[Feature suggestion] More robust commander through personal shield

I didn't find my exact idea in the forum, so I allow myself to elaborate...

After some matches with a friend, we noticed that a half-decent bunch of units (advanced bots, e.g.) eats the enemy commander for breakfast, ending the game very suddenly. Those units often cut through massive defense lines like a hot knife through butter.

My friend had the idea to provide the commander with some sort of personal shield. Here are some design parameters:

• the commander can activate a personal shield, which is able to take a whole lot of a beating
  
• the shield requires a fair amount of energy
  
• without enough power, the shield collapses
  
• the shield weakens, when under fire
• the shield may regenerate, while draining more energy from avaiable reserves/production

The shields dependence of energy would add a strategic aspect to the game. Attacking forces would have a hard time, killing the commander because of the shield. So prior to the attack on a commander, one would consider the destruction of some enemys power plants.

Looking forward to comments.

Andi

The problem here is that unless it is default off, which is reasonable it will be overpowered at the beginning. Also a problem is that people will eco just enough to be able to use it, then they'll rip apart others' bases, not to mention it now becoming the front line unit.

Uber has stated that they don't want commander upgrades, so that is already out the window. But it is a neat suggestion anyway.

Personally I'm not a fan of SupCom2's Hunker ability and from what your saying it seems your issues arise moreso from the unfinished balance, thought you are quite vague about it overall.

Mike

I see you're new here, and welcome to the forums! You should do a search before posting in accordance with forum rules.

This has been suggested several times on the forums and discussed in great depth already.

We already have issues with the Commander having too much health in the early and mid game. And the Commander is about to get a huge combat buff.

Late game the Commander is supposed to be a liability. It's supposed to be fragile.

It's not supposed to be a giant war machine in the middle of combat. It's the general. Lose the Commander, lose the match. Not something you want to have in the middle of the battle.

Au contraire, I think ending the game very suddenly because your base has been broken into by an unstoppable army is exactly how it should be.

*facepalm*
Given how vague and uninformative search results are, I'd love to bury this generic response deep in the forum archive's dirt.

Except that's not all I said.

I told him that he should follow the forum's rules and then proceeded to give my opinion on the topic, just like you did.

Not having duplicate threads is imperative to a healthy forum so we don't have 4 threads on the exact same topic on the home page – like we used to.

To be honest I'm not really akin to shields in general.
Which I'm pretty sure is like, illegal to say because I played a lot of Forged Alliance, but it's true, I always just saw them as temporary game-halters.

You aren't the only who enjoyed SupCom but is opposed to Shields.

No. Yes to directional shields.

Welcome, antimatter84

I bet a mod will be made for this at least, but Uber wants to break away from shields, and come up with different ideas. I don't blame them.

I don't support shield but i would support radar and invisible cloak - still keeps commander fragile but harder to find and harder to snipe - ending the game in such an anti climactic way.

There was a bug, where the game didn't show the commander's icon. That created a LOT of frustration.

Most people actually scout the unit before sniping(fighters first, bombers second). I'm not sure how much this'd help.

Bug is still present.

Curses...

This sounds similar to an old idea of a shield that draws its HP directly from the energy supply. The theory is that it naturally scales in strength as a match progresses, without the need for any explicit upgrade. Its behavior would be further mediated by the use of grav-well based energy economies, so that it didn't grow too insane to be used as a supercomm invasion tool.

Currently energy is so far off the rails that such an ability would be all sorts of messed up.