Shield generators

Honestly while I'm a great fan of shield bases and heavy defenses in supcom we'll have to see what direction PA takes it in. I like heavy defenses but they aren't super essential to the game experience. So I'm cool with a different kind of defenses.

Maybe because despite the flaws, SupCom2 is actually still fun? :mrgreen:

Turtle enabling unit types relevant to PA:

• shields
• other artillery defense (e.g. anti-shell point defense)
• nuke defense
• asteroid defense
• long range artillery coupled with long range intel
• ground to orbital weaponry
• static towers with more power/health than mobile units

Have I missed any?

Guys, you forget the most horrible turtle-enabler: Artillery.
Honestly, I turtle quite alot, and the only real reason is the opponents arty. Take away long-range arty and I would be less anxious to go turtling. Now everyones base is vulnerable to long-range arty and without shields, your base will be decimated within moments. If you have arty, you've got to have something to counter it (like shields). If you take away shields, you have to come up with something that can counter arty or take away long-range arty.

EDIT: looked through the posts and the umbrella-shield is a great idea! It can counter arty and some bomber spam (allowing comsnipes) but it won't help you against an all-out attack from the front!

The difference is that artillery is used to break a turtle. Shields cannot be used to break a turtle.

Artillery is also used as an aspect OF turtling. Sit in your base, build an impenetrable turret line, and then attack the enemy base with impunity. It kind of goes both ways.

if you have one then you need the other, which both are turtle enabling factors, so get rid of both and your fine. unless the arty are like big Berthas. (dumbing down what bob wrote)

I can only vote yes for shields because I like the visualisation so much in FA.
Unit shields are also very nice because they regenerate faster then hp.
This way you can choose for harass tactics instead of going all in.

What? Shields have the opposite effect either you drain the shield and do damage or you don't drain the shield and do no damage at all. You have to go all in against a shield because if you don't break it then you have effectively done no damage.

Personally I just love when you get to strategic artillery in TA derived games without shields. You now have the opportunity to target anything in range. No place in their range is safe except behind mountains or high walls. Artillery can even force the enemy to hide vital infrastructure behind mountains.
But getting that artillery in range of expensive, clustered infrastructure is usually really hard and requires a big forward presence. The enemy might be able to hit your forward units with long range artillery in turn but a turtled up opponent is gonna have all his buildings in huge clusters making your artillery take a much bigger toll than his.
Artillery might also be good at softening up large clusters of enemies but relative useless at destroying individual units making it an interesting crowd control weapon.

I have an idea. Let's take our ideas, and PUSH THEM SOMEWHERE EL--

Into a mod. Shields are essentially radial insta-hit tactical-everything-defenses with a localized resource. Solution: Make a building that eats projectiles in a certain radius and subtracts their damage from t local resource bar under the health bar. Problem solved, no arguments needed. Hell, if the modding system is extensive enough, you could just make a sphere collision obstacle and make it only collide with projectiles. Problem solved even more efficiently!

I am against bubbleshields because they are so hard to balance. units are a balance of role, HP, firepower, ROF, accuracy. A glass cannon could get OP because it's behind a bubbleshield.


Now personal shields are fine. they're essentially a layer of fast-regen HP. this creates an interesting threshold you need to overcome before the unit actually gets damaged.

I am all for personal shields on *certain* units. But bubbleshields inherently cause a balance inequality.

I would love to see a kind of "active defence" shield tho: kinda like those shield robots in Supcom 2 that could rapidly shoot a ton of missiles out of the air as a form of defense. except there wouldn't be shield of course.

Artillery is not a direct aspect of turtling. Often players build arty to attack a base that has tons of enemy units in them (thus making it too dangerous to attack with their own units), forcing the enemy to build shields. Now, I quite like the idea of the Bomb Bouncer shield in SupCom 2. Basically, instead of a shield that is like a bubble, it's more like a flat shield surface above the generator. Therefore, only artillery, tactical missiles and air units could be countered using that shield. However, against direct fire, the shield is useless.
-------------
......X...... (X is the generator, --- is the shield).
This way the generator can easily be attack by ground units and still offer protection against artillery spam by the enemy.

Either this or no arty as well. Imagine you having a base set up nicely and someone else builds long-range arty. It means your base is practically doomed.

Why have protection against a flippin' asteroid (missiles in the visualisation) or nukes, and not against something simple as artillery. That makes no sense at all. Shields and long-range arty? Yes. No shields and long-range arty? No.

EDIT: Just checked the poll results. Basically it means the following (although it looks different)
42% is against shields.
6% doesn't care
That means 52% wants shields in some form. So there is a majority of people that want shields in PA.

TA proves otherwise. The absence of shields means bases are more spread out. One shell won't chain react your whole base. Furthermore, artillery without shields need not be as damaging, giving you time to react. Shields force weapons to be messily front-loaded in their damage to have any effect, which is why shields going down in SupCom was so bad. It makes for messy gameplay (it doesn't just affect artillery) and breaks balance.

Makes heaps of sense. We can do the first two in real life but not really the third. Unless you're saying real life doesn't make sense? There's nothing "simple" about stopping kinetic projectile weapons that small travelling at that speed. An asteroid has a large target area, and a nuke is easily damaged in flight (it needn't be actually destroyed to be rendered ineffective), whereas you have to essentially obliterate a shell for it to be stopped.

Actually, 14% of those opt for an option in the lobby to turn them on & off - that doesn't mean they necessarily want shields, only that they want a compromise. So it could be said that it's actually 42% against vs 38% for. But in any case, it's a clearly biased poll (2 options for yes), so I wouldn't draw anything from it either way.

I would be in support of no shields if there was another way to defend against everything.

My personal preference would be for point defense laser towers to actually act like point defense emplacements.

I read somewhere that the devs have said projectiles will be treated similar to units by the server/client software. Why not give them 'HP' and make them targetable by lasers?

This would make it so much easier to have both normal and advanced level stuff valuable for the entire game.

PD would be moderate range, high attack speed, low dps.
Advanced PD would be moderate-high range, very low attack speed, moderate-high damage.

Bombers would carpet bomb, either in a pattern or a line with very low damage, high area, low 'HP' bombs.
Advanced bombers would strategically bomb with a single high damage, high 'HP' moderate area bomb.

Tactical missles would be targettable but very high 'HP', so you would need advanced PD to have any chance of defending them before landing.

Artillery would be balanced by cost like normal. High metal cost to discourage/punish spam. Somewhat innaccurate, and very much so at max range. PD spam or advanced PD could intercept them.

What this does is make all units useable and important the whole game, as well as make 2 prong strategy important. Use tanks to distract all the opponents PD to open a hole for a carpet bombing. Use t1 bomber spam to saturate a fire bases defensed just before 5 TMs to whipe him out. Spam normal artillery at one well defended area to cause an energy drain before your ground assault on his moon base.

By that logic, I will now begin composing a post (including a poll, naturally) that will make the case that we should replace all the robots with anthropomorphic bathroom towels.

Just think about it, you could make battletowels to literally soak up the ocean around your enemy's base, so that your scout flannels could travel across what was the ocean floor and go and give the enemy commander a good rub in the face until all the chocolate had come off.

Everything? I'm an itinerant turtler and even I can see problems with providing a specific defense for every type of offense.

To make a game like this interesting and engaging, not to mention replayable, there should be no "perfect" anything. No perfect base layout, no perfect force composition, no perfect strategy/tactic. Especially, no perfect defense; good defenses, yes, but not impregnable. If I can build a set of towers (and/or units) that between them can neutralise all of the weapons in the game, you have the recipe for a perfect defense.

How do you propose to eliminate an entrenched enemy base, e.g. the last of 4 opponents that has had time to spam PD all around their base before you got to them, if their PD can neutralise eveything you can throw at them?

If you want to be able to build a base that opponents cannot break, they will be able to build a base that you cannot break. Then you have stalemate, which is boring, and you have to introduce something that can break the stalemate, i.e. an unblockable super weapon. Having to introduce an unblockable super weapon automatically invalidates your requirement that there is a defense for everything; if you provide a defense for the super weapon, you are back to a stalemate. I would argue that this shows why you should not have a defense for everything (everyone finds stalemates boring).

I want to be able to break opponents, so I accept that I, in turn, have to be breakable. In the case of PA, this means I'm going to happily accept the devs choice to not include shields, and instead deliberately abuse the extra power of artillery myself in my choice of units / buildings

I am also going to enjoy smashing asteroids into stuff. Who wouldn't enjoy smashing asteroids into stuff? :mrgreen:

All right, since this poll is "biased" and can't be trusted, I will reset it and have only yes, the compromise and no.

Rocks. Giant rocks. From space. It solves everything.

The problem with shields is their type of damage absorption had to be reconciled across every single weapon in the game. It was a huge task that did not work out well for Supcom. Shields can still work in PA, but few units demand that level of awesome protection.

Anti-X defenses only address a few specific weapons. Any weapon can arbitrarily be highly defensible or impossible to block, so the choice can be done on a case by case basis. It is much easier to design and won't necessarily be screwed up.

Make shields block friendly fire and unit movement.

That would eliminate the whole point of a bubble shield.

They already exist. They're called walls.