Shields rework

[bbot]

So, Merwinspawn and I were talking on teamspeak yesterday, and he raised a point which I have thought about many times as well - there seems to be a lot of games which get lost because one battlecruiser surprises the other battlecruiser, and the second battlecruiser doesn't have enough time to react and raise shields. Your options as the defending team are to either keep your shields excessively raised all the time, wasting energy, or keeping them really low, leaving yourself really defenseless.

I was wondering if other players shared this sentiment that shields are difficult and unforgiving for the defending team.

My idea for a shield revamp would be to give shields an energy cap similar to the weapons, with something like a maximum of 1000 HP, which would take a larger amount of energy to recharge (4000 energy?), and make hardened shields raise the HP cap of shields (500+ hp / level) as well as add a passive shield recharge (4 HP / second / level). Shield boost would add an extra 1000 HP shield which lasts 15 seconds and gets targeted first for attacks.

So, with that initial idea, what does everyone think about shields? Fine the way they are, or in need of work? Does anyone have any other ideas on how to make shields more practical while still making them competitive and not OP?

[Siretu]

I'm not sure how your suggestion would fix the problem you're describing. I'm lacking information as to how the shield regeneration will work with your current set up. Will it be removed (and be added as a part of hardened shield)? Will it stay the same?

At first I assumed you removed it. If we assume a rush and for the sake of simplicity that no one uses shield boost. In that case, you have a 1000 extra hp, which is nothing really. Even with max hardened shield, it would take more than a minute to reach 1000 shields.

It's worth noting that shields used to be even worse. They used to give more shield per energy but much less regeneration. The result was that if you got rushed, increasing shields didn't help as much because it would have time to regenerate to full. The max cap didn't matter since you weren't going to reach it anyways while you were getting hammered by the enemy. In addition, shields also used to turn off if they reached 0 for some time, unless you used core stability to keep them online with the emergency shield energizer.

Re-reading your post, it occurs to me that maybe what you're suggesting is making it so increasing shield power has no effect on max shields. Instead, if just boosts the shield regeneration, and then you can use upgrades (and abilities like shield boost) to increase the shields max cap.

[bbot]

Yeah, the last one. The amount of HP the shields provide is fixed, and increases with upgrades. It's by no means a completely thought out idea, and all the numbers were pulled out of my butt (yeah 1000 is a little low), I just thought I would start with an alternative and see if anyone else had any other ideas on how the shield play could be different than it is now.

I should also say I don't think the current setup isn't bad by any means, and I think most players are used to it and how it affects strategic decisions in gameplay.

[Siretu]

I have to say, it would be interesting to see how it works out with a static shield amount where power to shields just increases regeneration. I potentially like this idea.

[Degra]

Static shields would be interesting.
Maybe 1000 + (fusion_core_level * 500), so if maxed you'd have 4000 shields... ?

Fusion Core seems to have fallen out of fashion ever since the scaling upgrades costs, because they don't compete well with Powerdocking chompers (static prices).
That would bring back some unrelated use for them. Simply think of the core being able to maintain a stronger passive shield.
Hardened shielding is already mandatory enough just because of shield resistances and stronger Shield Boost.

We could give that idea some shots in the CC Beta perhaps?

[Dreadnought]

I think shields are fine where they are (until late game, level 8+ lasers overpower shields, but thats ok i think) its the other abilities you need to work around with, like iron-curtain, that thing is pretty great now, for 6 seconds it stop 90% of damage, which allows you to get your shields back up because your regeneration beats the 90% reduced dps. however you can only do this every 60s which is only once...maybe twice in a full on fight.
We need more defensive abilities, because i think hardened shields and lasers scale pretty well (still think hardened shields could get a bit of a buff) until like laser level 6-7, and we could use some more defensive abilities
(random ideas, science console will activate an ability, which absords all projectiles for 5 seconds, after 5 seconds science console guy can pick a direction and all those projectiles will fire at once in that direction, or even more random, when ever a BC takes like 250 damage, space debris will fly off it (the BC hull is buckling, inside theres debris as well, but now outside as well!) which could potentially prove a meat-barrier against incoming fire, not much but a nice small difference)

[Puppetbones]

I agree with DreadNought that shields are pretty good the way they are. What I like about the current shields is that greater energy usage creates vastly greater effectiveness, regardless of upgrades. This requires you to know when to pour energy into the shields and when not to. And the point I was getting to, is that you have to spy on your enemy a bit and know when you are about to engage in battle. If the shields will hold for several seconds with just minimal energy input, then it pretty much eliminates the need to be aware of the battlefield and makes surprise attacks rather useless.

I play a lot of matches with small lobbies, and surprise attacks and spying are fun and crucial parts of the game. In these games, there is actually use of the minelayer, because dropping beacons can fool your enemy and give you vision, and mines can thwart small ship scouting attempts. There are many other ways of spying that would become rather useless if shields were held for a while with minimal energy.

Also, I have a couple of stories:

I lost a 1v1 the other day to an opponent with much less experience than me because he got a tracking beacon into my bc without me knowing. I was watching my radar closely and knew he was fairly far off and not moving so I lowered my shields way down. However, since he knew my exact position because of the beacon, he was able to hit me with 3 yamatos from very long range, which did serious hull damage even though I had a lot of hardened shield upgrades. Before that event, I had a huge advantage because I had a far superior economy the entire game, and thus much more upgrades. If the shields were how bbot suggested, this comeback victory with yamatos would not have been possible, as I would have had like 4000 hp on shields because of my upgrades. (I realize bbot was just throwing out numbers, but you get my point)

I almost lost another 1v1 to the same opponent a while back again because of shields/energy. I almost lost because, at the first kerm spawn, I moved bc to it, and raised shields just before arriveing expecting an engagement. There was no enemy bc there. I parked the bc at kerm, still keeping the shields up while mining because I was still expecting his bc to show up. Once the kerm was mostly mined up, I fled but with little energy remaining. I upgraded several powerful bc upgrades, but I still lost the battle that occurred shortly after because I ran out of energy because I wasted so much on shields earlier. He had hardly any powerful bc upgrades because he had very little kerm, but he still won that battle. I was able to flee, replenish my energy, and win later, but he was able to even the game out with his surprise attack. Again, an inferior, under equipped cruiser still had a shot at victory because of shields being the way they are.

The last story; I lost to this same person in a similar situation to the last story in the sense that I was much better equipped, but unprepared in power console. As I said, he is not experienced, so he usually didn't move his bc until like 30 minutes into the game, but this one time he did and he dropped a beacon near the starting point. I assumed he hadn't moved because of the radar pings at that spot, but got surprise attacked while my shields were down and got utterly destroyed. It's stuff like this that makes me keep playing CC.

And lastly, I see the problem in losing battles due to surprise attacks because of not being able to up the shields quickly due to power console ability cooldowns, but I did notice an upgrade that lowers the power console cooldowns by a somewhat small amount; I believe it was in utility tier 3. I would suggest to Eric that maybe buffing that cooldown decrease might motivate people to pick utility tier 3 once in a while instead of the usual offensive tier 3.

[Degra]

And lastly, I see the problem in losing battles due to surprise attacks because of not being able to up the shields quickly due to power console ability cooldowns, but I did notice an upgrade that lowers the power console cooldowns by a somewhat small amount; I believe it was in utility tier 3. I would suggest to Eric that maybe buffing that cooldown decrease might motivate people to pick utility tier 3 once in a while instead of the usual offensive tier 3.

It's Utility tier 2.
I still fail to see how Offensive T3 would be a superior upgrade. I regularly win BC engagements without it.
I personally only go for Offensive T3 when my team is short on manpower and I can't or don't want to my combat ship pilots on a chomper (when Econ T3) or in a BC support ship when Utility T3 (Sub or Dessie)
Going for Utility T3 also means you will have 100 more red to spend, which means you can get 1 more BC laser upgrade.
So stop your silly CCI obsession with Offensive T3 please

But back to the topic.
The biggest problem with the current power console mechanics is the lategame, when the BCs are at 8+ laser upgrades.
At level 10 it comes down to who engages first, wins. Simple as that. The defending team has no chance at all to last long enough to get the shields up and tanking 100% of the damage.
10 BC laser levels raises the laser damage by 250%, while Hardened Shielding lowers the received damage by about 33%.
The scaling is off. I would suggest either lowering the damage bonus from 25% to 20% per level or limiting the upgrades to 8, while increasing the cost per upgrades a little.

[Puppetbones]

@Degra: Well I've done utility tier 3 once when I was capt for the same reason you mentioned: I wanted the red for the lasers. However, I've never seen anyone else do economic or utility tier 3 before, so that's why I thought there should be some more incentive for those.

I agree that there are some balance issues between laser and shields upgrades, but that is the only problem I see. Regardless, I would recommend giving bbot's suggestion a try in CC beta.

[Degra]

Okay....
Since we're already not on a clear suggestion in this topic but just brainstorming around the shield system, let me throw in another idea:
Bleedthrough.
Basically that means at a certain point (like below 25% shields) your shields will start to not tank everything, but a small portion of the damage starts hitting the hull.

E.g. you have a bleedthrough of 10% at 25% shields, that'd mean that 10% of the incoming damage would affect the hull.
You could also add a different bleedthrough for different types of weapons.
That would mean you could differentiate the usefulness of different ships against the BC without upsetting the small ship vs small ship balance too much.

So you could have 4000 static shields on the BC but Corvettes and especially Destroyers could have a higher bleedthrough modifier, meaning you can still harass the enemy BC properly with them, since you will start hitting some of their hull at e.g. 75% shields (=3000 shields in this example) and then start hitting some of their hull already.

That way, you could still have a balance between BC surprise attacks vs giving the defending team a realistic buffer to enact counter measures on one hand, and BC safety from harass vs harass strats like double corvette still be effective.

Hardened Shielding could then be changed to lower the bleedthrough of your BC shields, meaning you would have to bring them further down before you start hitting the hull, e.g. the BC shield is "modulated" to especially block BC weapons fire, so BC weapons have the hardest time of getting through the shields.
Making it justifiable that at maxed hardened shielding, you would have the current situation of having to bring the BC shields down to 0 before you can hit the hull.

As said, Corvette and Destroyer would have a bleedthrough modifier and they could start getting part of their damage through the shields when they're down to like 10% or 30%, when maxed Hardened Shielding.