On defensive structures, and shields

This idea reminds me a lot of the shields in Perimeter, an RTS from back in 2004. It had energy pylons that you used to gather resources but also would produce a shield around them when activated. If multiple pylons radii overlapped and were all activate, one large shield would be built over them. If a pylon was destroyed whilst the shield was active a new shield would reform from the remaining pylons. Here is the one video I found showing off the games shields (also shows other things like the cool teraforming mechanic).


From what I remember this game involved heavy micro of the shields state, as you could never produce enough energy to keep them all active for any length of time. It ended up being a case of only having 2 or 3 pylons active at any one time, or using the "master" shield controls on the hud to turn them all on for a short burst when an enemy attacks.

That's all I can remember about how they worked, maybe some of that could be of use for PA.

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I do like this too. But i think the balance is tricky, the tactical missile defense in SC was a bit to strong in my view.
Some sort of burst of intercepting munitions, followed my a large-ish cool-down, might be a better way. It'd be closer to how shields worked (if that's something we're striving for).

Apart from the activation micro that looks pretty much like what I envisioned.

The/A game which did the personal shield for all units within radius was star wars gallactic battlegrounds. While it might present gameplay benefits i think it ruins the aesthetic of shields, not to mention makes it harder to tell just what has taken damage because everything now has two health bars. All of this also reduces the "specialness" of shields by just making them be an area buff.

A simpler and similar in effect scenario is that shields are made of multiple screens which can be taken down individualy. Think like the graphics in sup com 2 only each triangle was an individual shield. They dont need their own health bars as they can fade in and out for damage. Regardless i'm sure there are dozens of other problems that could crop up (like overlapping shields) but its a thought. It also adds to a unique flavour of shields and given it is a screen can be mixed with other bubble shield ideas.

Also i remember the idea of making damage to shields impact the players energy pool from a sup com mod, while very large pools could become indestructible, there is no reason not to also impliment shield health, such that there was still a maximum damage the shield could take before dropping or that recharging the shield cost energy.

Also an issue with chaining one shield is that depending on accrued strength it could be linked out to cover an advancing army with a heavy fortress strength shield. but once again thats more down to balance issues.

I'm not attempting to push any of these ideas but perhaps they may inspire someone.

Two issues that need to be addressed with shields if they are included is the ability for a 1hp shield to stop a 10,000 damage shell with no consequence, and shield layering. Briefly reading through the posts says that there are also many solutions for the later.

Shields also seemed to have weird behaviour with AOE weapons like commander explosions in FA. The bubbles were also invisible in FA if the generator was under the Fog of War, even if the bubble was in the visible area.

One Idea:

Instead of a bubble (and it's associated issues), why not essentially "link" all units in range of the generator - whenever a unit would take damage, it instead subtracts that damage from the shield pool.

The upside is very consistant behaviour - it works exactly as you expect, and shield overlapping wouldn't be as useful as the subtraction would occur to all shields that are "linked" to a unit taking damage (not quite the same as bubbles joining when overlapping, but similar in practice).

The downside is you can't go "under" the shield.


My personal preference is no shields, they are easy enough to mod in if someone wants.

Unless you make bubble shields prohibitively expensive to build or operate, they will always function as they did in SupCom. A defensive structure which provides 100% damage mitigation is an incredible advantage, especially against low or intermittent damage sources.

You know the type of shields nobody every complains about? Personal shields. The Titan UEF T3 bot in SupCom had a personal shield- a feature which prompts me to greatly prefer them over Percivals for most purposes (that and their much lower cost). A small shell of HP which regenerates very fast is extremely useful if you use your units as skirmishers or raiders, rather than terminally committing them fresh out of the factory. Such shields have a similar effect at mitigating damage from artillery, without the incentive to turtle hard as a result.

I like bubble shields, personally, but they will always encourage turtling unless their protection is imperfect, or conditional. If we want bubble shields, we should have them only work against some types of weapons. Which weapons will depend on lore and gameplay decisions. Suppose our shield technology is plasma EM shielding, and only works on lasers, plasma shells, etc. and does not actually stop regular bullets, missiles, or other physical projectiles.

(Also, shielded mobile units would be unable to attack or only stationary stuff would be shieldable)

Just thought i would add another idea to the mix.

In SC, Shields are meant to be a counter to artillery, however the problem is that layered shields can withstand pretty much anything. Thus, we need a way to allow them to work well against the odd one or two artillery pieces, but allow them to get overwhelmed by units, or massed artillery barrages. The defining features of long range artillery compared to most other units are long range, high damage, poor ROF and low accuracy.

Bubble shields counter mainly by making use of the poor ROF aspect. By the time a second shot is fired, the shield has almost fully recuperated from the first.

Another option is to make use of the low accuracy aspect. Suppose that each bubble was made up of lots of little segments, all tessellated together. Each one has little health, and will protect from one arty shell, before failing. The failed segment(s) will take a while to re-initialise, so although the next shot will be along soon, it is unlikely to hit the exact same spot, due to the large inaccuracy of the artillery. A large barrage might manage to get a couple of shells landing in the same place, thus admitting a shell.

This kind of shield would do a good job against protecting against damage done over large areas, but would fair poorly against precise fire-power. Even if layered extensively, the small health of each segment would mean that a force of attacking bots would have no trouble drilling through a series of shields, as they would all be attacking the same small area.

I really like the idea of shield generators granting personal shields to everything in its radius. From a mechanics perspective this seems great. Overlapping generator fields would not give additional buffs, only provide some redundancy in the event one generator is destroyed. However, I also agree that I'm not sure how to make that cool looking.

Alternatively, let's look at a more passive approach to shields. Using the soap bubble idea, where shields that touch effectively become "the same shield", what if shields just reduced incoming damage by say 50%(Just a made up number). Shields would never fail from taking too much damage and players would never be able to turtle under endless layers. Instead could only be brought down by destroying the Shield Generator, the Power needed to run the shields, or the player turning the shields off. In this case the shields would also not completely prevent damage and instead just mitigate some of that incoming damage. Thus, repairing could become much more important as you'd need sufficient repair units to upkeep a base under siege.

You'd still have to watch out for snipes on vital parts of your infrastructure, but it would cost your opponent a good deal more firepower to pull it off. Shield Generators could also actually be armored as well since they'd be a prime target and could still take damage.

I actually really like the tessellated together one. Basically, it protects against most of a decent barrage of arty, while still being weak against a medium to large barrage or any form of actual concentrated attack. Since it's not layered also, and instead melded together with another to make one shield, it gets past that problem. I also feel as if it would look cool as hell as panels were destroyed by an attack.

Area personal shields also sounds good, if a bit boring.

Tessellated shields sounds like a brilliant idea : easy to understand, pretty original, visually great and the gameplay sounds good.

That said, it would be great if the bubble- and personal shields to be possible engine-wise for the modders.

I just want to make sure I 100% understand what is proposed here.

So the below represents tow overlapping shields (1), and instead of one or the other failing like sup com (2), if you attack the overlap them only that part fails (3)?

The tesselated shields idea is interesting, but seems quite computationally expensive to have every small segment of a spherical shield activate and deactivate independently. It doesn't seem like either player really changes the way they treat such a shield compared to other shield solutions. And such a shield mechanic, depending on stats, might have some of the same shortcomings as a normal bubble shield anyway. Having a large number of these tesselated shields functioning together, where each section sustains one hit, would need more shield generators to maintain an "absolute protection field," with the number needed depending on the refresh rate of each segment.

I don't think I've seen this discussed yet - the impact shields have on balancing units.

Any solution that has a shield projector, be it a bubble, or personal shields, or whatever, is imho, fundamentally flawed in that it completely and utterly screws up the balance of the units.

Unit balance is roughly based on three main factors: Unit health / ability to stay alive on the field, Unit dps / ability to put fire on enemy targets, and unit cost.

Projected shields make the unit's effective health go straight through the roof. Suddenly fragile, high dps units become absolute monsters. ANY kind of projected shield system is going to have this issue, and it's the primary reason why when a shield went up in Supcom, you backed the hell off and waited for artillery to take it down.

The only realistic solution to this problem is to make it impossible for units of either side to shoot through shields. Which comes with a whole new set of challenges.

You forgot range, mobility and amount of frontloaded damage.

If balance to you is merely a function of the unit's HP, damage, and cost, an RTS designed by you would be incredibly boring and predictable. There would be no capacity to make units do more work than they would under normal circumstances, no way to obtain an advantage apart from numbers or rock-paper-scissors composition... It's just not right to look at balance that way.

Balance is a highly abstract comparison of utility per cost, in general, in most standard situations. It's not really correct to say that feature X ever makes a unit unbalanced, because it might be relatively ineffective, or be expensive, or saddled with other limitations, or any number of other factors.

Shields regenerate faster than HP. So in that sense they are better. But to say that they "fundamentally screw up balance" simply means you can't conceptualize utility. Would you rather have a unit with 100 HP and 100 shield, or the same unit with 500 HP? The correct answer is, it depends. Most of the time you are going to want the 500 HP, as it is most of the time going to be superior.

However, fast-regenerating shields could make that unit a more effective raider, or perhaps skirmisher, than simply having 500 HP. There might be other circumstances, game mechanics, or features of shields that make them more or less desirable, either generally, or in specific circumstances.

I said PROJECTED shields. Is that too hard to understand? A unit built with a personal shield is obviously balanced with that shield in mind. A fragile sniper unit hiding behind a shield that is projected by another unit is NOT balanced. It's got absolutely nothing to do with the physical properties of a shield.

But that is still subject to the same calculation of utility for cost, regardless of what it is.

It is a thing which you spend resources on which helps you. The question is, how much it helps you, and how much it costs. If it gives the player a huge gain for little cost in virtually all circumstances, then a rational player will always build it. Change the utility, or the cost, or the circumstances in which it is effective, and this calculus shifts.

No it's not subject to the same calculations as others, simply because it's projected onto another unit, and therefore affects the balance of other units.

I'm not sure how you can argue that on the one hand you can balance a unit by changing its health / survivability, and then on the other hand argue that a process which arbitrarily allows you to change the survivability of units in range has no effect on the balance of the unit.

A high damage, weak unit behind a shield becomes a high damage, strong unit. It's really not that hard to figure out.

Just because a particular asset modifies another unit doesn't make it impossible to balance. The only difference is that instead of having its own intrinsic utility value, it adds to the utility value of other units, increasing the utility of your forces by some amount based on how you use it and under what conditions.