My Thoughts on Shields

How is a Layered shield mechanism a slight variation to the bubble shield?

Since you say there is little difference.. let me go ahead and give you a 0 as your quiz grade..

There is a large fundamental difference that has been proposed. Again you have failed to grasp it...

so redeem yourself.. Explain your position.. Why do you think that the proposed layer shield is a slight variance on SC bubble shields.

siefer101, man, let it go. It doesn't have to be personal.

Focus on this instead,

We've been talking about the layer shield, and I like it a mountain more than I like the SupCom shields, but I'm still worried about the balance shift they make when we're talking about interplanetary assaults. For example, on a small but heavily fortified world you have to establish orbital dominance before you can assault the surface. If they have umbrellas this means you have to use the SXX to break them first. The SXX wins a 1vs1 fight against the umbrella, but is far more expensive and is very heavily damaged during the fight.

If layer shields are added, even if it can only absorb one shot from above, it will mean I need no less than twice as many SXX before I can take out an umbrella. This dramatically raises the cost of an invasion when both players control only small moons.

Make me feel better about this... what helps balance out the layer shield in this case?

I do like it but I have some concerns.

BIG NO to random area accuracy for PA at least. RNG is not in this game and I would like to keep it that way.

(side note: i would be in favor of a game in the future that uses planetary weather systems/atmospherics to affect projectile trajectories in a complex but semi predictable way that would seem 'random'. )


so due to the above I am not in favor of anti artillery radar jamming.

I am however, in favor of highly linking radar and missiles/rockets tracking.


I had come up with a system where rockets and missiles were non tracking projectiles out of radar coverage and tracking inside of coverage (including catapults and strategic missiles)

makes skitters and mobile radar coverage important for anti air rockets.

catapults can fire at orbital units under orbital radar (at reduced range)

also catapult able to store up to 4 missiles each if you give a stop order or no targets are available allowing for an initial barrage.


advanced radar jamming with medium radius would make your commander safe from guided missiles


I don't have it very fleshed out yet I am still working on it's dynamics with other mechanics I am working on.

We already have randomized accuracy in the game. Build some pelters and watch them go to town. They never hit the same spot twice. Accuracy is actually a critical balancing point for artillery units. Give them laser accuracy and they become almost instantly overpowered. This is the same reason the catapult is so damned good even though it's stats are pretty blatantly inferior to the Holkins.

Missiles tracking beyond radar range is a really niche change. Missiles only track units that are directly targeted (not ground fire) and they can only be directly targeted when they are visible. For this change to matter the target unit has to enter radar range, get fired upon, and then leave radar range before the missile can hit.

In a realistic scenario there are missiles that have their own guidance systems and can track the target even when the launcher is destroyed so if PA missile follow that premise the missiles really shouldn't be overly effected by radar loss. Infact, if that's the case it might be even more realistic for the missiles themselves to have a tiny vision and radar LOS facing forward.

How about we give scouts a spotting function and only spotted units can be shot by artillery. You'd have to have units close to your target in order to hit it, and artillery would then be more of a force multiplicator for a attacking army and less of a constant bombardment of the area they cover. Your scout would then have kind of a laserpointer fitted to it in order to visualize what is being targeted.

This would also enable someone to counterrush an artillerycamp without the artillery shooting once because his spotting units are somewhere else.

Shields would still be useful tho .

The problem there being artillery wouldn't be able to do it's most important job anymore.

Artillery exists in game (and real life too, looking back a few centuries) to break down static defenses that are too dangerous for your army to approach. If we force a spotter unit to close range then it will get butchered and the artillery is left idle.

that's a random rule.

no to random rules.

Scout could get close to static defenses granting line of sight, this will allow artillery to bombard defenses even under cover of a radar jammer. My idea assumes that all units on the battlefield share the same line of sight.
The trick will be to keep the scout alive long enough to take out the radar jammer with artillery. We can dream up some T2 scouts with high line of sight with a cloaking ability that could do this job.

Anchors attack ground use them overwhelm the layer shields an anchor fires four shots per sequence and will overwhelm layer shields. After shields overwhelmed then SXX will wiped the base.

If you can build anchors then your problem is in the orbital layer and not with the shields..

it wasn't meant to be negative towards Brian.. But rather then use direct communication using words like I and Me...he prefers to speak using terms like we and us.
I would prefer that he present reasons why the new idea, Layer shields wont work. Nobody in this forum has experience in layer shields in RTS's , including myself, because they haven't existed in this manner.

I believe that the layer shield is the only way to continue the shield debate. But amongst our self's, those who agree with implementation, discussion is pointless

So discussion is pointless because you aren't willing or able to test your own suggestion, or at least investigate any possible problems with it?

If you all happen to agree with the implementation, then implement and test it.

Or at least play devils advocate amongst yourselves and take different angles on the suggestion so you can get a better indication of it and how it works.

Discussion is never pointless, discussion is the life blood of the forum.

You should need to discuss only to push your idea to those who don't agree with you.

you can't build anchors above umbrellas though. The SXX can pop anchors, but not through a shield.

Actually, when I modded shields into zerohour I had to do some trickery because the engine had no support for anything resembling shields. The shield I finally created used an invisible point defense laser to destroy enemy projectiles at the same time they crossed the 3D art for the shield bubble. Since the modded shields were a weapon they had no health bar and used an ammo clip to limit their effectiveness. I had both directional and bubble versions.

My experience was that a low "layer" count crumbled much too quickly to matter. It was useful in theory but my mod had several very long range hard hitting cluster and burst weapons that could overwhelm the shield almost instantly. I experimented with a huge variety of ammo counts but settled on a huge clip t6o keep the shield relevant.

PA's long range weapons are all single shot weapons right now so it might work with the balance today, but if any rapid fire or cluster artillery options are added they will very quickly invalidate the shield.

It's a good start and is worth discussing. Personally, I am more interested in finding ways to rebalance the existing units and structures to address all the roles a shield could be used for.

with Realm's balance mod, that's already that part of the work in. try it you'll see what I mean.

unit mods aren't possible yet but I bet you modders will be on top of shields as soon as it does become possible.

at that point we'll be able to test and evaluate the viability, playability, balance, validity and most importantly fun of wildly various implementations of shields.

I haven't tried the Realm's balance mod yet, but I've been reading up on it and have watched a game on reddit. Personally I'm thrilled that we can start up our server side mods now, but I'm still waiting to start my own. I want to see what Uber does and compare it to what the Realm does. Once both have reached a stable "complete" balance I'll compare it to what I want to make myself and go from there.

This^

Just signed up to reply to this thread, havent read it all only the first few pages, sorry if this has been brought up before, throwing my 2cents in.

Well the general consensus is that shields are "counters" to artillery /long range weapons, and people keep bringing up the point at how they don't actually "counter" artillery in the way of destroying artillery.

... What about if shields bounce back the artillery super-charged?

Explains the need for the potential energy cost.
Actually counters artillery.
And honestly i think it solves the problems we've been having about this discussion.

The shields could be totally ineffective against non-artillery units.

Unit mods are possible, though custom art for units are not... or is, but it's very difficult.

I'm still of the opinion that even a single tech weak bubble shield has to be added to the game by the developers.
The moddersdon't have to waste their time on a feature that a lot of people wants since the beginning.

We could start with a small shield useful only to stop artillery and fragile against normal troops, then we can gamma test it, but at least even if later users decide to take it out, at least the framework to implement it in mods would be there.

it has been said many times uber won´t include any sort of shield in 1.0 but may take a look on ideas of shields after release ...
what modders do is up to them ... let them experiment to their hearts content .... as that is what they mostly do out of free will ...
and the devs are not obligated to include something that is difficult to ballance and wasting time than being all too intuitive ...

You have to remember that there are still a very large portion of players who specifically DO NOT want shields. You can't appease one group without angering the other. This is why I've been calling into question "specifically, what do you want shields to do for you?" and then looking for alternate solutions that would fulfill those needs.

I have nothing against shields, but I also acknowledge they are not needed and everything players want from shields can be fixed in other ways. Also, before they worry about shields in any way shape or form they need to address many more critical issues such as Orbital balance, interplanetary assault, and balancing out planet smashing.

Maybe have the shields only block a specific projectile so tank shells go through but lasers are not affected.