Please make shields stronger

[Jolly Roger]

I think the shield regen is still a little low. When you have a large slow ship, and you are relying on your shields not to take damage, and you are a huge target which is easy to hit, I think the current regen is about half of what you really need. Who wants to go searching for holes in a huge ship? The thing is supposed to stand up to at least a few small fighters, but with the limits on power which in return limit thrusters along with weapons for large ships, the shield thing is the final nail in the coffin.

Schema, Please increase the shield effectiveness to about twice what they are now and half the time it takes to regen. It's already hard enough keeping your ship together with the shields that are allowing some fire to pass through when they are not depleted!

 

[Nootau]

Why is your ship slow? Anyways when under fire you don\'t regenerate, so multiplying the rate by ten will not assist in battle survivability.



What you should ask for is a increase to shield capacity

 

[Atticusmas]

Uhm. No.

 

[TractGildart]

If your ship is that slow you need more thrusters, and you need to put some armor on your ship and some turrets. If you have a small ship you can manoever to shoot at enemies, if you have a large ship you can\'t turn but you need to have guns all around. That\'s just the way it is, and frankly it makes sense. There is so much space on most ships to put shields. They did the right thing nerfing them; before the nerf my main ship had like 10,000 shield regen/s, it literally could not be hurt.

AMCs need a bit of a rework so that damage and reload become inversely proportionate (small and fast or big and slow, as opposed to the current that is small and slow or big and fast, ie, gigantism), and that rework will make shields make some more sense, but until then I don\'t think the shields are wrong.

 

[Terramort]

I don\'t think the shields are at fault. AMC weapon damage is way overpowered on large ships. The other problem is that shields are the only defense a ship has, as armor is utterly uselss against 50x50x200 cannons that shoot x times a second.

Instead, allow Reinforced Hulls to share 90% of incoming damage with all connected Renforced Hulls (so armor actually becomes like real-life bulkheads, absorbing a fair amount of damage before actually failing), and have the damage sharing quit when a block reaching 15%< health.

Then reverse the fire rate of addition AMC blocks, and allow mutliple-block-output turrets (i.e. laser doesn\'t get big because it\'s doing more damage, but because you have a 2x2 gun barrel) that causes reload to drastically drecrease at the advantage of 2x firepower and slight DPS damage - then add slowed turret tracking for larger mass turrets. Large ships will then have survivablity against other large ships, and the victor will be the one who actually fires his big shots correctly (after shields have fallen), and not the one who shoots first.

 

[Obama]

Instead of completely removing Shield Regen, they could just divide it by 10 or 100 when under fire.

Huge ships would be impervious to small weapons but not immune to big ones.

 

[Terramort]

Or maybe a small bit of shield absorption on shields that favors small ships? Something like 10/block for first block, 1/block for the next 10, .1/block for the next 100, and so on (it ends up that a small bomber with 111 shield blocks have 30 dmg absorb/shot, and a capship with 1.1mil shield blocks will have 70 dmg absorb/shot), so weapons will begin to have classes. A turret built to mow down incoming torpedoes will do next to no damage to shielded ships, and a turret doing massive shield damage won\'t be able to target fighters/torpedoes fast enough to do any good.

 

[Jolly Roger]

By slow, I mean the turn rate. If you are trying to attack 3 smaller ships they can easily outmaneuver you. I don\'t think the shields need to be inpenetrable, just a little more powerful. I just think they are a bit weak. I have been testing shields on a build with a little over 1,000,000 shields. They really don\'t last long at all against smaller ships. I was thinking the recharge rate would be important because if you can avoid getting hit for a couple seconds, it gives you time to recharge.



Also, If pirates show up with some of my bigger builds, I don\'t even have time to get into my ship before they start hitting the hull. They don\'t tend to miss when it\'s this big.

 

[legobeast247]

just sayin

 

[Nootau]

Well?

 

[Jolly Roger]

I want a boost on shields, I think most people who build bigger ships would agree. I can eat through 1,000,000 shields with that weapons system aboard the same ship in less than 10 seconds with the antimatter canon array aboard. If someone is outside of their ship when I find them, they don\'t even have time to get inside the core before I destroy it, even if it is through 10 layers of hardened hull.



There is a ship called the HyperionComplete in the downloads section. I thought it was well planned out and well balanced with a great weapon aboard when I first saw it and I\'ve been using it to test my own dreadnought to make it better. My guns eat through the HyperionComplete\'s shields in the 4th volley, after that, it just eats blocks like a knife through butter. There\'s no reason something like that should have its shields fall so easily.

 

[Archer6621]

Honestly, I think the main issue is being caused by the insane AMC scaling.

Making the cannons scale in a less extreme fashion (or make them fire slower when in larger groups) would fix both shields being weak, and missiles being useless.

 

[Jolly Roger]

Small ships don\'t usually have ridiculous AMC scaling, so I think it\'s the shields.

 

[DracoNB]

AMCs just need a major nerf to damage. There is no reason to use hull against them because they can one shot each piece and drill into the core. Missiles got their reduction, I\'m sure amc will soon

 

[Zaflis]

Something you should know about current shields is that they have regeneration delay, which depends on how much shield blocks you have. I\'ve seen it\'s something like:
1-511 blocks = 0.5 delay
512-1023 blocks = 1.0 delay
1024-(2047?) blocks = 2.0 delay
2048-4085 blocks = 4.0 (or was it 3.0?) delay

Sorry, haven\'t done accurate study on it. But you want the shields to always have as small delay as possible. So making ship with 2050 shield blocks would be very stupid.

 

[Jolly Roger]

Do you guys who think AMC needs a nerf even look at how stacking them works? The more you put together the less Damage Per Second they have... Stacking them makes them collectively WEAKER not STRONGER. You just have an increase in range when you put it together and it looks cooler when it shoots. If you want to nerf AMCs do you know how stupid people will look having 400 separated AMCs in their ship shooting tiny lasers because they want more damage? It\'s a stupid idea to nerf AMCS, while we\'re at it, why don\'t we nerf everything in the game and make it completely lame?

The whole point of missiles right now is to eat away large pieces of hull when shields are gone, not to punch through the shield and make a big hole. I think it would be easiest to just increase shield capacity rather than weakening the AMCs so that when mobs do get through shields they barely do any damage to your hull.



Also Zaflis, you\'re absolutely right. Why have the game set up in such a way that it discourages people in creating gigantic ships because the shields will be limited to make adding more a bad idea? 15 second recharge time for slow regeneration which doesn\'t last all that long anyway, for a huge target? come on!

 

[DracoNB]

AMCs do way too much damage. Yes I know that DPS decreases as you get more, but when each shot from a 250 block array can kill hardened hull in a single shot there is an issue. 64 block arrays can kill hardened hull in two shots.


If you want to nerf AMCs do you know how stupid people will look having 400 separated AMCs in their ship shooting tiny lasers because they want more damage?


How does raising the amount of shield HP not cause this same issue? If people want to take your shields out faster, they would increase their DPS (more amc arrays vs bigger ones), just like lowering AMC damage.... The difference is lowering AMC damage would ALSO make hull worthwhile.


I think it would be easiest to just increase shield capacity rather than weakening the AMCs so that when mobs do get through shields they barely do any damage to your hull.


What? The point of hull is to prevent damage to internal parts. With the current AMCs, they cut through hull like butter and make it worthless for anything other than looks.



With each 250 AMC block array, I can kill 9.95 (basically 10) hardened hulls PER SECOND. That is with default stats.

So 4 250 block arrays can kill almost 40 hardened hull blocks per second... That is ridiculous. Once shields are down, the ship is cored instantly.



Posted more here: http://star-made.org/content/amc-damage-rework-fix-shield-and-hull-problem

 

[DivineEvil]

I agree that the combat regen of the shields has to return. If the regen were too large, then it just has to get lower, or rather scale on the ship dimensions (bigger ship - less efficiency per block of shield). To make it a little more burden it has to consume energy at all times, since it looks like a passive field and oh-hit power consumption seems rather irrevelant.

And I also agree on the hull sharing taken damage with up to 5 blocks around it (6 sides around exculding the side that is taking damage). If it\'s hard on performance, then hull just need to be stronger, since as of now it works only as a decorative element for anything bigger than a corvette/corvette combat.

 

[Alpha_Squad]

I\'ll agree that AMCs need a nerf which will effectively increase your shields. Also, I doubt the mid-battle regen will come back because the point of adding it was to make fighters relevant. Though considering the regen delay, increasing the regen rate a bit for larger ships might be a worthwhile endeavour(considering it will regen shields out of battle anyways and making it take a ridiculously long time to do so puts another nail in the giant ship coffin).



Really though, a lot of the game needs more balancing(rather the imbalance was intentional or not), so it will get done all in due time. Not to say the discussion isn\'t important regardless

 

[Stakhanov]

Some people just can\'t get over the loss of their invulnerability.

The reason shields feature diminishing returns on large scales is obvious to anyone who ever tried to shoot something twice bigger than what they\'re flying. It becomes entirely stupid (not to mention boring) as mass differential increases.