At this point, QuickFire seems to have devolved into an unstable, hyper-polarizing, and restrictive mess. I thought that it would resolve some of the issues from the weapons and power builds, but now I'm not so sure.
I think at this point I might downgrade to a pre-QF build so I can build shells without worrying about changing configs and restrictive mechanics...either that or I'll just go switch over to From the Depths. At least that game properly balances all of its different weapons.
Yeah... After all the crazy designs I've come up with over the past 6 years, I'm not interested in suddenly being restricted to only one build/play style.
It's times like these that I am glad I started saving all my SM installs (before and after QF) to completely separate folders as a backup.
I didn't participate in the last round of shield changes but pre-last change they were pretty strong as long as you cared about building them at proper size.
Right now looking into confings you can have 5 regen and 1250 cap for 100 power vs DPS of ~17 for same 100 power. Less if we take anything more long range than base cannon. That's 73 seconds to bring down the shields if all the shots hit. For beams or long range weapons you can double to triple that accounting for some misses. So 100-200 seconds to shut down the shields. That's seems pretty decent.
This should get you from 10 to 20 something millions of shield cap at ~50k mass. Depending on how much recharge you want to have in percentage of your cap.
P.S. My own on computer notes actually show that shields were buffed from 1.25 upkeep per cap block to 1 upkeep per cap block.
That sounds promising on paper, but...
The recent changes substantially dropped the amount of shield capacity you get per block. For example; I went from 700K shields on a 7K mass ship (the original "Challenger" class) to about 450K. I tried to tweak a config setting and it corrupted my universe; forcing me to restore a copy of a previous install. When I updated to QF again, the ship registered only 280K shields. Subsequent reinstalls again yielded only 280K; the lowest capacity ever for that ancient ship design since I joined this forum. Meanwhile, regen was so power hungery that I could not fire weapons (30% of total power draw), while moving (30% power draw) without redlining to 130% or more and did not get any kind of resonable performance until I removed ALL shield chargers from the ship.
This demonstrates two problems.
1) Regardless of what changes were made to shield rechargers, lower shield capacity per block means yet more block spam, which means less interior and less creativity for the sake of combat effectiveness and a glaring incompatibility with several of Schine's planned features.
2) Because of the aforementioned excessive mass of system blocks (
how you distribute the mass among system block types it is irrelevant), the excessive power draw of thrusters and the fact that smaller ships simply cannot benefit from armor the way larger ships to (due to being *smaller*), shields were the only thing that provided any significant defense for smaller ships. By reducing overall shield capacity, the durability of smaller ships has been nerfed; with the only way to compensate being to add more capacitors, thus adding more weight; thus lowering your speed and turn rate (making them easier to hit); thus requiring speed and turnrate chambers; thus eliminating your ability to use any
other chambers.
As I explained in previous discussions; QF is promoting block spam as well as giantism and forcing one play/build style at the expense of all others. From a balance standpoint, this is simply unacceptable.
EDIT: Furthermore; the fact you offer an example at 50K mass (a size threshold which I very rarely approach) further demonstrates that you are neither looking at this issue from all angles nor considering how these kinds of broadly sweeping changes affect players who don't fit the supposed consensus of "standard" size or build methods.
