What an obvious troll! Uber said "no shield" because it's too hard to balance against everything. Yes, they said that... and implemented walls. To my eyes, walls behaves exactly like a shield, rendering towers behind walls as tough as towers behind shields in supcom. At least, in supreme commander, shield could be taken down when the energy was missing. You'll tell me that walls can be avoided by using air units; and you are right. And there is my idea. People are often complaining that planet invasion is too hard. Why? because the time you set a foot on a planet, you get overwhelmed by enemy units / artillery / whatever sits on the planet awaiting for you. So we need something to protect your units on the ground when you bring them. That's the purpose of the "Protector" sattellite: an orbital unit that is slow as hell, drain a lot of energy, and project an unpenetrable shield to bullets and movement (for you and your enemies) below it on ground and air layer. How this unit work? You'll need to have some control of the orbital layer on the enemy planet (the natural enemy of the protector is the avenger) so you'll only need to balance the protector against avengers. When deploying on an enemy planet, the impenetrable bubble will allows orbital fabbers to build gates and defenses. Iif the enemy lost the orbital battle (you are controlling the orbital layer) he still can defend himself by adding more defense around the shield; to this point, it's a matter of resources and commitment on the choke point for both players, until the shield gets down (either by being disabled by missing energy / the enemy, or voluntary by the player - don't forget that the shield is unpenetrable for both sides). What if enemy units are caught in the shield? They'll still exists, but will be trapped inside, and able to shoot whatever that will be built by the player. Oh yeah, I know: Uber said "no shields". This thread is pointless.
There's better ways of fixing these issues than this, much of which have been discussed on other threads.
Yes, I know, I was only daydreaming. However my point about "walls are basically shields" is still valid.
Walls in way like they are now are definitely too much, they can be cheap but they should melt easily under larger attacks or be more expensive. I'm not fan of shield bubbles personally but I would like to see combat fabricators repair speed buffed (and make them consume proportionally more energy) and I would not mind having Maintenance turrets that would act as over-sized combat fabricator, quickly "healing" units and structures in range... this is energy based protection similar to shields but unlike them, they can be overpowered by large enough DPS and combat fabbing at large scale cost massive amounts of energy and metal and when reserves are gone they won't help you much . Also this mean that You can harass enemy energy production by damaging (holkins could be good choice thanks to it's splash damage) multiple spots of it's base protected by fabricators and forcing them to repair constantly.
Well from that stand point, you are kinda right. But they of course meant the more flawed bubble shield that we have seen in previous iterations. Walls are more stated to be movement inhibitors, rather then bullet absorbers, but as it stands few units can use their weapons with any amount of physics like arcs. Mortar and artillery units, I feel, should become more common, along with other wall avoiding movement and weapon types, like ballistic artillery, and most kinds of exotic ammo like the plasma flame thrower tanks we currently have. Then we might justify keeping the walls at their current HP and cost, or even conceivably buff them, or give additional types of wall to produce true bastions. But for now, with few counters, most being a little more ineffective then would be liked, the walls might be taking a back-seat as 'shielding' type buildings for the future.
Actually it wouldn't hurt to have one or two units designed to break through walls, able to smash them physically. Those units shouldn't be able to fire, they should be used as caterpillar.
As caterpillar? Im not sure I understand the implications of what that means! But still, the plasma tanks smash them rather well.
The flawed bubble shield is because the bubble shield was BADLY defined. I think that shields could be implemented, if there are weapons that are not stopped by shields. Or there are two types of shields. And red shields stop red objects, but not blue objects. That is essentially the same system that we've seen in many RPGs and other RTS games with better defined shield systems.
I was more thinking of shields in general when I said that. No it would be lazier. It's not a complex system to set up, it's not a complex system to understand, and it would increase the depth of the current combat system.
