Force fields?

Two reasons I don't uses walls: They are not convenient to place in an organized fashion and take up valuable time to layout. The second reason is that walls offer no protection from airborne threats.

Logically, a bubble shield makes sense to me as a device that could work. The reason being is that a thick enough wall of ionized gas, nothing is going to get through that. Except the shock wave of a nuclear detonation.

What you're suggesting is rechargeable ablative armor. The problem I have with that is more armor can be defeated by increasing the weight and velocity of the projectile. The bubble shield makes sense, think of it this way. Imagine a thin layer of the sun surrounding your base. When a large projectile contacts the shield it is super heated and vaporized by the layer of ionized gas. Like a plasma cutter through cheap sheet metal. When an energy weapon contacts the shield the beam loses cohesion and cannot pass through the shield. Projectile weapons would take energy to defeat, while energy weapons would create an unusable power surge that would have to be dissipated. Shield failure would be a result of too much energy being removed and the shield collapsing, or absorbing too much energy and the emitter overloads and needs a cool down cycle. Friendly units would be oppositely charged to the shield and that's how they could pass through. Enemy units should not be able to pass through the shields.

Stop it man, this has been discussed for too much!!!

Laser turrets provide no protection from airborn threats, so should we not build them too? Walls are incredible for the amount of hp they have, and saying that they provide no airborne protection is a terrible reason not to build them. If you are looking for true airborn protection, build hummingbirds.

The only real reason i would ask for shields is to protect the commander once bomber snipes start becoming a problem. Other than that, im non-plussed about them.

So as I've said many times before shields are not in the current design, at least for ship.

I would love to experiment with some types of units that do this in the future though. Personally not a big fan of SupCom's shields (even though I spent a significant amount of time working on them!).

You guys will notice that placed units are directional and we haven't got any units that take advantage of that yet....

I think I'm getting the hint here...

Benjamin Franklin always liked his shields

Well you bring up a good point on laser turrets. They should be able to engage air targets. In TA artillery could engage air targets with the targeting facility. I hope to see all units being able to attack each other.

I'm not telling you if you should or should not build walls. I'm telling you why I don't build walls. There is a difference. For my style of play it takes me too long to layout the walls as well as the defensive structures. When I can click and drag build walls, I will be using them.

Edit to add: What I forgot to mention is that if walls offered protection from airborne threats they would be valuable enough for me to spend my time laying them out.

The first is being worked on by uber right now.

The problem is that you put too much attempts at realism in this when a shield -at least a bubbly shield- isn't realistic. The best attempt we have is that we would surround an object by a fine conductive mesh and create a plasma sheath around that. Which is kind of like armor. A projectile wouldn't be stopped by an ionized layer. At best, the outer layers of the projectile will be flash-vaporized and the rest continues on. Even small objects will just conserve their kinetic energy.

Magnetism and electricity can effect ionized gas. We can already use magnetism to direct radiation to form a picture in a CRT television, so why couldn't the same concept be used to produce shields?

You might be correct on the projectiles retaining some of their mass and energy, and perhaps that would be a good way to model the shields. The shields don't completely stop the incoming projectiles but they do reduce the amount of damage caused by that projectile. With enough overlapping layers it should also be possible to defeat the projectile. Ion shields may not be possible, or effective on celestial bodies that have no atmosphere.

Another option would be induction shields, using the heating properties of alternating current to liquefy the projectile before it hits the target. Induction shields would not be effective against energy weapons but they would work in all conditions.

Laser turrets shouldnt shoot air, they are incredible against ground, so why should they be able to shoot air anyways? It was the whole problem with tanks shooting at air. I mean, why make exceptions like this when my bombers dont have AA either, or that my hummingbirds cant shoot at ground, or that doxs cant shoot up. Its been talked about soooooo much, and limiting units to shooting at certain types of units forces more unit diversity. Laser turrets only shooting land forces you to build missile turrets against air.

For those players who want to turtle, that option should remain. But you need to do it with a large number of carefully placed discrete units, not by making your turrets and artillery extremely hard to destroy using bubble shields. Setting up a hard defense is a delicate, skillful balancing act, not just "throw a whole bunch of stuff under enough shields and it will hold."

TA is the very reason all units should be able to engage each other. Besides we already have laser emitters today that can be used against aircraft, ICBMs and land targets.

This is PA not TA. what do you TA and Supcom fanboys not get about that? you guys realise that TA is the only RTS to allow stupid **** like tanks to shoot up? It prevents unit diversity. People argue that all units should be different to each other, that T2 should not just be a straight upgrade from T1, but how is that ever going to happen if all units can engage all other units? it tends towards a generalised unit, of which all units are the same. If you want unit diversity, restricting units from shooting other units is a requirement.

When a game is advertised as the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation it is a reasonable expectation that it would have most, if not all of the features of TA. The famous 88mm from world war 2 started as an anti-aircraft flak cannon but ended up serving a number of roles from artillery, anti-air and anti-tank.

I don't want your kind of diversity. I want units that are specialize to different roles, but still are capable of engaging all targets even if they are not as effective outside of their normal operating envelope.

A human is a successor of a fish, does that mean we have the features of a fish? You can already see how it is similar to TA and Supcom, but that does not mean all of its concepts have to be the same. What does the pak 43/41 have to do with PA? WW2 was not a game you know? if it was, would you give a faction in TA nukes, and then prevent the other side from aquiring any WMDs? no, because thats not balanced. Many aspects of war are not balanced, so why try and reason with real world weapons?

You dont even need a balance argument to say why tanks shooting up is a terrible idea, because the result of leaving tanks to do this is that it goes against one of the principle design focus' of PA, which is to remove micro and emphasize macro. People were already starting to fly planes over a tank army to turn their turrets just before a battle back in mid alpha.

If you want to know more, there are a few alpha threads on the forums where this has been discussed.

Without getting into a debate on the nature of the beginnings of life I must point out that evolution and or creationism has not been proven either way yet. I'm not convinced we'll ever know the actual answer short of building a time machine and going back to look.

Germany was ahead of everyone in almost all aspects of technology accept the nuclear sciences. That said they were playing with reactors and bomb designs but the Americans finished their program first.

As I've covered before, using balance as an argument is not a valid one, so come up with a better argument.

Other than balance, why is the ability of a tank to shoot at planes a stupid idea? It is realistic, it has happened in real life and it was supported in TA. A single tank may not be able to actually shoot down an enemy aircraft, but a group of tanks may have enough volume of fire to shoot down an aircraft.

I dont even know where to start, so im just going to stop posting as you seem to see PA as nothing but TA2.

The standard reply of someone who has run out of arguments or lost control of their emotions.

Forcefields and stuff - that's what you're discussing.

Not evolution.

Not WW2.

Not HURRDURRTANKSHOOTSUPWARDS.

The extremely short version is: the shape of the electromagnetic field needed. what i said about a metal lattice sheathed with plasma? thats how a shield would be.


On a different topic:

Actually the guy is right: units shooting upwards HAS to do with this. The situation as i see it is simply this.

Pro-shielders see shields as a solution to something, even if they don't really understand the problem. This isn't me blaming people, this is how most people think.

I'm an engineer, and i'm trained to think in problems, not solutions. When you say "an enemy has a base too close" i think "initial placement needs work". When you say "i need to soak up damage" i think "walls don't work for you?". You confirm that suspicion and say they're hard to place. Which goes to show that improper mass-placement is your problem, not that you need shields.

IMO, this thread is an excellent way to uncover problems about the design, that can each have their own solutions. And if those problems are fixed, shields are "needed" less and less.

I think that with the current setup of air and anti-air, Uber is on to something. it's not perfect, no, but i think the distinct lack of T2 AA gives Air something cool.

Can someone please post a video of a tank in TA shooting down a moving plane. I have played many days of TA and haven't seen this phenomenon you all seem to love so much.