stumbled into this from an article on RPS: http://www.mandategame.com/mandateshipb ... ilder.html
Can we have this shield damage system Josh? Please? Pretty Please? with cherries on top? pweeeeeaaase?
(shoot rocks at shield for maximum OOooOOoOoooOooo)

(been following the progress of the game for awhile now. Josh's dev logs and videos are incredible, the guy is a one man programming team. Wish I had backed it, decided around dev video update 2 or 3 that I was picking it up on release day.)

Since Josh is almost ready to start focusing on gameplay I figured it wasn't totally irrelevant to start begging for something like this.

Seriously looking forward to release day for limit theory. It cannot come fast enough. I have been chomping at the bit to get my hands on it for months now. XD

*sigh*. I'll refrain from snarking about "I WANT IT! IT SOOOO PRETTY!!!!" posts. Also, I consider lifting innovative visuals wholesale without asking permission from the authors to be impolite at best and asking for legal trouble at worst.


But for clarification on the Mandate's shield tech: Beside what was shown in vids and the interactive ship builder demo, there are absolutely no technical details available as far as the damage model or the game mechanics behind it are concerned.
Video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf-lB51wlNo

Basically, the shields aren't divided in the usual 1-4 zones that get depleted under fire until they fail and the hull gets it, but instead get holes in the shield bubble, which increase in size when further compromised. In the demo, the effect was that the hull gets hit quite often, and that the shields offered a protection factor somewhere in the range of wet tissue paper, but that's probably the demo. Hull damage seems also to be heavily compartmentalized, eventually interacting with the real-time boarding operations.

I'm rather unsure on the amount of work needed to get LT's shield systems to perform similarly, and I'm totally unsure on how you would balance this, since I haven't seen it in action. Not having had access to the prototype, I don't know how the LT shield system worked back then, but it seemed to only track overall shield and hull strength. Maybe Josh can enlighten us on LT's damage model in general.

Hardenberg wrote:*sigh*. I'll refrain from snarking about "I WANT IT! IT SOOOO PRETTY!!!!" posts. Also, I consider lifting innovative visuals wholesale without asking permission from the authors to be impolite at best and asking for legal trouble at worst.


But for clarification on the Mandate's shield tech: Beside what was shown in vids and the interactive ship builder demo, there are absolutely no technical details available as far as the damage model or the game mechanics behind it are concerned.
Video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf-lB51wlNo

Basically, the shields aren't divided in the usual 1-4 zones that get depleted under fire until they fail and the hull gets it, but instead get holes in the shield bubble, which increase in size when further compromised. In the demo, the effect was that the hull gets hit quite often, and that the shields offered a protection factor somewhere in the range of wet tissue paper, but that's probably the demo. Hull damage seems also to be heavily compartmentalized, eventually interacting with the real-time boarding operations.

I'm rather unsure on the amount of work needed to get LT's shield systems to perform similarly, and I'm totally unsure on how you would balance this, since I haven't seen it in action. Not having had access to the prototype, I don't know how the LT shield system worked back then, but it seemed to only track overall shield and hull strength. Maybe Josh can enlighten us on LT's damage model in general.

Sorry I have always been a sucker for eye candy. Also I wasn't trying to imply I wanted this exact damage model copy/pasted into LT. Just that I thought it was cool and something maybe could inspire the devs. Title was stupid I should have posted this under technical or something not under suggestions, My bad.
EDIT: wait, I did in fact say that I wanted this damage model, oops. I just would like to see something similar. Too many years of eve online have made me bitter and cynical to the whole "your shields have this much hp. That's it." So anytime someone does directional shield based damage models I get overly excited

downsizer wrote:Sorry I have always been a sucker for eye candy. Also I wasn't trying to imply I wanted this exact damage model copy/pasted into LT. Just that I thought it was cool and something maybe could inspire the devs. Title was stupid I should have posted this under technical or something not under suggestions, My bad.

No need to apologize, we're a civilized forum, and I'm not allowed to eat the newbies anymore or flame them to the point where they cancel their internet access. I merely wanted to elaborate a bit on the Mandate shield visuals, since your post was a bit lacking in the technical description compartment. We can talk about everything, and I'm merely voicing my concerns here.

Since it's your first post: Welcome to the forums. We don't bite much.

That shield method seems like it kinda kills the whole point of shields, and also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that assumes two things:

1) The idea that a shield is supposed to mitigate as much damage as possible for as often as possible in order to preserve the hull of the ship.
2) The idea that spaceship shields are usually some controlled projection of energy.

If you can just poke a hull in your opponent's shield and then shoot him with your BFG 9000, your opponent's shield is garbage. The basic premise of a shield is that you're guarding yourself on all sides and that energy is distributed evenly throughout. As you take damage, your shield eats up more power (presumably from a capacitor bank). If your shield takes too much damage and drains the capacitors, then your shield goes down.

The way that this game approaches the shields is like that of present day body armor, which can take a bullet in a given location ONCE, but then will have a weak point in that one spot. That's not to say that body armor is bad, but this is sci-fi we're dealing with. Shouldn't we be able to expect better?

Yeah, I think so. We don't have a ceramic, breakable shield up around our ship. It looks cool, but is immensely impractical.

Grumblesaur wrote:That shield method seems like it kinda kills the whole point of shields, and also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that assumes two things:

1) The idea that a shield is supposed to mitigate as much damage as possible for as often as possible in order to preserve the hull of the ship.
2) The idea that spaceship shields are usually some controlled projection of energy.

If you can just poke a hull in your opponent's shield and then shoot him with your BFG 9000, your opponent's shield is garbage. The basic premise of a shield is that you're guarding yourself on all sides and that energy is distributed evenly throughout. As you take damage, your shield eats up more power (presumably from a capacitor bank). If your shield takes too much damage and drains the capacitors, then your shield goes down.

The way that this game approaches the shields is like that of present day body armor, which can take a bullet in a given location ONCE, but then will have a weak point in that one spot. That's not to say that body armor is bad, but this is sci-fi we're dealing with. Shouldn't we be able to expect better?

Yeah, I think so. We don't have a ceramic, breakable shield up around our ship. It looks cool, but is immensely impractical.

Well, obviously overall shield integrity could be variable, "poking a hole" in them as you put could be very hard on a capital ship if the amount of damage needed to poke said hole was quite high, not to mention on small ships this would require you to put all your shots in the same location on a fast moving target, meaning what would most likely happen is that the shields would go down much more uniformly as hitting the same location with your weapons for any length of time would be nigh on impossible for fighters/bombers. Also I know Josh mentioned fighters and bombers being able to fly under a capital ships shields to do direct hull damage. How is this so different than that? Or has that feature been removed?

ALL THE EDITS: Made thread title less obnoxious. I totally agree that a flat shield HP amount is far easier to work with and totally viable. I have just always found it to be exceedingly boring in practice. But you're right this comes down to personal tastes mostly and updating the AI that deals with combat would need to become far more complex with this kind of system.

Yeah, we only let Hardenberg off the chain when someone continually posts stuff that has been [obviously] answered elsewhere multiple times.

Also I know Josh mentioned fighters and bombers being able to fly under a capital ships shields to do direct hull damage. How is this so different than that?

Mostly a scaling issue - getting attacked by fighters is death by a thousand papercuts, and takes quite some time. While bombers bring more firepower to bear, they're still pretty low on the food chain as far as sheer damage/time output goes. Also, the fighters need to get VERY close to the capital ship, which means they are susceptible to flak, interceptors and other sundry methods of disposing of them while approaching.

Poking a hole through a shield and then unloading whatever kind of unpleasantness the weapon banks can deliver in said hole however works just fine with long distance shots (which can't be intercepted and are probably a lot faster than a wing of fighters). Worse, there are no limits of what guns you can bring to bear, provided you still manage to hit the other ship reliably in the same spots. One is getting eaten alive by a swarm of gnats that got too close. The other is simply that your shields won't do jack against the second salvo, and put heavy emphasis on armor technologies.

Hardenberg wrote:

Also I know Josh mentioned fighters and bombers being able to fly under a capital ships shields to do direct hull damage. How is this so different than that?

The other is simply that your shields won't do jack against the second salvo, and put heavy emphasis on armor technologies.

See I disagree completely, you could shift to better armor, but you could also shift to more maneuverability. At least for large ships all you would have to do is rotate your ship away from the direction of the incoming fire. Also I think posting that tech demo was a terrible idea, I was more interested in the concept than the way it was executed for show in the demo. Punching through the shields in any given location on a large ship should take significantly more time than that which is required in the demo. So yeah again sorry about that. I wish I saw the appeal of the one surface shield damage system from a gameplay perspective... but I just don't. Again the amount of time to develop all of the tech and AI to support the system would probably be unwieldy for one guy. So I completely understand the implementation of such a system into LT may just not be possible due to lack of resources. But in a perfect world with all the money and all the time you guys would still seriously prefer a flat hp shield damage model? That kind of blows my mind.

Haaardshieldzzz