the AI units for turrets from inside the primary ship.

 

[Criss]

You can already enable/disable turrets from inside the ship, as well as any docked entity that has AI installed, and you can undock them also. The first part has been suggested before.

 

[ThisIsOneCrazyMonkey]

I personally don't understand why you'd want to have docked ships share shields with the mother ship. They are different entities after all. Turrets I'd understand. But not ships that were docked onto the mother ship.

 

[ltmauve]

There's a serious balance issue with having the ships share shields. Basically, it encourges gigantism. Having something to prevent enemies from nuking off small turrets would be nice though.

 

[logo1575]

maybe instead of changing the shielding system make a threat generation system where AIs target larger threats (IE larger ships, stations) before targeting turrets and smaller ships[DOUBLEPOST=1417119886,1417119506][/DOUBLEPOST]

I personally don't understand why you'd want to have docked ships share shields with the mother ship. They are different entities after all. Turrets I'd understand. But not ships that were docked onto the mother ship.

The thought was that it would probably be easier to completely redo the docking system than redo part of it and leave the other along with if you were say running from an enemy and had a friends ship docked to the exterior of your ship so it wasn't left in the middle of nowhere

 

[ThisIsOneCrazyMonkey]

I can understand but I don't think it would work. People would just build huge ships of shields and then dock them to their main ship and use that for protection instead of building shields into the main ship and making it suffer from the movement penalties of having so many blocks built into it. I believe what I said was one of the main arguments the last time this was mentioned.

 

[Megacrafter127]

I can understand but I don't think it would work. People would just build huge ships of shields and then dock them to their main ship and use that for protection instead of building shields into the main ship and making it suffer from the movement penalties of having so many blocks built into it. I believe what I said was one of the main arguments the last time this was mentioned.

Docked entities do still increase the mass of the main entity.

 

[ltmauve]

I can understand but I don't think it would work. People would just build huge ships of shields and then dock them to their main ship and use that for protection instead of building shields into the main ship and making it suffer from the movement penalties of having so many blocks built into it. I believe what I said was one of the main arguments the last time this was mentioned.

That wasn't the main argument the last time this came up. The argument was that small turrets on a large ship would not be vulnerable to being taken out until the shields fail, favoring giganstism. Some form of shield-sharing would help towards a balanced game, by preventing large ships from simply nuking smaller turrets off of a large ship. However, excessive shield-sharing leads to large ships being invulnerable to smaller ships picking off their turrets, meaning that only large ships are effective against large ships.

 

[logo1575]

Here's another idea: introduce a default turret-ship shield sharing system (like say 100% shield sharing) and make it an adjustable setting kind of like speed so server owners could modify it to their needs and in single player turrets would sit inside the shields of the main ship

 

[ltmauve]

The problem with that is: Different ships have different needs for shield-sharing. For example, a ship with a few turrets its own size (and comparable shields) requires little to no shield sharing, as both parts are equally capable of resisting damage. A large with many small turrets would want a high shield sharing, as the smaller turrets are significantly more vulnerable to getting destroyed before the battle ends.

Let's look at the factors that determine how much the shields should be shared:
Absolute size: smaller turrets should get more mothership shields.
Number of turrets: more turrets less mothership shields. But with fixed gun emplacements also able to do damage, what counts as a turret?
Damage done per shot: more damage hitting the turret should mean more mothership shields (See point about nuking off small turrets)
Mothership shield levels: the less of its shields the mothership has, the more damage the turrets should take.

The big can of worms is the number of turrets. Since obviously a larger ship should be able to handle more turrets, but also whether a turret is large or small mattering. Maybe the AI revamp will include a few metrics that would be helpful.