How to effectively protect yourself with shields (Power 2.0)

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    I haven't done much testing with the shields, but from what I've seen from them they now protect you in bubbles made bigger by the amount of rechargers you have. You can increase that bubble's capacity by adding more shield capacitor blocks inside the bubble. The capacitors also charge faster the more rechargers you have in the bubble (further expanding it).
    My question is, how many capacitors should be inside each bubble to not get shredded through by a ship with actual weaponry, but still be able to fit other things inside each bubble?
     
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    So, new issue with shields is that they now lose 100% of their ability to recharge when under continuous fire instead of 80% like they used to; so, regen tanking is no longer viable. If I recall correctly you need 1 regen block for every 10 capacitors to just maintain a shield and you need 10x as much power to maintain a regen block as a capacitor block; so, your best bet is mostly likely to follow the old Vaygr Despoiler meta and go really heavy on capacity while investing just enough regen to make a bubble that will fit your ship inside of your bubble (or use multiple bubbles).

    With new stabilizer rules, this should be a pretty easy task with a shorter/wider ship, than the original longbois that we were being forced to adopt.
     
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    Az14el

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    bubble size can be increased with more rechargers, gets power hungry & heavy for ships that are relatively long on one dimension but some ways to mitigate that while still increasing bubble size and keeping integrity high, eventually as you increase dimensions your intended to use multiple bubbles which do have independant recharge downtimes, though i imagine once AI is working again this won't help much against large numbers of turrets
     

    Benevolent27

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    So, new issue with shields is that they now lose 100% of their ability to recharge when under continuous fire instead of 80% like they used to; so, regen tanking is no longer viable. If I recall correctly you need 1 regen block for every 10 capacitors to just maintain a shield and you need 10x as much power to maintain a regen block as a capacitor block; so, your best bet is mostly likely to follow the old Vaygr Despoiler meta and go really heavy on capacity while investing just enough regen to make a bubble that will fit your ship inside of your bubble (or use multiple bubbles).

    With new stabilizer rules, this should be a pretty easy task with a shorter/wider ship, than the original longbois that we were being forced to adopt.
    Though it appears that this isn't necessarily how it has to be. Think it might be a good idea to have a chamber set the under-fire recharge rate to some figure and reduce the time-out to 0?
    upload_2018-2-24_4-57-7.png

    Cornchip I imagine this question is going to become a more complicated question if and when servers are able to branch out with customizations.

    Just for you, I created a custom chamber that did just this with the effects.

    Here is what it the shield-recharge rate like without any custom chamber:

    And this is with the custom chamber. I set the under-fire timeout to 0 and under-fire recharge rate to 80%.

    We may very well move to settings like these on LvD once custom chambers behave correctly on servers. This sort of behavior might come at a penalty of 20% of your shields or something. So then if someone wanted to make a shield tank, perhaps they can, but they'd be more vulnerable to alpha-strike weapons. Perhaps even make it upgradable with 0 tech points, so people can perhaps have a 2x bonus to recharge rate and no timeout, but only have half the shields. Might be interesting.
     
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    And this is with the custom chamber. I set the under-fire timeout to 0 and under-fire recharge rate to 80%.
    Any chance of a download for that custom chamber when servers will work with it? :P Cos as it stands now, shield bubbles are useless if you can get inside them.
     
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    Any chance of a download for that custom chamber when servers will work with it? :P Cos as it stands now, shield bubbles are useless if you can get inside them.
    What do you mean get inside them? They aren't litteral shield bubbles, the bubble only shows what blocks are covered by that shield group.
     

    Benevolent27

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    Any chance of a download for that custom chamber when servers will work with it? :P Cos as it stands now, shield bubbles are useless if you can get inside them.
    My test installation of StarMade got all messed up. Messing with custom chambers is dangerous, it seems. I'd suggest you just change your default settings if you're doing this for single player. Here's how to do that:

    1. Copy the /data/config/blockBehaviorConfig.xml file to your /customBlockBehaviorConfig/ folder in your StarMade folder.
    2. Rename it to "customBlockBehaviorConfig.xml".
    3. Change "ShieldLocalOnDamageRechargePreventionSec" to 0. Now shields recharge immediately upon taking fire in single-player and the setting should survive updates.
    upload_2018-3-3_13-27-45.png
     
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    What do you mean get inside them? They aren't litteral shield bubbles, the bubble only shows what blocks are covered by that shield group.
    I mean one of my admins got inside my ship's shield bubble, fired a beam at my ship and I instantly lost blocks.
     
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    I mean one of my admins got inside my ship's shield bubble, fired a beam at my ship and I instantly lost blocks.
    Schields seem a bit buggy, i got hulldamage while still having my shields up, i only had one recharger group and my entire ship was covered with the bubble.
     
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    Benevolent27

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    I mean one of my admins got inside my ship's shield bubble, fired a beam at my ship and I instantly lost blocks.
    It could be integrity. It seems that if your integrity is below 0, then it doesn't matter if you have shield protection or not on the blocks, the system will suffer integrity explosions. Or perhaps shields also have bugs here shooting from inside the bubble causes block damage? I'd need to test to confirm.
     
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    i can confirm that negative intergrity causes it, yes (tested it). However, there seems to be something weird going on beyond this. I don't know how to reproduce it yet. It seems to happen randomly, but sometimes even ships with positive integrity on all the systems seem to take block damae through intact shields.
     
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    It might be a good idea to take a look at the weapons that were causing this damage - are they all using some of the effect blocks that were deprecated, and if so, might that be WHY those effects were deprecated?

    If anyone still has a pile of the old blocks, try setting up a shielded test target and some weapons with 50% ion, 50% pierce, and 50% EMP and firing those at the target to see if any of them are partially bypassing shields.
    Might also be good to try a missile/pulse/explosive to see if blast radius might be what is bleeding through.
     
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    i can confirm that negative intergrity causes it, yes (tested it). However, there seems to be something weird going on beyond this. I don't know how to reproduce it yet. It seems to happen randomly, but sometimes even ships with positive integrity on all the systems seem to take block damae through intact shields.
    Yes, that as well, had a 50k mass ship, didnt notice my shield integrity was negative, all it took was a 1k mass fighter shooting at me and after a minute i lost all my cap bloks.
    The last part of your post is what annoys me the most however, happend to me as well.
     

    Benevolent27

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    i can confirm that negative intergrity causes it, yes (tested it). However, there seems to be something weird going on beyond this. I don't know how to reproduce it yet. It seems to happen randomly, but sometimes even ships with positive integrity on all the systems seem to take block damae through intact shields.
    I'm guessing it is part of the desync issue that happened after the chunk prioritization update came out. Check the shields to see if they appear to be at 0, but then are fixed after reloading the sector the ship is in (by having all players in the sector go at least 3 sectors away or log off for long enough for the sector to unload and then come back).
     
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    that's actually a good idea. Totally possible that there is a desync happening between the shield bubble and the ship's blocks. So the server "thinks" for a moment that those blocks that take damage aren't inside the bubble.
     
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    hm... Well we ended up fixing the issue on my new server by just boosting the integrity levels added per block, as building a reasonable sized shield system caused negative integrity, and we've also got boosted shield power, as well as a (relatively speaking) greatly reduced level of shield outage xD So it's kinda like shields 1.5 XD there is some cutoff, but not a lot; you'd have enough time to escape battle, for example xD
     
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    Concerning Integrity: I figured out that especially medium sized ships suffer from it. While very small vessels profit from the (rather) high integrity value you start with and big ships have enough space to add a big block to get a nice integrity buffer, especially medium sized ships are having a very hard time even achieving an integrity that is slighty above zero. Im pretty sure that wasnt the goal that the devs wanted to achieve by introducing integrity to the game. I really hope it gets drastically changed soon.
     
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