Hey, does anyone think it would be a good idea to make hull and shield blocks much more expensive and hard to make?
No. Producing Shield blocks already needs the rarest resources there are, and these resources has no substitutes. On average, building a battleship-sized ship would require you to mine the entire planet segment for both capsule types, or mining corresponding asteroids for several days, given the adequate in-game time. Situation with Shields is
at least reasonable at the moment, though I wouldn't mind if they were easier to produce (would take less capsules by default, or at least less ores), so that it wouldn't be an ultimate bottleneck for producing ships as it is now.
Armor situation is also "reasonable" - it is easier to obtain and there's several ways to accomodate your needs by using Crystal Armor and Forcefields to use ore materials for other purpoces. The problem here, is that different colors of armor require different ores/crystals, while rarity and laternative uses of these materials is not uniform; In effect, you're highly encouraged to use Green and Black armor as their respective materials are abundant and not used to produce anything particularly useful, while using Purple, Blue and White ores is almost detrimental.
So it's not more about armor or shields specifically, but it is about resources mining and crafting we have now in general. Starmade requires more substantial raw material system, where resources are more limited and define the value of a given system. Available resources must be separated into several tiers of rarity and relative value (instead of being "kinda equal, but not so much really"), and factory schematics must accomodate these tiers. In that framework, hull and glass should be produced from lowest tier resources, standard armor and shields should be produced from mid-tier and advanced armor, jump-drive modules, most significant effects and other most advanced items should be produced from the most valuable resources. Armor must be produced in successive tiers (hull>standard>advanced) and only then painted and wedged.
Additionaly, both shield blocks should have an equalized efficiency, which means that different ratios of Capacitors and Rechagers should give different results. Ships with higher Recharger fraction should have smaller combat regeneration penalty, while ships with higher Capacitor fraction should experience less diminishing returns.
