Shields, regen and bypassing

[Arcaner]

The new shield system is really nice interesting - except for the fact that shields now do not regenerate on fire. There are obvious reasons for this kind of system, BUT while this feature prevented ships from relying only on high regeneration, now the only possible way to effectively protect your ship becomes having extremely high shield capacity - not cool. I thought of something that has the potential to avoid completely removing shield regen on fire and also (with some work) make battles slightly more fun (less pre-deterministic) and can add newer ways of protecting your ship.

• Introduction of shield bypassing: Weapon projectiles should be allowed to bypass the shields randomly even when the shields are not down. The probability of this bypass occurring would scale with % shields remaining.
• CLARIFICATION: THIS MEANS OUT OF 100 PROJECTILES SHOT, ONLY A FRACTION BYPASS THE SHIELDS AND DEAL DAMAGE.

• For Eg, when shields of a vessel are at 90-100%, bypassing probability=10% (highest); when at 60-90%, 6%; when 30-60%, 5%; and below 30%, it should be zero. (Do not hold the values against me, they are only a very rough estimate to show you what sort of system I mean.)

• Shield regen under fire should be as before, dropping to a small fraction of max regen (during no fire)

• EXTRA-Maybe the defense chamber can have an additional feature to decrease the bypassing probability.

All the weapon types except the mine-layer (maybe that too, I do not know the specifics of that weapon, so I cannot comment) should be able to do this bypassing. The high damage potential of beams and missiles is countered by their large reload times. So, if you are lucky, you could fire your missiles and have it damage your opponent even though their shields were at max. There is a gamble factor associated with the battle (as in Sci-fi movies, where anything and everything goes wrong), and this would make it very interesting. Even a lone smaller ship may have a chance (still small though, as it should be) against a bigger ship, as two or three lucky bypassed shots to the reactors/weapon systems could cripple the bigger ship. Overall, I think it will make battles less pre-deterministic and more engaging, while allowing shield regen under fire to be a thing.

(Original base idea by JinM )

 

[Nosajimiki]

The main reason to use shields is so that you can walk away from a really one sided fight without having to waste a bunch of time patching holes. If you are flying around a 100k+ battleship and some noob decides to troll you with a 1k bomber just to force you to waste time on repairs, combat would become more of a chore than something fun. Another way to put it for the non-PvP crowd: image if every time you fly your miner too close to a pirate base, you are pretty much guaranteed to have some holes to fix, even if you loaded the thing with a massive shield to "protect you from pirates". This would be especially annoying if you are testing a WIP on a multiplayer server.

If any variant of this system were to be introduced, it should be that regen under fire should be reintroduced and the shields should block 100% when at or near maximum, but that it should start letting shots through when it drops lower. Maybe something like:

// $shieldsPercent: the current % strength of the enemy shield.
$criticalThreshold = 80; // Percent at which you start taking damage.
$criticalChanceMax = 25; // Percent chance of a critical hit when your shield hits theoretical zero.
$chanceToBypass = ($criticalThreshold - $shieldsPercent) * $criticalChanceMax / $criticalThreshold;
If ($chanceToBypass < 0) {$chanceToBypass = 0;}
​

To my understanding, the zero regen under fire was introduced not just to make battles less deterministic, but to prevent the frequent stalemates that would happen where same mass ships could not drop each other's shields. In pretty much every battle I've seen between similar mass ships (where bug exploits were not at play), the weaker ship was still able to alpha the enemy shields down to at least 70% before regen + speed tanking mucked everything up; so, if you make 80% a soft cap where you gradually start introducing these "critical-hits", it means that micro-ship trolling won't ruin playability, but still give smaller ships a chance to do some damage before going down, even when significantly outclassed.

With the above configuration, crit chances would look like:

SHIELDS | CRITCHANCE
-----------------------------------
100% | 0%
90% | 0%
80% | 0%
70% | 3.125%
60% | 6.250%
50% | 8.375%
40% | 12.500%
30% | 15.625%
20% | 18.750%
10% | 21.875%
0% | (theoretically 25%, but actually 100% because this means shields are down)


Frankly though, I sort of feel like this is all kind of moot. If you want to harm a much bigger ship: just use warheads. They take a lot more skill to use right than conventional weapons, but they bypass shields 100% of the time, and people who know how to use them right can badly damage or cripple much larger ships. I've seen a 5k warhead ship kill a 200k cruiser in power 1.0, and rHP and integrity only makes this easier.

 

[Arcaner]

The main reason to use shields is so that you can walk away from a really one sided fight without having to waste a bunch of time patching holes. If you are flying around a 100k+ battleship and some noob decides to troll you with a 1k bomber just to force you to waste time on repairs, combat would become more of a chore than something fun. Another way to put it for the non-PvP crowd: image if every time you fly your miner too close to a pirate base, you are pretty much guaranteed to have some holes to fix, even if you loaded the thing with a massive shield to "protect you from pirates". This would be especially annoying if you are testing a WIP on a multiplayer server.

If any variant of this system were to be introduced, it should be that regen under fire should be reintroduced and the shields should block 100% when at or near maximum, but that it should start letting shots through when it drops lower. Maybe something like:

// $shieldsPercent: the current % strength of the enemy shield.
$criticalThreshold = 80; // Percent at which you start taking damage.
$criticalChanceMax = 25; // Percent chance of a critical hit when your shield hits theoretical zero.
$chanceToBypass = ($criticalThreshold - $shieldsPercent) * $criticalChanceMax / $criticalThreshold;
If ($chanceToBypass < 0) {$chanceToBypass = 0;}
​

To my understanding, the zero regen under fire was introduced not just to make battles less deterministic, but to prevent the frequent stalemates that would happen where same mass ships could not drop each other's shields. In pretty much every battle I've seen between similar mass ships (where bug exploits were not at play), the weaker ship was still able to alpha the enemy shields down to at least 70% before regen + speed tanking mucked everything up; so, if you make 80% a soft cap where you gradually start introducing these "critical-hits", it means that micro-ship trolling won't ruin playability, but still give smaller ships a chance to do some damage before going down, even when significantly outclassed.

With the above configuration, crit chances would look like:

SHIELDS | CRITCHANCE
-----------------------------------
100% | 0%
90% | 0%
80% | 0%
70% | 3.125%
60% | 6.250%
50% | 8.375%
40% | 12.500%
30% | 15.625%
20% | 18.750%
10% | 21.875%
0% | (theoretically 25%, but actually 100% because this means shields are down)


Frankly though, I sort of feel like this is all kind of moot. If you want to harm a much bigger ship: just use warheads. They take a lot more skill to use right than conventional weapons, but they bypass shields 100% of the time, and people who know how to use them right can badly damage or cripple much larger ships. I've seen a 5k warhead ship kill a 200k cruiser in power 1.0, and rHP and integrity only makes this easier.

Really informative and I can't say I disagree.

Additionally, it become important to define the "under fire" state. Would projectiles that bypass shields still count as fire?

If not, then I see shields never dropping down to zero (or rarely). If yes, then it just kills off any chance of retaliation-the ship under fire gets damage as well as low regen

 

[Nosajimiki]

Really informative and I can't say I disagree.

Additionally, it become important to define the "under fire" state. Would projectiles that bypass shields still count as fire?

If not, then I see shields never dropping down to zero (or rarely). If yes, then it just kills off any chance of retaliation-the ship under fire gets damage as well as low regen

Not really, shields have a separate cool-down when they hit zero. Cool-down and under-fire penalties are not the same thing.

Under fire means that while you are being hit, you suffer a regen penalty. In the old system, continuous fire would reduce your regen to 20% which is actually enough to take out ships several times your size if you've designed your weapons well. (I've seen a 5k ship that could overcome 1mil regen/sec. because it maintained a continuous bombardment of ion weapons, but even less specialized dps ships could still kill ships 5-10 times their size just fine.) The only reason people thought regen tanking was an issue was because so many people were using docked armor and speed disruption which depending on design could be used to stack nearly a dozen separate exploits making it really freaking hard to break shields with weapons balanced to kill more normal ships. What this means is that under the above mentioned system, even if you excluded critical hits, you would only need to maintain 250k dps to cancel a shield as it approaches zero instead of 200k dps. But docked armor speed tanks ships were able to completely break this formula by layering shields and block damage and dodging 80% of what you shoot at is so a ship with 1mil regen could take mitigate millions of dps for several minutes to before taking any meaningful damage. This is why I say, the 20% should be brought back now that we have single layer shields and the upcoming targeting update, because it really is not enough to be game breaking when things worked as intended, but it helped balance alpha and dps weapons.

Now the Cool-down is a separate thing. Once you bring a shield to zero, it stops recharging at all for a few seconds. This is what leaves ships open to damage between when you ion lance it, and hit it with your block damage weapons.

 

[apelsinsaft]

The main reason to use shields is so that you can walk away from a really one sided fight without having to waste a bunch of time patching holes.

I think this is a backwards way of thinking. If repairs were much easier, we wouldn't be so bummed when a few blocks were missing, and it follows that we wouldn't think shields are so essential. It then follows that shields could be made to let a percent of damage through proportional to how many percent of your shields are missing.

Many suggestions like this should really go hand in hand with other things to work, i feel.

 

[lupoCani]

Finally the suggestions forum sees some proper suggestions. That said, I accept some of the generalities and almost none of the specifics.

For example, penetration. Instead of a chance for all-or-nothing penetration, I'd prefer guaranteed partial penetration. If nothing else, with Schine pushing for a meta of high-powered, low-quantity projectiles in the update, all-or-nothing penetrations would make things needlessly random.

Furthermore, we're also confirmed to be getting repair beams that repair and replace blocks within an area, so regular post-combat maintenance, even after small skirmishes, doesn't seem too bad.

 

[Nosajimiki]

I think this is a backwards way of thinking. If repairs were much easier, we wouldn't be so bummed when a few blocks were missing, and it follows that we wouldn't think shields are so essential. It then follows that shields could be made to let a percent of damage through proportional to how many percent of your shields are missing.

Many suggestions like this should really go hand in hand with other things to work, i feel.

Even if repairs were easy, my logic about how damage should progress in relation to shields is still correct. A shield that is at full strength should maximize mitigation, period.

Also, there is the other point that the OP is very exploitable. If I know that N% of my shots will go through a shield, or if N% of my damage will go through (does not matter which), then I can use that info to make a saber gun that will mathematically bypass shields and drill right to your reactor every time without even having to worry about how strong your shield is.

 

[EricBlank]

I support this suggestion quite a bit, but some of the stipulations brought up already would work better as far as particulars go, namely shield bypass chance being inverse to current shield % strength, and partial penetration on the majority if not 100% of shots that "bypass" the shield, so if you have 80% capacity, you have say a 1% chance of a shot bypassing your shields with only 3-7% of its damage, at 25% shields youd have a 20% chance of bypass and between 5-99% of the damage may get through, with reactor chambers to reduce both the chance of penetration and the max amount of damage that can be dealt to the hull.

 

[Arcaner]

On further thought inversing the critical chance may not be particularly helpful.

If there are two ships that cannot take down each others shields (I'm talking about pre shields update here), even with this inverse system, how will they take each other's shields down to a meaningful value so as to actually start bypassing shields? Won't they recharge back before their weapons recharge? (I've read your values Nosajimiki, and don't think 3% crit chance at 80% shield strength is gonna work.)

Also, if we decide not to follow the inverse system, if a player with a small mass fighter decides to troll a player in a significantly bigger ship, the tiny damage dealt will be negligible. If it is not, that player is actually a significant enemy. If it is, why would you bother fixing it? Don't like holes peppered in your precious?

The only reason I suggested that the highest bypass probability be at full shields is so that it is never possible to be completely invincible even if your shield recharge is much higher than your opponent's dps. We would only be able to decrease the chance of bypass (via chambers) but never upto a point that stalemate is possible. Ever.

Also, the weapons update should make fixing stuff much easier.

 

[taisong]

Question; Does the bypass mechanic have to be random? Cannot it be X% damage mitigated, rest is passed?

Right now Armor is the last ditch effort to mitigate damage from your ship. It is truly the last resort defence, and not really a lot of people use it as a primary defence.
How about letting the blocks absorb some damage, and offset the rest to the shields?
This would make armor much more meaningful, because now you can protect your insides without your armor going to waste.

How does it function?

When you have lower shields, more and more of the damage starts to affect the blocks itself.
100% = 0% seeping
90% = 0% seeping
80% = 0% seeping
70% = 0% seeping
60% = 0% seeping
50% = 0% seeping (damage starts to seep at 50%)
40% = 4% seeping
30% = 16% seeping
20% = 36% seeping
10% = 64% seeping
0% = 100% seeping

The calculation is done by;
Shield (%) = X
Seeping (%) = Y

Y = (50 - X) * (50 - X) / 25

You may modify the value by shield modules.

Innate probability is just not a good idea. In a game like starmade, RNGesus is not gonna favor.

 

[Nosajimiki]

On further thought inversing the critical chance may not be particularly helpful.

If there are two ships that cannot take down each others shields (I'm talking about pre shields update here), even with this inverse system, how will they take each other's shields down to a meaningful value so as to actually start bypassing shields? Won't they recharge back before their weapons recharge? (I've read your values Nosajimiki, and don't think 3% crit chance at 80% shield strength is gonna work.)

Also, if we decide not to follow the inverse system, if a player with a small mass fighter decides to troll a player in a significantly bigger ship, the tiny damage dealt will be negligible. If it is not, that player is actually a significant enemy. If it is, why would you bother fixing it? Don't like holes peppered in your precious?

The only reason I suggested that the highest bypass probability be at full shields is so that it is never possible to be completely invincible even if your shield recharge is much higher than your opponent's dps. We would only be able to decrease the chance of bypass (via chambers) but never upto a point that stalemate is possible. Ever.

Also, the weapons update should make fixing stuff much easier.

Here's the thing: alpha striking someone to 50% shields or less is really easy now. Current shields (with ion passives removed) are about 2x durable as they were before but weapons are 5x as strong. This means that you all of your weapons are proportionally a bit stronger vs shields than ion weapons were before with no option to mitigate 50% with docked armor. So ships that used to be able to drop a docked armor ship to 70% can now drop a similar ship to ~30%. If you are smart enough to do that with multiple outputs, then you actually have multiple chances to bypass the shields so maybe if you get hit by 70 shots, 5o will get chances to bypass shields resulting in an average of 4 hits, but even if you can fully regen before the next salvo, you still took enough damage that it will add up over time (stripping away armor, disabling chambers, damaging the shield generator, etc.)

Now this will not result in a ton of damage, but it will give you the ability to wear your opponent down over time where before you could not. It might mean a fight could last 10-30 minutes if both players are in particularly tanky ships, but eventually someone will lose, and that is the goal.

Question; Does the bypass mechanic have to be random? Cannot it be X% damage mitigated, rest is passed?

Right now Armor is the last ditch effort to mitigate damage from your ship. It is truly the last resort defence, and not really a lot of people use it as a primary defence.
How about letting the blocks absorb some damage, and offset the rest to the shields?
This would make armor much more meaningful, because now you can protect your insides without your armor going to waste.

How does it function?

When you have lower shields, more and more of the damage starts to affect the blocks itself.
100% = 0% seeping
90% = 0% seeping
80% = 0% seeping
70% = 0% seeping
60% = 0% seeping
50% = 0% seeping (damage starts to seep at 50%)
40% = 4% seeping
30% = 16% seeping
20% = 36% seeping
10% = 64% seeping
0% = 100% seeping

The calculation is done by;
Shield (%) = X
Seeping (%) = Y

Y = (50 - X) * (50 - X) / 25

You may modify the value by shield modules.

Innate probability is just not a good idea. In a game like starmade, RNGesus is not gonna favor.

Something of this nature works equally fine IMO. You could even make it configurable like this:

Shield (%) = X
Seeping (%) = Y
Threashold (%) = Z

Y = 2*(Z - X)^2 / Z

This way a server admin who does not want seeping can set Z=0 or if someone wants to get a minimum seep of 10% could go Z=125. Default for Z should probably be in the 50-80 range though to get the desired effect.