Shield generators

Talking about shields as they were in FA, etc:

When I first heard about PA lacking shields i was a little unsure how i felt.

Excited for a completely different type of game and also unsure if I'd miss moments when shields make FA quite fun and challenging.

I used to love the old red alert for example though no shields there. You could do things that are sort of standard now, like loading up troops into air transports. Those sort of things are more exciting to me than just building a fortress every game.

I think the less time spent making shields the more time you spend getting better at attacking and defending yourself with units, just makes sense. The only reason people don't enjoy doing something is because they don't feel they're that good at it, they can't see progression in doing it.

Coming from more of a Supcom + FA experience. I felt i might miss some of the moments when shields came in really handy, at the same time all shields did was delay me dying. Not exactly thrilling stuff, just building and prolonging your existence without any hope of winning unless one your allies comes to your aid. I have to admit it's fun when someone does save you and in FA without shields if enough people are attacking your base you really won't last long without help from a teammate.

I remember playing games where the map was fairly small and people would build shields and try to turtle and then complain about me just sending units at their base or finding flaws in their defences. (So they didn't like the game i thought?).

They wanted me to sit back, do the same thing as them i guess. Actually i don't think they really cared what I did as long as I let them build up a fortress. Then after maybe an hour and half I'm sure they might have started scouting me and sending stuff my way. I think that was their master battle plan. "Thrilling right?" especially on a tiny map designed for quick gameplay.

Even when variety was used like flying my commander over into their base. They would say it was "CHEAP". Anyone could do that. I even did it when it was quite risky to do so because I thought it was more fun and it would give them a fighting chance. I'm sure other people did that too.

My thought was, well if anyone can do it why didn't they? Why focus on building up a base even when it's not helping you win, why play this type of map or game?

I think people should rely on mods if they want year long turtle fests where they watch massive amounts of units just slam together constantly.

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How shields could work better:

My thought of what could be more interesting would be make shields rare and VERY expensive. Not only to build but to maintain too. Making it like a decision like building a nuke launcher gives gameplay variety.

Have to ask yourself is it worth building a big shield that covers some your base or important asset like a nuke launcher or is it better to focus purely on just units and other defences?

Make it so you have to have a large amount of power to keep up one quite big shield. I think if a shield is a big investment and in some ways puts the person at a disadvantage it would be more interesting. Than it just becoming a standard gameplay decision.

When something has little drawbacks and as their economy grows it becomes so easy and necessary to use, it drives the gameplay in a particular way.

I say if we must have shields make them very expensive so even in an hour long game you wouldn't expect to see more than two shields because they require so much energy to maintain.

I want a fresh and different game, so I voted no to shields.

YES!!! I WANT SHIELDS!!! There is no reason not to.

Please read the rest of the thread, as there are many points as to why and why not that need to be considered.

Shields can make for long,fun games for people who enjoy base-building and turtling (I'm kind of one of those people). But that's only a segment of the player-base, large as it may be. I think it best that shields be a fleshed-out gameplay system, but optional.

I think you may have misunderstood me, that was a (semi-rhetorical) question based upon shandlar's premise that you have an in-game defense for everything. Which includes rocks from space.

I don't really care if there is shields, but as pointed out, there should be SOMETHING you can use to defend against artillery. I don't know about the rest of the community, but I personally don't really enjoy watching my base slowly die because my enemy built an artillery and I can't defend against it in any way (Don't bother with the "Oh just find it and destroy it." stuff because I'm NOT good at games like this and I'm not going to google, "Whats the best unit combination in Planetary Annihilation?" therefore, my attacks will tend to fail at times, and I won't be able to destroy the enemy artillery.) There needs to be some static defense of some kind, resource intensive or not, that can at least stop some artillery shells. Maybe it could be so expensive that it wouldn't be viable to have more than one in a base and maybe it occasionally would let a shell through.

Stealth?

or

Tactical missiles? (Harder to defend from in the field as no more map crossing artillery (Hopefully artillery will struggle across a planet too)).

So in other words, losing isn't fun?

Your base is probably going to end up getting destroyed by a superior player either way, regardless of whether or not artillery and shields are a part of the game. You can't complain that artillery is overpowered when you refuse to use the only viable tactics to counter it. In any case, if artillery IS so unstoppable, what's stopping you from returning the favor and raining artillery fire on your opponent's base?

Eh, I'm bad at the game and I dislike the prospect of having something where the only counter is destroying the structure. I also stopped playing Total Annihilation once the first or second mission with water became too tedious, so I don't have a sense of how artillery without shields will work. To me, artillery seems like the Novax Center from FA. A constant hassle, difficult to stop, and highly unbalanced. I'm not familiar with the cost of the Novax Center, but expensive or not, it's OP.

The premise is not that someone will be able to make an impenetrable base vs everything, the premise is that if I wanted to make a base impregnable to one or two attack types, I should be able to, regardless of said attack type.

I dont want a single base to be efficient at defending against everything, I want defense emplacements available to build that can defend against any type of attack.

Shields are bad cause they are one thing that defends against ALL types of attacks.

PD would be efficient vs weak land spam and carpet bombing, but suck badly vs advanced land, strat bombers, and be nearly useless vs advanced artillery.

Advanced PD would be efficient vs low numbers of tanky land, take out a plane or two (but not many cause they would fly in and out of range within one or two cycles of a very low fire rate), but be able to perhaps 2 shot tac missiles and 3 shot advanced arty shelling.

Make lasers EXPENSIVE to fire. This puts a soft cap on the ability to turtle with defenses balanced in this way. If they need obscene energy to fire at max rate, then your base gets bigger with all the advanced pgens to fuel them, which makes your base perimeter bigger, which increases the number of PDs you need to defend it, which increases the number of pgens needed to power them....etc etc etc...

No shields ever please last thread ever stop making these

As far as I know, this is the only thread dedicated to shields.

Confirmed Feature: impossible to shoot over walls. </rhetoric>

Then maybe the point is bad? A, giant, one-way damage valve doesn't sound like a good idea. I voted against Sup1/FA style shields because I think they're bad. There's another shield poll on the forum at the moment - it asked to consider shields that were different to the Sup1/FA shields. I voted yes there.

Trust us; this is most certainly not the first.

Why isn't there a "yes but only personal shields" or "yes but not like SupCom" option?

I like shields, it's just that i hate large domes impervious to all. In supcom, against the super-arty they're a must, and they're a must against experimentals. but they're not a necessary element against regular units like in PA

Thats correct, dont think about PA like every other RTS, it is different and so will the shields be different.

Just wait for it and enjoy your tee.

I have made my point multiple times, and I will make it again:

Without shields, you cannot counter long-range artillery, thus making it the most OP weapon in the entire game.
Some of you are like: "Well then destroy the arty"
Not everyone is as good as others. The enemy might be able to stand ground against you and you won't be able to destroy the arty, thus watching your base die off slowly.

Obviously, tactical missiles are NOT the solution because they CAN be countered. Also, I don't get why you dislike shields so much. Turtling isn't 'bad', it's a very valid tactic and yes, it can lock a battle up, but then it's up to you to siege them and destroy their base. Turtlers can't claim a lot of mass points around their base because they have their base concentrated around one point. Therefore the attacker can easily get loads of mass and spam loads of units.

There is no such thing as an unbreakable base. Shields are not OP. They do what they are supposed to do and they do it quite well. I do agree that the Supcom variants had a little too much health on the shield and their regen rate was a bit fast. Make those values smaller and you got some shields that will help you protect against arty and your base will stay vulnerable to other attacks.

Lasers are not a bad idea. I can see this idea work.

And to the smart boy that replied to me earlier saying shooting down arty is hard: It's the future. Space travel is hard. In PA it will be a key element of the game, thus happening quite frequently. If they can build cannons that shoot units through outer space bombarding the enemy base, why would't they be able to shoot arty shells down?

And that means you've been beaten by a superior player.

Sounds like everything is functioning perfectly.

:shock: :?:

Not sure if trolling or just hard of understanding.

Which provides the option of building a base that can (ostensibly) defend against everything. If I have that available as an option in the game, I am most certainly going to use it myself; why would I choose to build sub-optimal defenses? You can bet that if I would happily use them that way, that other players certainly will as well, even if you would not.

Better to not have the option in the first place, in my opinion. AG towers, AA towers, artillery, and intel (radar / whatever) provide a relatively complete defense package, which can be augmented with a bomber / gunship squadron to deal with threats that the towers are having an issue with.

It's basic, but that is the current premise for PA; limited funds plus a quick development cycle mean that some corners are having to be cut, one of which is unit variety. This is highly likely to get rectified by the community pretty quickly though, so I wouldn't be surprised if anti-stuff defenses start appearing soon after the modding specs are confirmed.

Actually, "bubble" shields as implemented in SupCom did not defend against nukes (even though they were effective against "tactical" missiles), and they could be bypassed by any unit that managed to enter the bubble. They are an exceedingly efficient method of protecting a base though, especially when coupled with towers/artillery.

Everyone has got used to having shields available (and the uses of shields), so not implementing them is going to change the gameplay dynamic; I would argue that this in itself is a good thing, as it forces players to adapt their timeworn strategies to compensate.

Yeah, so? A lot of things can't shoot over walls. You don't need perfect defense to be effective. Each option is going to be good against some things but not against others. That's called good design.

You forgot the most abundant and effective defense of all:
TANKS.

They don't only work in the field.

Read just like... half the thread, okay?
Anti ordnance defenses are more than capable of answering any arbitrary need for artillery defense. They can be as good or as bad as one wants, and they can be countered with a simple application of unblockable weapons. Like gigantic lasers. Or cluster bombs. Or asteroids. Or tanks.

Strong is not OP. Effective is not OP. Being unanswerable is OP.