Strategical shields

shields have been suggested numerous times. And most of the solutions are promoting turtling, however not this one. This is a suggestion for a strategical shield that instead of being candy for turtles brings some interesting gameplay elements. sorry for the long post, it's quite hard to explain a well formed idea. All numbers used in this post are just examples. At the end of the post there's a summary for the lazy of you.

How it works:

What do we see here? it's a hexagonal shield. this allows shields to be placed next to eachother without gaps between them, thus stacking is not necessary. The shield consists out of 7 segments, a center segment and 6 radial segments (with some of the hexagons belonging to 2 segments). Each radial segment holds 12K of energy while the center holds 36K this makes for a total of 108K of energy.


The shield is created and sustained by a generator. This generator only charges the center segment and does so at a rate of 1,2K/sec. The center segments than charges the radial segments at 200E/s. Fully charging the shield takes 90 seconds at this rate. During this charging step the shield is offline and the generator is vulnerable to enemy attacks.

When all segments are fully charged the shield becomes functional. it has four effects:

1. blocking enemy fire, as long as the shield is online it blocks all enemy shots. This weakens the shield as is loses energy.
2. let friendly shots through, it is possible to fire for inside the shield, however the segments you fire trough lose energy to polarization. shooting form inside a shield will drain you shield faster.
3. stopping all units, the shield doesn't allow any unit through, friendly or enemy. It is possible to disable sections of the shield to allow units through or make directional shields but this fully drains there energy.
4. consuming energy, the shield will even when not under fire consume some energy. This means that if insufficient energy is available your shields will slowly decay.

When a segment is hit it loses energy and will start to recharge. Once a segment reaches below 10% it will collapse and lose functionality until it is back at 25%. If the center segment collapses the whole shield goes down and requires a full recharge.

The recharging process works with these rules:

• the center segment is recharged by the generator at 1.2K/s
• the radial segments each get up to 0.2K/s from the center segment.
• the radial segments can pull energy from stronger adjacent segments at 50E/s or at 250E/s if there power is lower than 25%.
• the radial segments decay at 10E/s.

The shield can thus be destroyed in three ways:

• cutting the power supply
• damaging it with units
• destroying the center segment with a space laser.

Summary:

• shields cannot be stacked
• shields are seamlessly tileable
• shields take time to come online
• shields allow no unit movement without disabling segments
• shields can be directional
• shields cost a lot of power
• shields are vulnerable to orbital units

"destroying the center segment with a space laser" SPACE LAZORS. Hm, this sounds like a nice idea, just not sure if the devs will add any kind of shield, for the release version that is.

yeah but even if they add it post release it's cool. thanks for reading that wall of text btw. i tried keeping it short XD

I like this idea. Also, what's the range of the radial segments?

the range is really up to the devs (as are all other numbers). Personally i think the radius if the shield should be about 3 regular factorys

I can see that this is a pretty balanced shield suggestion, but you claim it is not promoting turtling. How so?

I don't think shields should completely stop units, but rather slow them down a lot. Units inside shields, including friendlies, are slowed to 75%, units entering or leaving should be slowed to 25%. If you want something that completely blocks units then get forcefields. Shields should be the most vulnerable to constant beams, which would drain power at an insane rate. So DOOMLASER satellites or railbeam tanks would be the ideal counter. +1 to the whole idea anyways, because i like shields, especially when bombers are OP.

I really like your use of pictures and definitive numbers, makes this post a bit more relevant than most shield suggestions which involve some variation of a countermeasure or a bubble shield.

However there are a few issues with this design; it sounds like an automatically stacked shield that promotes (read: requires) the use of indirect fire weapons such as artillery and orbital weapons to take literally any shielded location. It also entirely invalidates flanking as it protects in a pseudo-independent radial area. This mean that even if you send a good flank from behind, and attack the shield, the units will still have to fight through the point defenses at the front of the shield to disable the shield. This is not helped at all by the fact that the shield entirely stops movement.

Honestly, if we're going to have shields in-game (which we won't, because Uber said they don't want to do it at release), directional shields are the best way to go. So long as they are balanced correctly cost-wise, directional shields promote both strategic defense and strategic offense. There is literally no form of a radial shield that promotes either of these things.

Another thing I'll remind you of is how unbelievably overpowered T2 Power Generators are and how resistant Uber is to changing them to be... Less overpowered. So energy is pretty much irrelevant once you have enough T2 PGens to fuel your T2 engineers who are making more T2 power.

A newb turtling is nothing special, it's easy enough to break that kind of base. It's when a really good player turtles that it becomes annoying. I mean seriously, the Gentleman's League still has rules on WALLS because they're so overpowered. Just think about that; walls that sponge up damage and block movement are overpowered. Think about how OP a radial shield that stops movement and sponges up damage would be.

Apparently the overpowered-ness of T2 is intentional, especially so for the Economic structures so they can lock away units behind a paywall, making certain structures and units more difficult to get and some practically impossible on a "low powered" economy; all in the name of "controlling the pace of the game".

I've tried to reach Garat about his response to the Livestream and he hasn't responded. I can't get clarification on his statement.

I like the idea in addition to Stonewood's about units just moving through slowly.

One thing I don't really understand (sorry if i misread) is how the shields are actually build. My original thought was that the first shield you build only covers from up top, being basically a flat level shield. Then the additional segments are chosen one at a time costing more energy. So it would take a lot of energy to build all sides so practically you might have a shield with only a few segments right?

[sarcasm]You don't say?[/sarcasm]
Same as bot and vehicle tree are essentially the same, they differ only slightly in terms of the amount of micro required to unleash their full strength, but thats just it.
There is no such as a balancing so far, what we have so far is barely a test scenario for the engine which provides some half-baked game play for 20-40 minutes, but thats it. Abusing the economy to progress in a strictly tiered system of units was just the cheapest way to create some type of semi-playable game, at least for short matches.

Back on topic:
I don't really like it. It's actually even worse than the "classic" shields, since it blocks of flanking attacks by default. It also has the very same issues as the classic issues, to be specific: The effect of multiplying the effective strength of point defenses.

There is IMHO only one way to make a shield fair: Make the effect symmetrical. That means, if a certain weapon type is stopped from reaching the inside of the shield, then the very same weapon type must also be blocked from going out of the shield.
If the shield is supposed to block any high energy weapon (fast projectiles, lasers), then it must also prevent you from placing your point defenses under the protection of the shield.

Btw.: If you define a shield that way, then we already have a "shield" like structure: Walls. Blocks movement and direct shots in both directions, is depletable, but still allows BOTH sides to use any type of indirect fire. And guess what: These "shields" are even stackable and it still doesn't hurt...

I would appreciate a completely impenetrable shield. Especially a directional shield. THAT would create some interesting scenarios involving indirect fire and flanks. Heck, if the shield was low-to-the-ground, you could even flank from above with a Mesa.

No it wouldn't. It would just mean I park all my economy under it and build defenses outside of it, having no longer to worry about my economy at all.

Not really interesting...

Okay then, now your defenses are quite literally defenseless and they DIE DIE DIE. Now your economy die die dies because the rest of the defenses cannot defend; they are blocked by the shields. And when I say completely impenetrable, I mean that friendly projectiles and LoS are effected by the shield. It can still be destroyed.

Love the Hex shield idea and how it can be positional. How about it also blocking radar/LoS as well? That way your turrets/units behind the shield couldn't see out and the enemy couldn't see in..unless you have a spotter unit or building on the other side of the shield wall so that your defenses can get a target.

I think that would make shields very tactical...if they ever get implemented

There is a lot of weird mechanics here that people are trying to create for a ultimately flawed concept.

What can shields do that a group of tanks don't do better? Or bombers? Or bots? Or artillery? Or mobile artillery? Or any moving unit?

not getting destroyed by other artillery, or units that have bigger range

Casualty are not a point when you have a unlimited economy.

And when you can dodge shells.

And unlike shields, tanks/planes/boats can shoot back making them a sword and shield, rather then just a shield.

dionytadema, Isn't the game supposed to be about units getting destroyed, as opposed to, y'know, not?

I think that this would be a relay good idea, I hope they implement it.