Shield and Weapon recharge rates

[Mosshadow]

So, I am a pretty new player to starmade and I have been looking through the forums and it seems that the current weapon system really tears down shields quickly unless the shield system can recharge faster than the DPS.

My suggestion to making this more complex is to first, give the shield some sort of armor factor to represent a fraction of the damage being completely mititgated depending on overall strength. For example a weapon could have a fire rate of 5 shots a second and each shot does 20 damage. But the shield nullifies 7 damage so it loses 65 points. Then if you had a gun that fired 1 shot per second for 80 damage you will be doing 73 damage per second. In addition if it were possible to have shields partially fail after a certain amount of damage during a short time, say taking 400 damage would cause a 2X2 weakspot for a brief moment you would have a much more interesting fight against capital ships because you would need to bring weapons with a lower overall DPS but better "penetration(Not sure if right word for this)"

In addition the recharge rate should be lowered so that a large ship would recharge at for example 40 per sec while a fighter recharge at 30, instead of the current 900 per second rate. To balance that I would say that the overall damage values would need to be much lower, or shields should have much much more capacity.

Also I would suggestion somesort of polarized hull /intergrity field generator that only works on the main hull so that fighters/bombers can destroy turrets and engines while not being able to easily breach the core.



In terms of weapons, right now adding more power increase both the firerate and the damage if im not mistaken. I would suggest that weapons scale like thisfor the AMC cannon)

For a given energy input:

if you increase the damage per shot, fire rate goes down, speed of projectile goes slightly down.

If you increase the firerate: damage per shot goes down , speed of projectile goes slightly up

If you increase the speed of projectiles: Damage per shot goes down, fire rate goes up

if you decrease both damage per shot and firerate, speed of projectile goes sharply up

etc

For simplicity I only used 3 choices but I suppose range would also be a factor and blast radius

The reason for this is to differentiate between weapons that are good against strong shields (high damage per shot) and weapons that are good against faster opponents (higher firerate and speed of projectile)



Any comments, addons, concerns etc welcome. Most of this is based on my playing of Freespace Open which is a pretty good place to see a variety of game design.

 

[NeonSturm]

But I would wait suggesting things like this while the new master-slave system is under construction.


For simplicity I only used 3 choices but I suppose range would also be a factor and blast radius


Maybe not range, but time-to-life (TTL). It can then be converted to range by multipling it with speed.

 

[rece ktore leczo]

You can already change these values. Press \"t\" while in ship and there You have values and slides to adjust them for each weapon on this ship.

Turrets already have their own shields, they do not drain it from the mothership.

Armor for shields wouldn\'t make much change and i don\'t see any reason for it to exist. We need an armor overhaul for hulls but it\'s different topic and was suggested, in many forms, before.

Weakspots in shields are interesting but i\'m against them. Placing thousands of SDs on your ship to have milions of shields would be pointless, because enemy could just make one weakspot and shoot a missile there. Also some ideas about changes to shields were talked about during Q&A, nothing major, but i can\'t remember the details.

Balancing shields to weapons, in my opinion, should be done after the weapon update. And after armor overhaul (if there would be any).

 

[Mosshadow]

You have a good point with the missiles going through gaps in the shields. I suppose a balance is to have missiles be vulnerable to being destroyed by AMC and other weapon fire.