I really loved the balance in TIE Fighter: you started by flying a TIE Fighter, a ship that had NO shields, and your only method of defense was speed and dodging. I so loved it. It was still possible, when playing very carefully, to take out a big big ship with that one TIE Fighter if you took the time (and evade skill).
Looking back I think this game is the reason I always go for the fastest ships, no matter the hit in shields I take: it's always more than the zero shields of the TIE FIghter
So yeah, I don't mind if we have shields ranging from Shield Strength:
- 0 (hyperfast scout with offensive capabilities)
- 10 (basic fighter)
- 100 (basic frigate)
- 1000 (basic corvette/freighter)
- 10000 (basic carrier)
- 100000 (basic space station)
Let's say every point in shield strength in this overview is the amount of regular fighter-level weapon fire per second that the shield can take before going down.
Remember the Asteroids game? You could initiate a shield for about 3 secs by pressing a button, it would need 30 secs to reload. That is pretty cool. I could see this working for a niche-fighter.
Of course shield strength means nothing without Shield Regeneration rates. Or weapon Rate-of-Fire variance (current day stuff already approaches 1 million rouds/minute:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKlnMwuCZso and we all know the lower rates of fire too)
If shields regenerate a flat 1% of their power per second or so then the larger shields get insanely difficult/impossible to take down with average fighter weapons.
On the other hand, if shields regenerate really slow it may become possible to destroy a space station with a TIE Fighter-like craft, if you take 2,5 hours to do it.
This, imo, is an awesome experience, and I am not certain it's a problem in the game. I mean, logically I'd assume the AI to send some reinforcements to the station in 2,5 hours. If you have killed those already well... great job
If you do not want to take 2,5 hours just take a Corvette and attack with that.
I assume bigger shields will take longer to recharge to make this possible.
We could also give every ship the same shield strength but radically vary the regeneration rates: from near-instant to never.
This is getting a jumble, sorry :p Guess my point is:
- We can use any number of ways to achieve the sweet spot of shield/weapon balance of different classes of ships: until a decision has been made writing things like "shields should only vary in strength by a factor of 100 or less" does not make sense
- I don't see why a big scale difference in shields (or armor of whatever) would lead to problems (imo there are some assumptions in there I don't know about) (@Gazz, top of page post)
- Make a tactical strike scout without shields!
- My personal Sweet spot would be:
* Small ships would either need a lot of time or big numbers to kill a big ship (preferrably
both are an option, so recharge rates shouldn't be too high on average).
* Big ships and freighters have better shields than small ones, and can hold out a while, hoping for rescue.
* If there are different statistics for shields they should radically differ: I wouldn't like comparing shields that only have a few points difference in certain areas
* Small craft have the advantage of manouvrability and speed: you can do strafing runs and weapons can miss if you fly well and fast.