I've removed the other suggestions I made in this thread, since the discussion is almost entirely focused on shields.
Here's what I said on shields originally:
I find shields to be the biggest thing undermining the game. Right now, they serve as health your ship will always have, so long as the shield generators stay intact and are given time to recover between each battle. Many AI ship battles involving shields I've seen have dragged on well into the territory of an hour, and it seems they're generally much too powerful to be overcome by a single ship's firepower.
To address this, I'd recommend making shields begin to plateau in effectiveness beyond say 50% of a ship's hull strength, as well as possibly being less powerful the higher the ship's volume. This means a ship's shields will rarely be as strong as or stronger than its hull, and reduce the degree to which a shielded ship is more powerful than an unshielded one.
The key points:
Shields work against dynamic, opportunistic combat,
Shields are currently the best and main method of protecting your ship, outweighing other factors such as speed, maneuverability, armour, hull strength and pilot skill. Therefore, shields do not present themselves as a choice with drawbacks, but as a necessity you must account for to survive in combat. In turn, combat revolves entirely around being able to take enough damage for long enough to do enough damage to the enemy's shields, before they can do that to you. Shields can easily be made, with few drawbacks, to take that amount of damage for such a ridiculously long length of time, undermining the necessity of all combat principles beyond "shoot gun at enemy [if the numbers are on your side]".
The suggestions to address this:
Diminishing returns based on ship volume
Diminishing returns based on an upper threshold of shield strength, depending on ship volume
Energy production/consumption being affected by damage taken to shields (Active, manual shield raising/lowering)
General nerf to normal shields, with introduction of stronger but more limited directional shields
Suggestion
Morbo513
Edit:
I've removed the other suggestions I made in this thread, since the discussion is almost entirely focused on shields.
Here's what I said on shields originally:
The key points:
Shields work against dynamic, opportunistic combat,
Shields are currently the best and main method of protecting your ship, outweighing other factors such as speed, maneuverability, armour, hull strength and pilot skill. Therefore, shields do not present themselves as a choice with drawbacks, but as a necessity you must account for to survive in combat. In turn, combat revolves entirely around being able to take enough damage for long enough to do enough damage to the enemy's shields, before they can do that to you. Shields can easily be made, with few drawbacks, to take that amount of damage for such a ridiculously long length of time, undermining the necessity of all combat principles beyond "shoot gun at enemy [if the numbers are on your side]".
The suggestions to address this:
Diminishing returns based on ship volume
Diminishing returns based on an upper threshold of shield strength, depending on ship volume
Energy production/consumption being affected by damage taken to shields (Active, manual shield raising/lowering)
General nerf to normal shields, with introduction of stronger but more limited directional shields
See post #11 for elaboration on these
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