Single directional shields

So I get there will be no shields, and that's fine. But what is stopping arty from simply being King, and wrecking any base?

I feel like there needs to be some countermeasure, beyond the simple and dangerous "find and kill it". I get that people hate turtles for whatever reason, but it's a valid play-style with plenty of disadvantages that more aggressively expanding players can easily overcome.

Besides It will hurt aggressive player's bases too if they cannot deal with arty in any way besides bumrushing it.

I want physical shield walls. As in no glowly translucent silliness, I mean a freaking ten meter thick chunk of titanium alloy I can pound into the earth. Bases have no meaning if you can't defend them with something a bit better than a line of tanks, that's an outpost.

Maybe arty is very innacurate? Maybe its expensive to build? To shoot? Can be counterartied by mobile arty? Its range not covering the whole planet? Terrain usable as cover?

Also this is not about turtle-hating. I'm a turtle by heart (no mutant and no ninja and also too old though) and I still dislike shields.

If you put in shields as arty defense, you end up with either:
Have shield, base defended
No shield, base utterly destroyed

(And all gradiants between ofc. I slightly simplified it here a bit. )

Balancing artillery with the presence of shields is a nightmare imo.


Cover your base in neosteel walls, keep engineers running around, repairing stuff and rebuilding while under constant fire. That's imo much more interesting that a shield that absorps damage. Just make the UI help the player with that task.

Well that doesn't really happen in modern combat involving tanks, the best we should do id position ourselves into a valley or behind hills to prevent ourselves being hit at all.

I never played TA the closest I have played is Zero-K witch is based on TA in Zero-K Anti-Air ground units are very powerful and make air useless without ground support.

I also was thinking of a force field projecting wall that if you make it a seamless ring makes a impenetrable bubble until one of the wall sections is destroyed or you turn it off to let your fighters out or fire your artillery.

i don't really see us needing shields that badly. Without them well probably see quicker games and people will have to rely more on scouting to protect themselves.

I personally believe that directional shields are a good idea. If they require a lot of energy the enemy should target those generators first in order to take down the shields. and since they are directional whats there to stop the enemy from flanking them. Also in regards to the previous post, not all people enjoy short games, i'm one of those people who enjoys dragging a game on for ages.

Also if people don't want shields at all there should be an option when creating the match to disable certain buildings or units.

Another good idea would be to only have those shields block certain types of projectiles, so those units would be good at disabling shields but aren't good against buildings and other units which would encourage players to have a mix of units instead of only spamming one type of unit.

i only can repeat myself but: Bulletmagnets!

Directional defenses already exist in the form of putting turrets on one side of your base.

Not really. We're talking about defence as "mitigation of enemy firepower."

Turrets don't actually stop bullets; they only stop the things that are firing the bullets.

Then the solution is obviously to make turrets stop bullets.

This is typically superior because a combat trade behaves much more linearly with scale. As soon as damage absorption or free healing gets in the picture, things become asymptotic very fast. That's bad because very small changes can quickly make very lopsided results.

The reclaim mechanic already brutally punishes a player any time they lose a significant attack. You lose the money, and the enemy gets the money. That's rough. Game balance has to be very careful about adding too many things that act in the defender's favor, lest every attack becomes a sucker's game where you only donate resources to the enemy.

This already happens by blowing up the instigators. Sometimes the simple solutions are best.

The only time there's a real NEED to deflect damage is when the instigator can not be stopped. This is somewhat true for artillery and bombers. The former deals damage without getting in the line of fire, while the latter deals front loaded damage before the enemy can stop it. Preventing this type of damage isn't strictly necessary, but defense options can prevent games from being decided by only two unit types (especially since these two are well known for their game ending properties).

can I get some of this, hold the mayonaise?

That's the crux of the argument. There is a fundamental split in design goals by the backer population. It seems to be split fairly close down the center as well.

Half want ANY type of possible damage dealt by one player to have at least some possible way to be defended against at no damage to the target if properly used/spammed.

The other half feels that having a hard counter of this sort (shields that prevent all damage up to a point then no damage after being drained) causes horrible design issues in respect to mostly artillery which is forced to deal too much damage to break shields (and therefore shreds unshielded targets.

I'm in the first camp, If you can attack me with something, I want a way to defend against it before it deals any damage if I have properly applied the right counter.

So if you are launching a 150m asteroid in my direction, I want to be able to nuke it and break it apart with no damage to my base/planet. If it takes 10 nukes, and if I only launch 9 I lose the whole base, so be it. I dont care if its hard, but the counter needs to exist.

Same with bombers, I want SAMs that can kill a bomber before it drops its bombs. If not, I want lasers that can shoot down the bombs as they fall before they land. If not, I want shields that can absorb the bombs damage for no damage.

Any of these options can be balanced through energy costs.

Any of the last guy's options I wouldn't mind, except total invunerability shields.

^^^^
You sir got the entire point of shields.

I'm not exactly in favor of shields, but no shields means no arty to me as well or you'll get horrible un-fun gameplay.

EDIT: Not you trophy, shandler.

And I'm saying it again. Go play Total Annihilation.

It didn't have shields, it had extremely powerful long range artillery. And it had great gameplay that is still fun to this day.

(Seriously those youngsters today. There is one game with shields (SupCom) and they suddenly start to believe artillery is somehow impossible without shields. And get off my lawn!)

Artillery in TA had grater costs then the nuke silos (Or seemed like it) So really both were of equal power and time to construct.

The TA artillery drawing huge amounts of power to fire, firing a 'lobbed' shell rather then one that I can only presume in supcom is ballistic, and could cross all but the largest maps, which then made artillery a defensive weapon due to the risks of deploying them in the field.

When the artillery is equal to nukes, you get less of them, to build but a few was a massive undertaking in time and resources, and one that once placed was still easy to take out.

Their AOE wasn't much greater then mobile artillery, but the damage was enough to one-shot most smaller targets.

You didn't shield against strategic artillery, you took it out or avoided it, both of which were easy to do, especially with stealth emitters, and even then yo could easily just bum-rush the gun to kill it.

Orbital shield anyone?
Works over the atmosphere. Impenetrable by anything, No asteroids, no Orbital arcing artillery, doesn't matter if friend or foe.
It doesn't prevent arty just lowers the range.

Well its stupid but i throw it in there nevertheless

i dont like shields either but i have to admit that directional shields are interesting. imagine a shield that works like a projector. there is a turret like structure and it projects a mobile wall of light or titanium, whatever on the direction where the bigger damage is coming from. the distance between the wall and the structure is fixed, so it can only rotate the wall around itself like a circle. i believe this would create interesting gameplay, since no matter how much of thesse you had in a small area, the walls would be facing the same direction (or maybe not, but we could force it to). also, it would help solve that death ball or whatever was it called problem (the large indestructible group of units someone explained in a big post some time ago) since it would force people to divide the ball to make the fire come from diferent directions. i dont know. maybe something like that would be fun.