Maybe it should depend on why it's down.

If it's broken, then it needs repaired at any suitable repair depot, or maybe by on-board repair systems. If available, a spare unit could be switched in by a repair bot in a matter of minutes. In any case, run away.

If it's depleted (e.g. uses storage unit with minimum threshold), then waiting for recharge would be all that's required. Recharge should be automatic, though maybe you could prioritise what systems get how much power. Run away for a while, then come back and finish the fight.

Gazz wrote:

Grumblesaur wrote:should shields just gradually return?

They do that in most games but that's a bit lame. It's purely numerical scaling. No condition you can work with. No gameplay element.

It may be a bit lame, but for fighters and slightly bigger ships (maybe even as large as a corvette) they should just regen. It's hard enough being a small ship that you have to worry about this as well. But for larger ships, having a more complex mechanic does seem viable as it allows for more tactical deployments when in offense or defense. It also makes since that a shield generator on a larger ship is more complex than a fighter shield.

Thinking about why a larger shield would give a benefit for reduced damage I came up with two possible reasons:

1) The energy of the weapon is dissipated across the surface, therefore having a larger surface area means more energy absorption. The down side of this as has been mentioned is why not have an extra huge shield for maximum absorption.... maybe because of diminishing returns.

2) The shield actually isn't any stronger at all, in fact as you grow a shield large it is weaker.... BUT when a weapon hits a shield the some of the energy from the weapon is projected in a hemispherical wave out the other side of the shield (some absorbed by the shield). Therefore if the shield is tight fitting then some of the energy from the weapon makes it to the ship, a looser fitting shield will have that energy wave dissipate significantly by the time it hits the ship (using something like energy / (distance * distance) to calculate the resultant energy at the hull).

I personally prefer 2 as it seems more "realistic" and avoids the extremely large shield situation all together as a shield over a certain distance away from the hull would end up leaving more room behind the shield for ships to exploit without any meaningful reduction in energy hitting the hull (as it would already be negligible).

I think this also fits in well with the idea of shields only partially stopping weapons, and probably leads to some rather simple formula to calculate the damage to both shields and ship from a given shot.

I would love to make a difference between different kinds of weapons and mitigating their damage.

Energy weapons would be countered by plasma shields.
Ballistic weapons would be counter by -for instance- carbon nanotube plating.

We already know now that carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong and hard. So they'd make an ideal shield to stop bullets and missiles. To me it doesn't make sense to have mass drivers stopped by energy shields. Protective panels could be attached to the exterior of the ship, like storage containers. Small fighters could even perhaps shoot off the panels from their sockets.

This would introduce more variety. Not only can factions have their favourite weapon system, but you'll be able to adjust your defence when waging war with these factions.

Sweet! I posted toward the beginning of this thread that it might be a cool feature to have both kinds of shields at the same time, especially on larger ships and based upon latest dev log that's exactly what we'll be able to do! We can have the looser, stronger shield and also the tighter but weaker shield to protect against the small fighters that can fly in under the loose shield. I think this will add a fantastic game play element.

You could also have a small exploration ship geared towards speed where instead of hardpoints used for missiles or guns you use them to generate multiple shields. Of course on this ship you'll want to have extra heavy plating as well (assuming that's an option).

I'm really excited for the new game play features added by having tight and loose shields AND multiple shields!! Thanks Josh!

On the topic of shield regeneration, I saw an interesting idea in a game called Starsector (previously Starfarer). When your shields are depleted, all systems tied into your energy grid go offline and you are forced to vent "flux" (which is accrued by taking damage) and you cannot reactivate any systems until the flux has been fully depleted (could make for a pretty cool graphical event).

However, you can manually disable your shields to prevent overloading (allowing the rest of your systems to work as normal) which in turn drains flux (albiet at a slower rate than the forced flux dump).

Personally I found this an interesting mechanic that allowed for some interesting tactics.

It would depend what systems were all tied in to the energy grid, for me. If losing my shields means my engines, sensors and weapons stop working, I'm a sitting duck.

Personally, I like the idea of shields going down, and only coming back up after the capacitor has reached 10% power or so.
I also think that shields at full strength should use less power than shields that are building up.

Suppose we outfit a capital ship with more than one shield. Then it might be possible that the shield regeneration is too fast for the attackers to break the other shields.
If a regenerating shield uses more power, then it might make sense that the ship only has enough spare power to let one shield regenerate at a time. For instance, a regenerating shield would require 10GW, while an active shield would be maintained with 3GW.

Katorone wrote: Suppose we outfit a capital ship with more than one shield. Then it might be possible that the shield regeneration is too fast for the attackers to break the other shields.

This isn't a problem as long as other capital ships can take it out. If a player in a single fighter can take out a capital ship, that is incredibly unbalanced. In the original C&C, a minigunner could take out a tank because there was a glitch that when the single minigunner went prone, the tank would always miss. When you get to the RTS phase of LT, if a fighter can take out a cap, then there's no point of caps.

DWMagus wrote:

Katorone wrote: Suppose we outfit a capital ship with more than one shield. Then it might be possible that the shield regeneration is too fast for the attackers to break the other shields.

This isn't a problem as long as other capital ships can take it out. If a player in a single fighter can take out a capital ship, that is incredibly unbalanced. In the original C&C, a minigunner could take out a tank because there was a glitch that when the single minigunner went prone, the tank would always miss. When you get to the RTS phase of LT, if a fighter can take out a cap, then there's no point of caps.

I agree. But a lot of stings should still hurt. One fighter might not do it, but 100 of them should be able to cause a lot of damage.
In one of my games I'd probably try to play a swarm-like entity without capital ships. Just to see what happens.

Unless that fighter is carrying a torpedo, there should be no reason why a swarm of mosquitoes can take down an elephant. You'd need at least something to pierce that thick hide.

DWMagus wrote:Unless that fighter is carrying a torpedo, there should be no reason why a swarm of mosquitoes can take down an elephant. You'd need at least something to pierce that thick hide.

Again we agree.
Furthermore, I'd love it if armor was fit on hardpoints. This way a small ship could perhaps shoot off the plating and reveal a weaker spot. I'm still not saying underpowered fighters (eg M5 with mosquitoes) should be able to take down a big ship. But with preparation and the right equipment, such a hard task should be possible. (btw, in real life mosquitoes can bite an elephant just fine.)

I think I read somewhere that ships can be unlimited in size. So in theory you could make a ship the size of a small moon. This makes me wonder how many hitpoints such a ship has, and how it's calculated.
Would each torpedo fired take out a piece of the hull until something critical is damaged? Would LT be able to somehow calculate the structural integrity of the ship, and could we do away with hitpoints perhaps?
The same with asteroid bases... Would torpedo's fired from the wrong angle take out pieces of the asteroid until the actual base is hit?

It's important to know how badly damaged a ship is, but perhaps it's enough to display how critical it is? (perhaps in 5 stages or so)

I do agree that a properly armed group of fighters should be able to hurt or even destroy a cap ship, it makes sense really, like fighter planes can destroy air craft carriers. However it'd need to be scaled I guess. For example if it costs you 1000c per fighter, and 1,000,000 for your cap ship, and you spent that million on fighters, then I think it'd be reasonably likely that you're thousand fighters armed with torpedoes could wreck that capital ship, albeit with some nasty losses if you had some fighter defense of your own and plenty of anti-fighter weaponry.

Back to shields though, something I think that could be call is focusing shield power. So if all your enemies are in front you can slide your shields forward, leaving the rear 2/3 exposed but doubling the strength of the forward shields? It would leave you open to flanking and the like but I believe it could be a pretty cool feature, adding a more diverse tactical dynamic. Perhaps then you could also fire missiles that would split into a cluster that spreads around the nose of the ship and converge around the center of the hull as a counter, so you'd have to quickly pull the shields back. Obviously it would take a few seconds or more even, (I don't know really) to move the shield back so you'd need to be on the ball. Makes shields a bit more exciting and diverse than the standard second armour plating.

Slevan wrote:Back to shields though, something I think that could be call is focusing shield power. So if all your enemies are in front you can slide your shields forward, leaving the rear 2/3 exposed but doubling the strength of the forward shields? It would leave you open to flanking and the like but I believe it could be a pretty cool feature, adding a more diverse tactical dynamic. Perhaps then you could also fire missiles that would split into a cluster that spreads around the nose of the ship and converge around the center of the hull as a counter, so you'd have to quickly pull the shields back. Obviously it would take a few seconds or more even, (I don't know really) to move the shield back so you'd need to be on the ball. Makes shields a bit more exciting and diverse than the standard second armour plating.

For this to work you'd need to have 4-6 shield generators each generating a shield at a different part of your ship. If one shield gets breached, this part of the ship becomes vulnerable.
At the moment shields are supposed to go around the entire ship. So, with 4-6 generators your shield around the entire ship would be 4-6 times as strong.

Needing multiple generators to protect the entire ship seems like a mechanism that wouldn't add a lot to gameplay. You'd only get to use it when commanding a ship. In return, the AI will use this technique flawlessly.

Nah it wasn't so much having seperate generators for each area of the ship, as being able to direct where the generators shielded. Lets say for example you have one generator covering the whole ship, lets say you have a certain amount of power for the shield and the further it spreads the weaker the shield is overall, so realistically the bigger you were the more shields you'd need for effective coverage.

Now if you're in a battle and you're taking a pounding on the nose and nowhere else, I'm proposing you should be able to pool all the shield power to the front of the ship, leaving the rest temporarily unshielded. In doing this you save power overall because the shielded area is smaller, thus increasing the overall defense on the nose.

Stargate is the best example I can think of, where they have to block a solar flare with a ship, so they put all the shield on the nose of the ship and the rest is unshielded. This increases the shield strength of the nose drastically, allowing you to last longer than if you the shield covered the entire ship.

Hope that was a bit clearer.

Oh right, that makes sense.

It could be fun, but I don't think it would see much use except on the player ship.