Shields and Structural Integrity/Better HP

[Khazzy]

More suggestions from me, how fun.

THE ISSUE

Starmade's Hull HP/Armor is literally useless. In this game I have built very large ships and bumbled into a PvP fight only to sooner realize if he got through my shield I was completely done for, it didn't matter how much armor or HP my ship had if he got through I was paper.

Players in this game get into an arms race not for Armor and hull defense, no no, armor in this game is purely cosmetic IMO its just what you use to fill out a larger ship. Players are always rushing to get millions of shields and to build weapons to get through those shields. Thats literally it. Its no fun to have no real reason to use hull when you can build a very ugly but efficient stack for power, shields, and weapons. Your job is not to do enough damage to the ship but to just get through their shields because after that you're dealing too much damage for their armor to do anything.

THE IDEA
-SHIELDS-
Shields - We should do shields as a system, with its own computer and systems block. The way it will work is similar to how cloaking and jamming work, a player will activate the computer on their hotbar and it will constantly drain power to provide shields that prevent damage until their depleted or power drains near 50% Shields would also have a charge up time, when shields are depleted it will be unable to be turned back on till it's charge up time is full, it does not drain power during its charge up time it only acts as a "reload" time. Adding more modules to the computer will drain abit more power but in return you have more shield health and a faster charge up time. With the systems method in mind it is entirely possible to create a multi layer shield but power drain would be increased.
Slaving effect computers would cause different types of shields, still requiring a 1:1 ration to get the full effect, anything below that will have a the same effect just not as strong. Every effect will give the shield a passive and a "On depleted" effect as well as change the shield color to the effect modules color.

EMP Effect: Shield is weaker but costs substantially less to keep up. When shields are depleted you get a burst of energy based on the amount of shields.

Explosive Effect: Every hit to the shield caused a small blast reflecting 10-20% of damange. When shields are depleted a blast emits from your ship dealing damage based on the amount shields you have.

Ion Effect: Larger shield health, more power drain. When shields are depleted a smaller free shield is deployed on the ship that decays but does not cost energy.

Overdrive Effect: Faster active shield regen and faster shield "reload". When shields are depleted it will "precharge" by 25%.

Piercing Effect: 5% of damage done to shields will be fired back in a static beam. When shields are depleted a set of beams dealing a % of the total shields as damage near the attacker.

Pull Effect: Shields produce a gravity able to pull in smaller ships. When shields are depleted a blast emits that draws in nearby ships.

Punch Through Effect: Damage dealt to this shield is stored. When shield is depleted the stored damage is first reduced by a % then given to the next shot by this ship.

Push Effect: Shields push ships back slightly. When shields are depleted it will push away nearby ships.

Stop Effect: When the ship is holding still, shields cost less, regen faster, but if the ship is moving at all increased power cost and slower regen. When shield is depleted a burst emits stopping all ships.

-ARMOR-
This should be a simple fix, all blocks have a armor rating and hp rating as normal but instead of each block holding their own they add to the overall structure HP of the ship. System/Power/Turret/Thruster blocks do not add any armor or HP. If a ship is composed of a core with 10 Armor, 500 HP and 20 light armor at 5 AR and 20 HP, this would effectively create a ship with 110 AR and 900 HP (these numbers are just to play around with, nothing solid). Ships would not fall apart immediately, they would take damage with the blocks hit just gaining the damaged texture until the ship as a while reaches below a set integrity % (I think around 30% - 20% sounds fine) after that ships blocks can be blown off as normal.
As a ship takes damage systems would fail, Max speed would decline as HP goes down, Jump drive takes longer to charge, power fails bit by bit, turrets power down, until they ship starts physically breaking apart.

MY PERSONAL REASONING

I would rather ships take damage themselves instead of shields, shields should just be a medium buffer for damage and not basically your entire health. If ships themselves take damage and it being not shield based it would make a thousand times more sense to have legitimate small fighters and drones later in the game. Larger ships are still viable for power but this means a group of smaller ships actually stand a chance of doing SOMETHING to the larger ship instead of the entire game relying on who brought the larger shields and damage. Larger ships could still fight back pretty hard and have massive turrets but it would be nice to have enough skill to maneuver around turret fire quickly, deplete shields and try to atleast do something to the ship even if its small damage, that small damage can add up and if systems start failing for the larger ship they could be in trouble.

LAST UNRELATED IDEA

I think we should buff what the Rail Turret Axis can hold and straight up remove the ability for them to use enhancers. This goes along with smaller fighters being more viable in a fight as the larger more powerful turrets would have to slowly turn to face them, and lighter anti fighter turrets could quickly lock on and deal with the fighters making them a focus.

Thoughts?

 

[BDLS]

Weird, I figured most people would agree armor is pretty decent now with the newish hp system.

Sorry don't have anything too constructive to say.

 

[Dire Venom]

Armour DOES seem to be useful in some cases, but no-where as useful as extra shields would have been.
From my testing, direct missile hits to a ships armor that still has some % left have a much decreased radius, but cannons still tear through it like butter. Cannon-Cannon punch can easily tear any ship 4 times its size in half regardless of how much armour it has.

I think a ships 'Armour' values could act a bit like a sheild? e.g 90% of damage that hits armour gets sent to the ships 'Armour' pool.
However armour does feel quite weak right now and definatly needs a buff.
(However this needs to be balnced for both small and large ships)

 

[Valiant70]

Starmade's Hull HP/Armor is literally useless.

Nope.
[DOUBLEPOST=1447776850,1447774959][/DOUBLEPOST]Overall this isn't a bad thread. However, I'm not a huge fan of things that are more mechanic-driven than reason-driven as these shield ideas seem to be. Drawing on Star Trek for inspiration might not be a bad idea since it's one of the more well-thought-out sic-fi universes.

Here's what I'd do:

• Shields:
  • Add a percent 'bleed-through' for shield damage that affects blocks/armor.
  • The bleed-through starts when shield HP falls below 95%(so kids with pistols can't graffiti your battleship) and increases gradually as shields fall.
  • The larger the ship, the higher the maximum bleed-through. (Similar to the HP penalty mechanic for larger ships.) Small ships would have little bleed-through.
  • Ion effect mitigates bleed-through by half and prevents it entirely until shield HP falls below 90%. It also offers the same damage mitigation it does now, but with a slightly lower max value.
  • Add a decoupling mechanism: voluntarily drop the shields to prevent them from taking damage or interfering with transporters. They recharge at out-of-combat speed during this time but offer no protection. When re-activated, they rise quickly to the appropriate % HP.
• Armor:
  • Add a similar mechanic for armor where the damage sent to armor HP instead of block HP depends on the % of your armor HP that remains.
  • While shields are up, a weapon impact on an armor block cannot destroy more than one layer. All excess damage goes to armor HP.
    
  • In general, armor should be harder to break than shields. This is balanced by its inability to recharge.
  • Defensive armor effects probably don't need to change much.

This would need some balancing adjustments for sure, but this is the gist of what I'd like to see from shields and armor. Armor and shields work together rather than separately. It nerfs shields slightly, but gives armor more purpose, as well as simply making armor stronger. This may also help to balance large ships. It won't cripple big ships, but rather add some diminishing returns on ship size.

 

[alterintel]

Nope.
[DOUBLEPOST=1447776850,1447774959][/DOUBLEPOST]Overall this isn't a bad thread. However, I'm not a huge fan of things that are more mechanic-driven than reason-driven as these shield ideas seem to be. Drawing on Star Trek for inspiration might not be a bad idea since it's one of the more well-thought-out sic-fi universes.

Here's what I'd do:

• Shields:
  • Add a percent 'bleed-through' for shield damage that affects blocks/armor.
  • The bleed-through starts when shield HP falls below 95%(so kids with pistols can't graffiti your battleship) and increases gradually as shields fall.
  • The larger the ship, the higher the maximum bleed-through. (Similar to the HP penalty mechanic for larger ships.) Small ships would have little bleed-through.
  • Ion effect mitigates bleed-through by half and prevents it entirely until shield HP falls below 90%. It also offers the same damage mitigation it does now, but with a slightly lower max value.
  • Add a decoupling mechanism: voluntarily drop the shields to prevent them from taking damage or interfering with transporters. They recharge at out-of-combat speed during this time but offer no protection. When re-activated, they rise quickly to the appropriate % HP.
• Armor:
  • Add a similar mechanic for armor where the damage sent to armor HP instead of block HP depends on the % of your armor HP that remains.
  • While shields are up, a weapon impact on an armor block cannot destroy more than one layer. All excess damage goes to armor HP.
    
  • In general, armor should be harder to break than shields. This is balanced by its inability to recharge.
  • Defensive armor effects probably don't need to change much.

This would need some balancing adjustments for sure, but this is the gist of what I'd like to see from shields and armor. Armor and shields work together rather than separately. It nerfs shields slightly, but gives armor more purpose, as well as simply making armor stronger. This may also help to balance large ships. It won't cripple big ships, but rather add some diminishing returns on ship size.

May have to address shield layering, or multiple shields per ship. I could totally see your shield Idea being abused by having multiple shields via docked entites cutting down on the percentage of damage making it to the actual hull. Not to mention bringing one of many shields off line to recharge it faster. This would lead to shield rotation / invulnerable ships? Maybe shields on separate entities should "merge" so that they can't be cycled or layered so easily.

Also the idea of no pierce or punch-through on hull with shields still above 0%. doesn't really make sense in the whole scifi physics world.

Everything else you said... pure gold.

 

[Tunk]

Personally I'd rather see armour get more damage control and repair options than a complete re-write of shields.

For example, destroyed armour becoming a collisionless block and repairable via astro's, astro's getting piercing, crew doing damage control like stuff (eg a crew bonus that forces block HP damage to AHP damage, regenerates AHP over time, uses repair beam, etc).

 

[Khazzy]

Personally I'd rather see armour get more damage control and repair options than a complete re-write of shields.

For example, destroyed armour becoming a collisionless block and repairable via astro's, astro's getting piercing, crew doing damage control like stuff (eg a crew bonus that forces block HP damage to AHP damage, regenerates AHP over time, uses repair beam, etc).

I like this idea, why not make it so when a block becomes completely damaged it only becomes like a metal mesh block or a scaffolding look. Astros could go right through a ship and lock onto the core (for medic/engineer ships) allowing it to slowly rebuild the blocks bit by bit.

I like in Space Engineers specifically how blocks have stages, why not have ships have stages in damange? completely destroyed blocks would appear only as bare bones look and offer no protection.

 

[Keptick]

Herm, idk about you but all my ships have way more structure HP than shields. And it's not like there's any weapon that can magically do more damage to structure than shields (unless you use effects)...

What I'm trying to say here is that even if you drop an enemy's shields you're only halfway towards killing them, if not less. I find that fights generally last longer in the armor/structure HP phase than shield phase.

So sure, armor might not block 100% of damage like shields, but it's still pretty usefull! I still want some form of armor repair though :p

 

[Byamarro]

I find idea of activating shields rather than perma shields pretty intriguing.

 

[Lecic]

Starmade's Hull HP/Armor is literally useless. In this game I have built very large ships and bumbled into a PvP fight only to sooner realize if he got through my shield I was completely done for, it didn't matter how much armor or HP my ship had if he got through I was paper.

Besides advanced, armor is much, much cheaper than shields. It's not as effective because it's cheaper to produce, but standard is about the same strength as a shield cap when you account for armor protection. What tier of armor, how thick, and what passives reinforcement are you using?

From my personal PvP experience, shields are usually only about a quarter of the battle.

 

[Lecic]

A quick comparison-

Standard armor has 250 EHP by default. With armor HP, that's 500. With both passive hull boosters, that's 1,333 EHP per block as long as armor HP is up. However, this is only as useful as you have layers thick of armor.

Shield capacitors have ~110 (slowly decreases as you add more) HP, and ~275 EHP with full passive ion. This does cover the entire ship and turrets (as long as capacity is over 50%), though.

I'd say even without accounting for resources (1 mesh + 1 composite + 6 capsules vs 50 capsules), it's clear who the winner here is.

Shields are best suited for stations, which cannot move damaged sections of out the line of fire, and for (fast) turret boats, which will benefit from the lighter weight (0.15 v 0.1) and turret protection. Should ships still have some shields? Yes. Every block of hull you lose is a block of hull you have to replace. But I don't think people should focus so much on shields.

 

[Malacodor]

Instead of massive changes I'd simply increase the percentage of damage tranferred to the armor HP pool and make advanced armor cheaper.