Shields?

shields in fa were quite strong. The problem was always overlapping shields. In FAF this was balanced quite well by now, with shields that overlap giving a slower recharge rate.

Shields in zero k have the potentional to be extremely strong but because of their costs and counters they are not op. Even through they link to each other pretty much making one big shield.

Total Annihilation did not have shields, and it was more than playable. It made even one enemy artillery an issue that had to be dealt with before it ruined too much of your base. This also gave you a reason to spread out your base or even have multiple smaller bases so it wouldn't all get hit at once.

Shields encourage the player to fit their entire base in the smallest area possible in a single base. Shields also counter so many different things that they do end up being hard to truly balance.

A better replacement for shields is an Anti-Artillery system. That way it won't be countering, small engagements, long range missiles, short range missiles, lasers, etc etc.

Shields are mainly a nice thing to have in the engine. But they also add to the game because you get more types of interactions, especially with artillery. Inaccurate artillery is good against them because it is hard to miss a massive shield.

Problem I find with shields is that if there available, seem to become obligatory. I'm fine getting rid of them because in the "defense of artillery" argument all I found was people would just build more artillery, then people would build more shields etc etc.

You just need 'shield breakers'. Simply put units that can tear down shield really quickly. A example in zero k is the tremor for instance. Also a shield doesnt have to block everything some stuff could pass through the shield (not armor piercing but shield piercing rounds xd).

Why don't Uber want to include shields? Apparently the majority of the people (and funders...) do want shields...

I do not think 52 votes give a good picture of what 26,000+ funders want.

I think neutrino had his own ideas on shields, "a new twist" or something, so there will probably be some attempt at implementing shields, what they will be like I do not know.

Please no. As a student of Total Annihilation, shields were one of the aspects that made SupCom such an inferior game.

In TA, the action started within the first few minutes and some times lasted for the rest of the game. The pacing of the game was so much more interesting and exciting than in SupCom.

In SupCom, it's literally awful. As soon as someone get shields, the game turns into a turtle fest for the next 20 minutes. It forces you to upgrade to the highest tier just to deal with them, and pigeonholes the game into a really campy playstyle. The concept of shields is cool, but I'd rather they stay out of the game.

The thing about TA that was so cool was that Tier 1 units stayed useful all game long. I don't see how this even remotely possible with the introduction of shields.

Edit: So you need to tweak shields. Find a way to limit their number and make them very weak towards specific units or something. And even in Supcom t1 units were useful almost throughout the entire game. You always had some t1 factories spamming t1 far into the game.

It is a random sample of acceptable size.

Do you expect 26000 votes then?

56 votes is a pretty good example already of what the community thinks.

You haven't given me a reason why shields NEED to be in the game in the first place. What do they add? They slow the game down, punish players for being aggressive, and make the game less exciting.

"Shields are cool" is not a good reason for adding them to the game.

I don't care if everybody wants them. Players are notorious for wanting things that are bad for the game. Look at League of Legends and World of Warcraft. Popularity != proper game design. I think the PA designers are making a good decision by really questioning whether shields should even be in the game whatsoever.

Well aside from shields being cool they ad more interactions.

The reason they fail in sc was because they where not properly implemented. It just became shield spam vs artilery spam because there was no other option. They didnt had a nice place in the game they created a new game for themselves. There should be other counters than just 'more artilery'.

Zero k is a nice example where its done right. Unless you are playing with noobs you wont see shield spam vs artilery spam. The only time you will see massive shield spam is with chicken mode (tower defence). Then its possible to see like 100 shields but only then.

@nactsuht: ... but shields aren’t cool... they are awesome!!

Your logic doesn’t quite apply, as you could also question the need of walls and turrets then. These also punish players for being aggressive and slow down the game.

Edit: an example for shields adding depth to the game is forward fire bases. On four leaf clover players tend to build forward bases with turrets a shield to claim some ground in the mid. Without shields it would be much harder to raise a stable forward fire base. Thus the game had one element of diversity less as players would simply focus on spamming units.

There are a great many things that shields accomplish.

For one, they provide, if not a defense against artillery, a, as has been stated before, "grace period." Those shields are going to go down, no doubt about it, but now you have a few seconds to figure out what you're going to do about it. Depending on the strength and availability of artillery, this is, in fact, important.

Second, they can provide base damage mitigation that would otherwise be unavailable. Sure, you can say, "just build units," but on a scale like this, chances are that units inside your base are wasted units indeed.

Third, they give a grace period against any long range units or weaponry that you can't deal with at the moment. It gives you a little bit of time to muster a counter, or just decide that you're abandoning the base.

If adjusted right, they don't have to promote defensive gameplay. Instead, it simply gives a mechanic to defend your structures from instant attacks that would otherwise crush you instantly.

And I wonder why I haven't seen any mention of mobile shields...

I think they add another layer of complexity and micro, and are hard to balance.

In Supreme Commander you could layer them, and keep shields underneath turned off and turn them on after the outer shields were knocked out. That was unnecessary micro that was the most advantageous way to play them.

They're just another life bar that regenerates faster. Let's keep them out for now and see if we can add them later if anyone cares. I think TA was really fun without them.

Individual shields were adequately balanced in SupCom, even the T2-T3 combo shield wasn't that much of a problem.

It's when you build Shield walls 5 or 6 thick that shields become almost impossible to take down.

That's because shield walls were basically like onions, to borrow and badly mangle a Shrek analogy, you take the outermost shield down, and then two feet inside of it was another shield, and two feet inside that one was another, repeat as much as your opponent built shields.

Shield strategy in SupCom was based entirely on having multiple shield gens covering for each other so that the ones that went down would have enough time to recharge and turn back on, covering for the others that went down while protecting it.

There were only three ways to kill a shield wall.

Nukes, Massed Artillery Barrage, or marching an army through the shields.

Nukes were by far the better option, if harder to implement than the others, as anti-nukes were harder to effectively overlap than shields were.

Shields should be in the game, but I say that they should merge, and with diminishing returns to boot.

You'd sort of have a circus tent type shield, where only the outermost sections of the various bubbles would be the actual shield, and all the shield gens would feed into it, as well as sharing the shield damage and recharging between them, so they'd all go down at the same time, and would all recharge and come back up at the same time.

And for diminishing returns, have each additional shield generator only give the overall shield something like 50% more power than the one before it. So three shield generators would give you a shield 175% as strong, four would make it 187.5%, five would be 193.75%, etc.

That way, you'd mostly build shield gens to make the shield bigger, instead of stronger.

This keeps people from getting lucky and one shotting your commander with their first artillery shot (I have done that in TA before), and taking out your base with it.

Yet keeps it to where you can crack it open without too much trouble.

Now, lets look at how this could be exploited.

Most obvious way would be to build two hotkey grouped shield arrays for your base. When one goes down, turn it off and switch to group 2 and turn that shield array on, forcing the enemy to basically have to start all over again.

This would be bad, as it would be pretty similar to what was wrong with Supcom shields.

Solution: Give shield gens an internal energy storage, which determines how much HP the shield has left. Then have activating the shield take something like 90% of that energy store, leaving the new shield at 10% and charging.

This will render secondary shield arrays mostly useless, since it would collapse long before the first shield array could recharge. Unless an extra 30 seconds or so is absolutely crucial to your strategy or something.


Now let's look at counters to shields.

There is of course, massed artillery, high altitude carpet bombing, etc.

But I believe that a precision bomber with an AI that can fly under the shield and drop a single powerful bomb on a shield generator would be the best shield counter.

If we have a recon system like Supcoms that leaves ghostly images of buildings, then a heavily armored/shielded precision low altitude bomber would be the best, and probably cheapest way to take out the relatively fragile shield generator without pounding past it's shields.

It'd also be a good way to take out individual buildings under shields, meaning that you'd have to have a good AA defense as well.

Second best way to take out shields would probably be some sort of specialty anti-shield cruise missile, that does some thing like triple damage against shields or such. They can be countered of course by anti-missile defenses.

I think that with these suggestions, shields can be a useful, but not overpowered, piece of base design, equally useful as AA, Anti-Army buildings, and Walls.

Shields should do something like suck up as much energy as they deflect in damage. If too much damage is hitting the shield, either you won't have the energy economy backing it, or your shield will drop.

You can throw in an efficiency factor as well... so base shields might have something like a 1:1 efficiency, whereas mobile shields will take twice as much energy for damage. With a maximum damage threshold, you can also prevent 'unkillable' units. Also, shields should stop firing from both sides of the shield.... and perhaps some special weapons can penetrate them (e.g., lasers)

My suggestion does this by having the shield strength tied to an internal energy battery in the shield gens.

I think you're getting a little more complex than it really needs to be.

I think merging shields and diminishing returns for each shield generator added to it is enough of a limit on shields to make them balanced.

we can have one experimental shield bubble then you can protract the commander or a small area.

then you limited to one expensive shield.
and you can have one good shield per player.

i don't thing many shield like in SC is going to work.