Please make shields stronger

[DracoNB]

Thats the point, once shields are down it shouldn\'t just be game over. Shields should be the first line of defense with hull as the second.

You seem to think that once shields are down, the ship should just explode since its not worth fighting after that point.

Yes repairing now is a PITA, but that should be made better as well, with the ability to have repair drones or shipyards that can \"heal\" your ship based on its blueprints. Having a longer fight is much more fun than a minute long carrier vs carrier and bam, over.

It also gives missiles a purpose to destroy the hull instead of AMCs being better at everything.

 

[Minsc]

Been reading a couple shields threads here, some thoughts.



I\'m still quite new to the game so I may not have a full grasp on shields. Am I correct in that shields absorb all damage until they fail at which point your ship is doomed? Many complaints appear to stem from hulls being useless.

Here\'s my uneducated idea:

- As shields weaken allow damage to bleed (is that the word I\'m looking for?) through. The closer to 0 shields get the more damage allowed through. For example shields will still absorb 50% damge just prior to failing. The scale of bleed damage in relation to shield strength is something I\'ll leave for another to calculate. Once Shields fail it\'s more less game over. Shield capicity could be increased to allow a large ship to tough it out. Bleed damage however would make hulls useful. They\'ll protect your ships systems from any damage which gets through your shield.

I\'m reminded of shows like Star Trek where where ships still take damage even with shields intact.

-Perhaps new hull types could be added. A refractive hull would dissipate damage from beam weapons while being of little use to missles. On the flip side hardned hulls would be great against missles and poor against cannons. This way you\'d have to decide what kind of defense you want once your shields drop. You can have one, but not the other. Of course the ideas of damage sharing between hulls could be implemented.

 

[tubadancross]

I like the idea of hull connecting to other hull and dispersing the damage. I also think damage bleeding through shields is probably the best idea i\'ve seen here.

I\'ve got nothing to add to the damage bleed effect, but some ideas for hull sharing damage.
90% may be a bit much for damage share, but something more like 75% sounds pretty good. This\'d make tunneling through a wall of hull more of an option rather than simply destroying the whole hull.

I would also add separation based on type of hull. This could make layers work better and look better in battle. Basically, you make a layer of brown hardened hull, brown hull, and gray hull. Hardened hull is first defense and while it takes damage the normal hull beneath it is not damaged. Once the hardened hull is broken through the brown hull takes all the damage and the gray is protected. This\'d allow some interesting battle wounds, protect systems, and make it obvious where you need to repair is more of a face rather than a tunnel through the ship.

I could see this making hull far more useful and would love to see some building strategies based around hull damage dispersal. I would also recommend the damage sharing with a smaller percent for plexdoors as well.

 

[Terramort]

Hmm, agreed about different colors not sharing damage. Of course, a layer of shield dispersers or 3 layers of regular hull would also do the trick. Shield bleeding is also a good idea. Maybe add a new type of weapon that is considerably weaker than others, but has a % chance to penetrate shields (such as Phase Missiles and Meson Lasers) depnding on shield strength? Then you\'d begin to build various ships designs. A ship outfitted with primairly balistics weapons will crush numerous layers of amor, but fail against a ship relying primarly on shields. Vice-verca, a Phase Missile boat will crush ships relying on shields, but won\'t have the DPS to keep up with armored, gun-heavy ships.