Shields

Have I posted a Sun Tzu in this thread yet? No?

"Security against defeat implies defensive tactics; ability to defeat the enemy means taking the offensive" - Sun Tzu's Art of War

Notice that defeating the enemy implies offense. Another part - "When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."

Except instead of wasting men, and having their weapons dull and their ardor dampening, you are wasting my time, playing a dull game and dampening my ardor. And my love for strategy games.

Shields cause static, still gameplay which discourages raiding and promotes army snowballing, ecowarring and turtling. These 3 things are all defensive tactics and, if you look at my Sun Tzu quote above, you can not win with defensive tactics. This causes MASSIVELY DRAWN OUT stalemates which always end in artillery wars to crack defenses, then flooding the downed defenses with tanks. It's a boring put-off.


So please. Keep shields to mods.

The problem with shields is that they work on ALL weapons. Mudding them up with arbitrary rules only serves to illustrate how broken it is. There are far superior ways to defend against problem X that don't involve designing the entire game around shields.

There is only ONE unit that needs protection from ALL forms of damage at ALL costs- the Commander. A shield may be designed to provide a scalable HP buffer without fussing over upgrades. However it's strictly an optional thing that isn't really needed at this time.

Nothing else will benefit from a shield in any way that standard HP and defense tools can't accomplish.

Why not have shields not affect Missile type attacks but absorb Energy types and Projectile types. this would work very well and in tandem with the point defense anti missile type defenses.

i would propose a medium low capacity type shield bubble that regenerates quickly out of combat and moderately in combat. when popped it should regenerate 25% of its shield value before reforming.
this type of shield would be good against slow firing artillery type weapons but weaker against multiple units that can burst it down.

To be fair, you only ever need to kill the enemy Commander, surrendering a planet doesn't mean you lose, or that your opponent immediately gains a huge advantage, for one so far it seems trying to move armies between worlds will not be feasible/be very expensive. Even with Reclaiming baiting a huge army from your opponent and bailing could be a valid tactic.

Commanders are also the most effective unit with which to start capitalizing on a new planet, which is simultaneously a good defense and a great weakness. Even if your opponent has a huge base and just parks his commander in it start laughing and send your commander to as many Planet, Moons and Asteroids as you can and get the 'expansion' lead on him. in time your advantages could win you war.

Mike

i don't know that feels like a bit of a stretch. any time you are giving ground and resource base is a negative time for you. running and hiding to an asteroid or moon is just prolonging the inevitable

So do shields.

Lol. You guys are all over the place. The whole art of war thing i have to say when I read it i thought it was a joke. Its a game, I was disappointed that shields were kiboshed and i tryed to do alittle defending to have them included in the game, there are obvious advantages and disadvantages and im not saying it dosent offer the opportunity to turtle hard but i totally disagree with the extreme win or extreme loss many of you have agreed with, especially "Global Moderator". Iv never played a stalemate game you all speak of and iv never turtled into my base to start an ecowar but its alpha, can we not just see what kind of effect shields will have? (as long as it is feasable coding wise and including them without alot of work, i dont code so We have walls which in my opinion is cool because i havent played a game with walls since like age of empires lol having them shift-drag to build them more precisly where you need them instead of having to shift que each individual piece would make life easier. But i like this thread, seems to have become fairly popular over the past little bit and i hope the discussion continues to atleast get it to a testing phase or discussing advantages and disadvantages that could be applied to them to set some sort of equalibrium amongst the other features of the game, overall im excited for P-A, iv exhausted all my other strategy games lol btw hit me up if anyone is up for some games or discussions.

I'm finding these T2 bomber snipes annoying. AA is useless if they're smart and build a ton of air scouts to take the initial fire. 3-4 Bombs is all it takes to end a game.

Damage reduction, healing, buffs, and auras are what we like to call force multipliers. If you do not know what a force multiplier is, then look it up. It is a well established and well understood mechanic, and forms a cornerstone of the RPG holy trinity.

Shields are a buff aura that prevents damage to units and heals over time. They are very clearly a force multiplying unit. There is nothing else interesting about them.

If you won't listen to me, listen to Mike, Nanolathe and Bobocules. They've been around forever, and are avid SupCom community members (I think). There are a lot of people here who have taken time to crunch the numbers to get quantitative data. There are also people here, such as myself, who have played games competitively to get qualitative data.

And they all agree that Shields would do nothing but promote excessively drawn out matches.

You don't win games by curling up into a ball, you win them by reducing your enemies to molten, glowing, metal-rich slag.

Sigh, this silly argument again... my response from one of the other insanely long threads RE Shields:

Just my 2 cents:

I feel as though the only valid arguments in this thread (yes I read it in its entirety) are the ones that first acknowledge that intelligence gathering is THE MOST IMPORTANT COUNTER IN THE GAME. So, ask yourself first before blah blahing for or against a unit/structure, if the primary focus is gathering intelligence can I properly negate X threat without singular-purpose unit/structure Y (this is implied in most arguments as shields being primarily for anti-artillery)? If the answer is yes, then why is Y needed? Redundancy in games never adds much value IMO, and shields tend to be redundant in that proper scouting and non-static response would have saved one from needing shields in the first place. Artillery can be very easily balanced IMO with cost/build time. Shields aren't needed... if they turtled so hard that you can't get something in to take out an expensive artillery piece then you are failing at intelligence gathering. TA, SC, and even SC2 all heavily favor mobility over static... there is no reason why this game should be different. Always keep in mind that static = support... static should never be a first option.

As far as a "for shields" type argument, I think that they can be useful when they are used to temporarily help push out the control boundaries. I think this could be done via a nothing in or out approach (i.e. no stupid good-guys can phase through them) while giving the desired HP area boost. This means they would offer temporary protection at the cost of having 0 return firepower ability (ie you can't drop static defense structures underneath to fire outwards while being shielded from incoming fire). This would encourage their use only in very specific instances that would be much more dynamic than traditional shield use. Also, as mentioned earlier, if implemented, shield layering should have drastic diminishing returns or offer 0 benefits.



TL/DR: Shields cause static game play when implemented in the "usual" fashion, which should be a BIG NO NO!!! Come up with some unique way to make shields function to push out boundaries and promote turf wars and then they MIGHT be useful.

I said it COULD be valid, there are a lot of little details that could change things up, but the basic idea is sound. Think of it like this, 2 evenly skilled players, one focuses on Army production the other focuses on Expansion/Eco. The Army Player will win the planet eventually, but by the time he done you could be well established on another planet, moon or starting work on a KEW. Comparing army sizes only matters for when Armies clash, in the end you only need a comparatively small number of units to kill Commander.

Mike

im still unhappy about no shields. i would even be happy with a compromise of T3 or experimental type expensive shields only that doesn't stop direct ground or missiles but halts arty bombardment and bomber strikes. <-- these are the issues i want to address with shields and i think this can be achieved with little impact to the desired game play you are all looking for. instead of an creating unassailable positions it delays artillery pushes and tries to force ground assaults.

Delaying artillery and forcing ground assaults are two things you don't want to do if you are loosing, which is the only time you might think of doing that. Silencing artillery and derailing ground assaults is what you want to do.

And again, I cannot stress this, units like this which promote negative gameplay (negative in my opinion at least) should be modded and will be modded. Especilly popular units like Shield Bubbles.

I feel that having an expensive late-game shield that gives very little pay-off might be redundant though. Having it there for the sole purpose of it being there defeats the object. A unit should have a clearly defined role which it is designed for.

Just a quick opinion about shields.

Go play BA on the spring engine (I am surprised by the very few references to BA and spring in this forum btw) and play around with shields there.

Once you tried them then you can make a good judgement.

Personally, I like the idea of shields.

Just feels right to have em im sure as the game progresses through the alpha and into the beta that we may see some shields, im hopeful that the decision to exclude them will be rethought considering its not a complex mechanism like much of the other features that will undoubtly be added to PA, cant wait for its epic release, gettin the old crew back together for this one, already made some calls :twisted:

the point of having expensive hard to mass shields is to make using them have important choices attached to them. like WHERE am i going to be bombarded from? (relying on intel) instead of seeing every base covered in bubble shields you will see important targets covered by few shields. this also makes building a shield paint a big target on it because it means you want to protect what is underneath very badly to have invested in the shield. making it ineffective against missiles/rockets would also give a clear countermeasure to shield tech that isn't some tacked on anti shield weapon.

In my opinion, lower tier units should use combos of direct fire and rocket tech, mid tier use missiles and arty, late tier use lasers and shields. (in general not exclusively)

direct fire weapons deal full damage to shields
rockets/missiles pass through shields
lasers and attack from the top (arty/air/orbital) deal 50% damage to shields

this means that the counter to shields is actually early and mid tier units and shields have an anti late game units role that would also help unit diversity in the late game to crack the positions that have invested in shields.

there are ways of doing this intelligently that avoid all the problems you guys are citing about shields. we agree that SupCom style shields that are over every base late game just serves to drag out a game like this. we agree that that should be avoided. instead of COMPLETELY eliminating shields from the picture (a picture we have grown accustom to) please consider alternatives. we are creative people we can find solutions to problems instead of removing them.