Shields

Hello All,

I really only have one issue with the features list and thats "No Shields"... I dont understand how you can have a game such as this and not have shields. Im sure the op artillery will be fixed but one clever placement of artillery could make a base parish quickly as the stats stand already, i think this no shields business should be rethought, the whole intro into the game was the adaption of technoligies to the point where everyone already has everything and for some reason the best defencive technology that could exist was casted out? Supcom2 had great shield dynamics and offered you a position for gathering and planning without worrying about a single op artillery round splash damage wiping out your units like they were made of paper like in PA. Why not have the shields set to a maximum strength of like 1000 hitpoints for example, as the shield takes hits the energy is being consumed from the shield generator itself, if attack lightens up the shields recharge from your reserve energy until max shields again or even while taking damage a ability could be added to the generator that allows them to directly siphon from your reserves if you run into heavy bombardment and they wont hold past their 1000 hitpoints, this would put a buffet on people having too many shield generators and would probably only be used for key structures and choke points and absorbing massive amounts of artillery fire, I think this would steer people away from "hedge Hogging" or "turtling" since your using the very life blood you use to make buildings, units and advances. i can see its use being minimal with no real advantage since your giving up things to protect what you have. And since we are talking about artillery, will moons possess the capabilities for orbital bombardment, i think this would be a cool feature as the artilery really only has so many opportunities as the moon orbits. Just a few thoughts i really honestly think shields should be rethought, its a great aspect that SHOULD be added to the game. :? :?


:?

Nope.

There are reasons. If you used search you would find them... but you already posted a good reason why your implementation is bad:

I agree with Nanolathe. TA had some of the most powerful and satisfying artillery I've seen in a game (Big Bertha <3), and there was no need for shields in that. The key was counter-intelligence, redundancy and intelligent base placement (if you placed your structures behind a hill the artillery couldn't get you).
It's true that a well-placed artillery piece can wreak havoc in your base, but seriously: if you've allowed your opponent to set that up and not initiated a pre-emptive strike to stop him, you deserve to get shelled.

Inter-planetary presents a slightly more complicated scenario - there's not a lot of hiding or pre-emptive striking can be done when an incident asteroid appears on the horizon, but it seems that Uber have plans for that already if the kickstarter vid is anything to go by.

Radar Jamming == Shields in TA, considering that everything had absolutely **** LoS for late game.

Except that radar jamming was BETTER than shields.

Sorry yeah - by counter-intelligence I meant the radar jamming and cloaking.

Even in the current state I think it is counterable. I played an unbalanced 4v5 game yesterday where we managed to win out against more players using multiple catapults and lobbers through good unit usage, sniping and raiding. Video for it is out tomorrow. Turns out on a planet you can attack from all angles and this worked out well for us.

Not having a consistent front line does wonders for sneak attacks. Raiding tactics are king currently.

Yeah, if the enemy fortifies one side of their base, just attack from any other side or attack from multiple sides at once.

Even if they have tons of static defenses, building units is both faster and cheaper and you'll eventually just overrun them through sheer numbers.

That's not strictly true at the present moment. If you give someone enough time they can make something impenetrable. That said, this is alpha and we've not even begun to get into any of REAL gameplay yet, namely the "Annihilation at a Planetary levels" parts of it.

Turtling will be a valid option for the short term; not so for the long term.

Im sure they are think in the shields , idon´t imagine this game without it!

Hopefully they're are other weapons for turtlers! I like having options to play defensive or offensive. But any ways uber claims this game will be extremely modable so it shouldn't be hard to put Shields in. Now that I think of it I'd rather Shields out. I feel like in sup com Shields caused less battles to take place than in ta. And I'd rather this Game be more like ta have more action and battles take place

Well reading through some of the comments i see how parts of my pargraph were miss understood. The part where i speak of no real advantage or its use as minimal is strictly from a energy point of view, I didnt want it to come across like "lets add a building no one will use" way. I was simply stating that trading energy consumption of units for base shields would offer no real advantage against players but more as a support to static defence.

I played a couple games last night and the games that got to the point where artillery was becoming an issue (When the game didnt crash), rushing artillery positions is not a strategy but a hopless tactic. No one I have ever played against puts their artillery in a spot where you can rush it before its complete as long as you can even find it or scout it out succesfully, the shields offer an opportunity to collect and stratagize undercover and mass your forces for an assault against these positions without losing half your base in the process.

Also the comment about hiding behind cliffs and hills offers little protection and on a side note the only maps i ever seem to get are moon maps or ice worlds that dont have those physical aspects to the map so that really honestly isent on the table when we are discussing why we cant have shields, hell im even willing to comprimise and only have cieling shields that will only protect against bombardments and air units but not ground units. We can discuss this until the cows come home but in my honest opinion the game needs something.

If you'd ever played TA you'd realise that Artillery isn't the be-all-end-all weapon it was made into for SupCom.

SupCom T3 Artillery was overpowered by design they were supposed to end games, hence them being called "Game Enders". Shields were made to give the defender a chance to react, albeit only for a few extra minutes, to a Game Ender being completed. There wasn't anywhere to run, so you had a small reactionary window to find the Arti and kill it before it leveled your base.

In PA... there are places to run.

Lol obviously we arent having the same experiences with pa. I dont understand how you "run" seems like everything i throw out here you come up with something that dosent really justify not having shields lol :ugeek: Anyways my hope is that the Dev team will make some room for these Amazing buildings and we will see them in the finished product. :mrgreen:

Shields are something I'm pretty much on the fence about. I could potentially see them being ok, but I wonder if they are worth the effort.

The issue in SupCom was the implementation. Shields were cheap, and didn't use a huge amount of energy. They protected against any form of damage. Thus, no matter what the purpose was for a given base, you would always build a shield. There was no sufficient downside to building a shield meaning a base with a shield was always strictly better than a base without a shield. This was compounded when shields got nested.

Creating a no-brainer choice like this is a bad idea. Features should add choices, not remove them. Thus shields in the same sense as SupCom are a bad idea.

There are a lot of different ways they could be balanced. Only stopping artillery is one, but it seems a bit dull. A counter intuitive, but interesting balance would be to make them huge, but un-nestable, so that they were very easy to walk though with units and take out from inside. ZK had an interesting mechanic whereby shields would link to each-other, thus if one went down, they all did. This worked well when combined with the fact that EMP weapons did immense damage to shields, although this does begin to stray towards arbitrary rock-paper-scissors territory. Perhaps the simplest balance would be to have the shield power drain be the same or greater than the amount of generation capacity that could be fit beneath a shield. Thus, guarding an area with a shield is a cost that must be paid for by having a lot of power-gens elsewhere.

Overall, that seems like a lot of testing and balancing just to shoehorn in one feature. Ultimately, I'd rather see developments in stealth, jamming, cloaking and spoofing as they could potentially have a lot more uses. There are a lot more interesting ways of countering artillery than hiding beneath shields.

not a fan of cloak in the slightest. The grouping of shields idea i like, however you make it sound like shields is an immense amount of work, but when you compare it to crashing buildable fields (Asteroids/moons/planets) into eachother i dont even think they are on the same level. Iv been keeping up with this string and I have to say there are alot of nay sayers out there against shields. Either they are to O/P and offer people the opportunity to turtle into the positions with immense capabilities or the are too weak and serve no purpose but one thing is for certain no one seems to be backing them up with some positive reinforcment/examples and such if im the only one here who seems to want shields whats the point lol

However I do have one final argument: Shields Rule.

Otal :twisted:

You're not good at reasoned argument.

When I said you can "run" I mean that, pretty soon you'll be able to move your Commander to a different planetary body.

Shields ala SupCom do not promote fun counter play. If you build a shield I don't have many options for taking you out. I spam TMLs while transitioning into air raid tactics against anything you haven't shielded yet. Either I get my TMLs up and running and I win, or you turtle for 45mins and then win the Eco War.

You delayed me for anywhere between 5 to 10 mins from winning or you wasted 45mins of time to win by pure EcoWhoring. That's not fun.

I think alot of your reasons are pretty shotty aswell. :geek:

-Evacuate to a new planetary body and abandon your primary base mid-late game without a decent way to even the odds sounds like a great strategy bud, run away all you want. To me that sounds like a last ditch effort unless your just retreating to a forward base or from a forward base back to your main.

-Not to mention the whole orbital bodies colliding into each other, never said shields could stop that, nothing stopping you from bringing a roid down. Nothing stopping you from launching units into shielded areas.

-Your against them because you cant beat them or because it makes the game more difficult? Your reasoning has only 2 sides my friend; Extreme loss or Extreme win. There are spaces inbetween, you make it sound like a player who places a few shields on his key structures and at his chokepoints only has 2 options, die quickly or hold out, your looking at them as pure reason for players to ignore counter play when thats not the case at all. Invasion of a base is like 45% of the game right there, and not often do armies meet in the middle of nowhere for combat, its always over something whether its your base or his. Turtling and not expanding and harrassing in P-A is a bad idea and I myself have never just done one or the other, its a combination that wins the game.

-Not to mention theres always just attacking the shield generator itself, not like its going to be a boss hog building capable of retarded amounts of fire before it goes KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

:twisted:

Perhaps somebody will make a mod for shields.
I would like to see some as well.

If only for the graphics, I love them!
I do not need any other reasons to have them.
Unit shields/static shields .. gimme.

Actually, Extreme Loss or Win is exactly what shields cause: You either break through the shields and devastate a base, or you don't and the base takes 0 damage. There's no middle ground, no ability to harass or cause attrition, and shields necessitate crazy high DPS on units to not make them useless, which causes all kinds of other issues.