Force fields?

What they are talking about is that because every bullet is simulated, every bullet can hit anything -even planes-. If a plane moves over an artillery unit and the artillery unit fires at just the right time, the bullet will hit -and destroy- the plane.

The same possibility exists within PA.

It's quite sad watching a Commander pick off T1 bombers more effectively than a dedicated AA unit.
And perhaps a little amusing, if the Commander is yours.

I prefer needing to build AA units to deal with air.

shields are confirm no, but a Modder can add them to the game , right?

I'm not gonna vote for or against shields.

But i will tell you WHY i like them.

For me it's about conservation of attention.

See, in a game i can build a defensive point and know that it has enough walls/guns/repair units that casual harrasment will not have any effect.

This means that i can turn my attention somewhere else, until a significantly large army comes grinding through.

with Shields, it means less management for me, because the harrasment needs no attention in the form of repairs.
Sure, you can have fabbers on patrol/repair towers patching them back up, but you need to make sure the strike didn't total the fabbers or mess up the patrol.

One of the arguements i've heard for not having a shield type thing, is that it bogs stuff down.
in that, because a light force cannot do any meaningful damage, you have to amass a huge force to do anything, which takes time... yadda yadda.

But this happens with any heavily defended scenario.
You cannot 'wear down' their shieldless defences, because unless you attack in numbers large enough to bring them down, you are probably losing more stuff than he is, and he can just build more defences or repair them.
Same effect, more management.


I have only ever played one game that didn't have this basic feature, and that was a bizarre old game called Warwinds 2.

That game had a map-fixed total number of troops that could EVER be recruited.
So a raid that left your 4 guys beat-up but healing, and one of theirs dead was a WIN.
Because that one guy was irreplacable.
lead to some fun tactics.

Without something like this, the huge mob effect is always going to be a feature.

Fortress must be attacked with huge mob, because it's tough.
(Huge mob can be tanks, aircraft or artillery. what ever you use, you will need enough to do some good)
Huge mob can be nuked.
But nukes are expensive and slow. and i can build anti nukes.
So now we are back to a huge mob.


This is why (for me) TA/SC/PA and similar games are about strategy and economy.
I will always need overwhelming force to smash someones defences, the key is GETTING that force.

Unless you get lucky and snipe his commander, but hey.

TLDR: shields don't change the strategy much, they just make the micro easier

Same thought, shields should just help you, so there is less micro, they don't need to be OP.
This is a multiple theater of war, shields won't kill the enemy units, but buy you a few seconds.

Im sure shields will easily be modded into the game...along with many other things!

Confirmation in current patch. I have seen

Bombers shoot down fighters.
Catapults shoot down bombers.
Pelters shoot down bombers.
Stompers shoot down bombers.

Tanks don't appear to have the height to, or else they would if they were shooting from the top of one mountain to another and a bomber was flying in the valley.

It does not exactly needs to be more durable, any other measure, like cloaking, if present and playable, might take the place of shields too. This is just an option with predictable mechanics. When powerful units are on the field, being able of killing poor comm in half-second, might be not a bad option to bring some mechanics like "kill 5 pgens and take a shot on comm". This is to make it easier to do anything else, say, map control, actual strategy etc, but hunting and protecting comm matter.

Please also note, that this is neither single, nor main point about shields for me. I just didn't spotted it in the thread by the time and added in the sake of completeness.

Why dont they create shields with exponentially higher amounts of resource use based on the area, and multiple cant be used as they penalize eachother and shut off due to the different energy fields or something like that.

Shouldnt everything have a counter?

Missile have anti missiles
Artillery have shields
Air have anti air
Radar have cloaking

I want shields in the game and i dont even play defensive! The are not op!! They are cool and effective!

That has been my personal reason why shields should exist. They should only affect fast moving projectiles.
The cost of having it is the requirement of a larger pool to store energy. Each hit requires an equivalent amount of energy to deflect/mitigate. If your energy hits zero, your shields fail and require a lot of energy and time to spool back up.

At first I thought - wow, wouldn't be cool to see those blurred, glowing blue bubbles on the surface of a planet? They also show us where the most valuable assets of the adversary are, no doubt about.

But then I realized shields are for losers

If you need shields to protect your base, perhaps your base is in the wrong place.

It also means that if all suddenly your base is under attack and you need shields to protect it, then you missed to do many fundamental things in order to not having it attacked in the first place.

Shields may be visually cool. May be interesting or boring depending on how they would be implemented. But they do not change one basic thing: If you have to rely on shields, you lack military skills. Period. Or the game is kinda crap.

What I do like in PA is that this game forces you in learning the importance of change and keeping moving. That is billions times more interesting and entertaining than falling back to shields.

If we want shields for the mere visual effect, they will be mod.

If we want shields for changing the game play, then we should think really carefully, 'cos as Iedarsi has brilliantly explained, shields can deeply affect the game play, and not for good.

After having read tons of words in this thread, I came to the conclusion that Iedarsi has one of the best understanding on the topic, and therefore I would listen to him. I personally do

So that means every projectile, right?

If they add shields, they need to be directional. A blanket shield would be OP, considering the curved nature of the planet.

Walls also act as shields of a sort against units, but not against artillery.

If this is your best argument against shields, I find you to be rather ignorant.

Lol. And I even put a smiley
ps. Cool gifs, where does it come from?

I still consider his sig the coolest on the forum.

I'm not 100% but I believe it's the Russian version of a SWAT team doing a car-extraction demonstration. As per the Russian usual, it's a combo Awesome/Rediculous.

Thanks bro

As usual, Russians do things that only Russians can do.