Shield Blocks; Consider This

[ToastyPolarBear]

Schema,

I can easily understand wanting to give smaller ships a fighting chance, but I would like to find a better solution to the whole shield issue. I see huge ships as giant metal targets; their size makes it very easy to hit them, without a problem. I believe small ships, being small and agile, are quick and nimble enough to dodge a decent amount of the fire they are taking. I do agree that small ships should have a chance to win, but at the same time, people spend hundreds of hours building their massive cruisers and destroyers, while a small ship can be made in around five or ten minutes. I think that balancing the game is important, but it needs to cater to the needs of both parties. If you can't dodge, you need high defenses. The hull, hardened or not is simply not strong enough to take a beating, which large, slow ships are sure to receive. I agree with you in the fact that it is unfair to players who are just starting off with small ships to have to endure the constant victories of the giants of their server, but I believe that making the shields of larger ships less potent is not the best way to go about solving that issue. While balancing the game is an essential part to making it fun for all players, you also need to reward the people who spend so much time on the mega ships they build. I've been building a huge ship in single player, and I've been having problems with pirates showing up and destroying half of what I create. My solution was to add lots of shields so the AI enemies wouldn't wreck all my hard work. Now, though, I'm actually quite hesitant to start up single player mode, for fear that the first pirates that show up will ruin everything I've put into this large-scale project. While some people say that the shields being weaker on huge ships is realistic or fair, I think the bigger targets need greater defense. I know it's going to be a difficult task, but please make the game fun for all playstyles. I'm sure the majority of people who own huge spaceships will agree that it's no fun spending time rebuilding after every encounter, when we could be exploring the universe. Thanks for hearing me out, Schema. This game has tons of potential, and I trust that you will capitalize on that.

***If anyone would like to continue the discussion below, feel free to do so. Please make sure your argument is legitimate and logical, though. Thank you.***

 

[ToastyPolarBear]

Schema said he changed it so that \"shield blocks were less overpowered in large numbers.\" I agree that they shouldn\'t be overpowered, but I worry that they will become useless or underpowered as is.

 

[ToastyPolarBear]

Before any vicious hound dogs jump on me because I don\'t completely like the new change to shields, I\'m not opposed to balancing and I\'m not freaking out because something was changed. I\'m not raging and nothing I made is totally broken. I\'m open to new playstyles and I respect game developers and their decisions. My point is simple: the game should cater to all styles of play so as not to be restrictive and require a certain playstyle in order to succeed. Shield balancing is good, but making them too weak could present issues.

 

[Benjamintruth]

What we have now is similar to Star Trek. I spent around 100 hours on a large, 500m long 100 wide washington monument type deal. I have (total/regen) 1.3mil/20k.



This is up from 200k/100k. So what we have now are very large sheilds that regen slowly. Large ships aren\'t as underpowered as everyone thinks. Previously, the soft cap on sheilds was very rough. Once over the soft cap, you would get 4/2 for every block. Now, it\'s more like 40/.05. I\'m on with this change in preportion, but the total amount of sheilds needs to come up. Just raise the ammount after soft cap, when you stop benefiting from the small sheild grouping, and raise the amount per block placed after to something like 100/1. Energy regeneration is a good example of this. The Power Tank blocks allow you to aquire an insanely large poewr cap, because they benefit from touching. Regen is soft capped at around 1mil. Something like this with sheilds would be good, where you have a very large, easily increasable total size of sheilds, even if regen is slow.

 

[Danzarlo]

I love this idea wouldnt be perfect but it would be a step back into the right direction

 

[Trinova]

I think the change was made to make shields a \"additional HP-pool for defense\" instead of a \"invincibility against everything that\'s smaller than you\". The changed favours high shield pools over high regeneration rates (which was imho the core problem in the old system).

 

[Trinova]

i second this

 

[ToastyPolarBear]

Thanks for the clarification Benjamin. As I said, I haven\'t tested the new shields for fear of the total destruction of my ship by pirates. That\'s nice to know that shields are high though. Still, I do believe that Schema should certainly continue to regard larger ships as slower, larger targets.

 

[ToastyPolarBear]

Thanks for the additional clarification. I wasn\'t aware of the additional \"HP-pool\" part of things from reading the update change log, so it\'s nice to get more clear explanations from other players. I appreciate the comment.

 

[Aophel]

I too am building a massive ship in singleplayer, a borg styled 100x100x100 cube. It has over 100,000 shield blocks in it, giving it 1.7mil shields. It also wields a powerful anti-matter death ray, consisting of 28 banks of 900 cannon each, or about 25,000 cannon blocks. In addition it has a 33mil power capacity with 3mil regen. When I spawned in an identical ship to test both the cannon and shields, i was rather dissapointed. My 100,000 shield blocks didn\'t last 3 seconds while being bombarded by my cannon. In all honesty, I had hoped for it to last atleast 30 seconds. All this considered, I find it extremely irritating that weapon systems can be chained together to deal massive MASSIVE amounts of damage, yet when you take 4 times the number of shields as weapons used, you cant last 3 seconds...

I understand that large ships need some kind of weakness, targeting their shields and making them useless is not the right option. Reducing their maximum speed would be a good choice. Limited speed along with thier pathetic turning capabilities is enough I would think. Sure smaller ships can\'t beat them, but at least the gigantic ships can\'t beat the smaller ones either.

 

[DracoNB]

I\'m sure in the near future AMCs and Missiles will be reduced in their damage potential. Right now they are so strong that hull is worthless for anything other than looks.



Hull also needs a boost in both armor and health. The current low values make it worthless for preventing damage when you could just place more shields there instead (or more offensive weapons)



Missiles should not do damage to blocks under the one they initiall hit. Right now you can have missiles destroy blocks BEHIND others because the damage just works as a sphere and while it does less damage (not much less) the farther out from the impact point, it doesn\'t check for any blocks between the initial impact point and the end of its blast radius.



The shield regen change was really needed, but now the weapons need to be toned down as to give defense a chance against the massive amount of offensive power you can easily obtain.

 

[Alpha_Squad]

If you fear pirates destroying your ships when you don\'t want them to, you can just turn them off in the server config file. I am not sure what pirates you are facing but adding a swarm of turrets around your base should be good enough for the most part. As per balancing issues, I feel that there other things Schema could be doing that would better serve his time (with enough effort there may be a way around the current shield balancing).

 

[Alviss]

I am definitely not a fighter fanboi, but I believe a good pilot should be able to kill anything if they are patient and skillful enough. Right now I have a Carrier, it has a 872164 shield pool and generates 14870 s/sec. No fighter will ever be able to overcome that alone.

 

[Aophel]

I dont think a lone fighter should have a chance at beating that either. To make an analogy of the situation...

Let\'s say that you, a person, represent your carrier. Then let\'s take a smaller animal, a squirrel, to represent the lone fighter. That squirrel has no chance of killing you. Bump it up to 10-20 squirrels, all of whom really want to kill you, and you\'re dead, you can\'t overtake that swarm. They don\'t hurt you a lot individually, but they are faster than you, more agile than you, and they attack every part of your body.

That\'s what people need to understand about balance. If you want to take down a giant with your fighter, you have little chance at doing it. Take a few friends, and victory may favor you.

 

[MrFURB]

Hey folks, nice thread so far!

My view on shields is that while the change was in the right direction, when you take all things into consideration it wasn\'t enough of a buff to capacity to affect capital vs. capital fights. A ship with any decent amount of firepower will still be able to get through it\'s own shields in but a few seconds, where it should be closer to 10-30 depending on if the ship is defensively or offensively focused. Likewise, more capacity would certainly give capital ships plenty of time to retreat to safety should they be ambushed by a group of smaller, more agile craft.

About hull, there have been many suggestions on how to make it more useful. One of my favorite suggestions is that damage to hull is spread through all connected hulls, creating bulkheads. Another is that hulls increase the total HP of the ship, affecting all blocks on the ship.

The difficult thing about balancing hull is that in all the fights I\'ve seen between two small or tiny ships, hull is completely overpowered because it takes so much effort to get through it and you can only land a few shots that aren\'t strong enough to punch through it. We\'re going to need to find a way to get hull to scale well so we aren\'t forced to rely on shields alone.

 

[Dire Badger]

Am I the only one that actually builds thick hulls?



I mean, look at it like this: fighters tend to only have a single layer of armor... if you have a ship that has five hundred times the mass, shouldn\'t you have considerably more armor? If you build a \'cool looking\' cockleshell, you have no one to blame but yourself when it gets torn apart.



Also remember that economy still has to be tweaked. right now, you can build virtually anything for a minimum of actual time investment. Once there\'s a real economy, building titanic ships will be out of reach for all but the most successful factions. the enormous stacked cannons will be more expensive and less common.

I think people should stop doomcrying until the entire game is closer to complete. right now, even getting beat up means you just go into the catalog and replace the whole thing.

 

[Nootau]

Once shields are down, one volley of most ships will rip through five to ten layers of hardened hull, they only have effective 400HP each. Once the shields drop, you in short screwed without lube.

 

[Dire Badger]

That\'s why i created modded \'armor\' blocks. 200 hp each, 90 armor, 12000 credits apiece. Held off releasing them intul schema releases \'anti missile\' systems as he mentioned.



Once he gets the code to the point where he can unobfuscate it, server owners wil be able to add and subtract mods to precisely monitor and adjust battle conditions.

 

[rmooney01]

No shields, lots of defensive turrets and fighters. Now, until we have \"more\" AI options, we need the shileds to a degree. Chasing a bunch of AI fighters down after attack would take a while... especially when they will chase down pirates far from your location.

But honestly, I had a small/mid sized ship that had 6 turrets on it. 3 player controlled and 3 AI. We handled pirate attacks with no problem at all. If you are by yourself you can switch to a turret or docked fighter with the arrow keys.

I may not fully understand the role people want the larger ships to play, but I would think using shields in smaller banks with higher regen rates would be a good thing. Do they all work as if they are conneced or do they shiield that area of the ship? Could we layer shild banks between hull plating and interior plating?

Again, I don\'t fully understand all the game mechanics with shields, but turrets and docked ships can go a LONG way in protecting your larger ships.

Anyway, I\'m really enjoying the game!!!!

Thanks

Rob

 

[Benjamintruth]

As it is though, you could be killed by one squirrel, but only realisticly if you held still. Large ships are only in danger or lone fighters once they\'re logged off, really. What I\'ve found is that, as a large ship, you can protect yourself by using turrets. The problem with turrets is that people go and build 550 or 100 500 block turrets, each which have to be activated indivudially. Which takes forever, especially on laggy or glitchy servers. Also, these tiny turrets are taken down pretty quickly and have low damage output. The solution to this is to build 5 or 10 Large turrets. I have 6 500k block turrets on my destroyer, which can pretty much shred most ships- even capitals. You have to set the antimatter turrets up in lines, so they fire off rapid wave like blocks. Spreading out your fire like a shotgun or wave attack is devastating to ships, small or large. My turrets have shaved off the top layer ( 5-10 blocks) of a large destroyer as well as one-shotting meduim ships ( like 5k-10k blocks) and just smashing Isanath\'s.



So, per your analogy, imagine that the big ships would be Arnold Schwartzenager with 6 arms, all of the arms full power punching the squirrel. Or Hitmonchamp. Whichever works for you.



I\'d also like to mention that my destroyer has been finished, and has around 4.2 million blocks now. With 30 mil sheilds, I don\'t think anyone less that 1/3 of my size will be much of a threat.



Also, a thing about energy cap. I\'m actually able to stealth/cloak my supermassive, planet sized ship for about 50 seconds because of the insane amount of total power that can be accumulated. I think I have around a billion power. Might be 100 million, could be adding a decimal in my head. I\'m at work so I can\'t check. Anyways, my energy regen is only like 3 million, so that even though I can stealth for a while, it takes like two minuits before my power comes back up.

I think a proportion like this in sheilds could work, only maybe smaller. Tweaking the soft cap is definatly the way to go.