Hard Shields

posted on February 27th, 2012, 3:45 am

An idea (stolen from ... lots of places): Hard Shields: When taking damage, negates(or seriously reduces) all damage over a certain amount per hit. I.e. if hit by a 100 damage shot, and the hard shields limit is 10, then only take 10 damage (the 90 points of damage are absorbed by the hard shields). If hit by 10 ships firing for 11 damage, take 100 damage.


And an inverse: "Soft" shields: Absorbs the first x amount of damage. For example, if the limit is 10, and the ship got hit by a 100 damage shot, take 90 damage. If shot by 10 ships firing for 11 damage take (11-10) x 10 = 10 damage total.

Just a thought

posted on February 27th, 2012, 5:07 am

So your idea is party the "Immortal" (reduces damage over a certain amount) from SC2 and partly Stone Giant from Wacraft 3 ( reduces the first "x" damage done).

  Is that the concept you're getting at?

posted on February 27th, 2012, 5:12 am

There are indeed some units which use essentially these mechanics in Fleet Ops for the past versions . For instance, the Tactical Armor plates of a Cube and the Refractive Shielding of a Generix Specter Refit both reduce damage from low damage weaponry. 

posted on February 27th, 2012, 5:14 am

So your idea is party the "Immortal" (reduces damage over a certain amount) from SC2 and partly Stone Giant from Wacraft 3 ( reduces the first "x" damage done).

  Is that the concept you're getting at?

Yeah, pretty much.

posted on February 27th, 2012, 8:50 am

I'd like this feature on the redone Negh'Var.

posted on February 27th, 2012, 12:44 pm

I can imagine, that the first x points of damage are completely reflected, but I can imagine, that damage above a certain point will go to waste. If I hit a ship with hard shields with a... supernova, the first 10 damage points will be absorbed and the rest of those quatrillion damage points go to nirvana. No, doesnt makes any sense. The second attempt makes sense, because I can imagine, that you need a certain power-level in order to break through the outer line of the shield-bubble and then the remaining rest will make damage.

Its like the tactical armor, yes.

posted on February 27th, 2012, 3:31 pm

I like the idea, it sounds a bit like my suggestion for the Sovereign though.  It seems the devs prefer using multipliers instead of straight-up addition and subtraction, so we're more likely to keep the Tactical Plates style of defense.  Also multipliers will never reduce the damage to zero, which subtractors are capable of doing.

You can probably find a good explanation for why the shields block large amounts of damage over a certain threshold.  Either the shield is super-charged at the instant that the attack hits, becoming invulnerable but consuming a great deal of energy in that millisecond, or instead of taking the hit it works with the ship's momentum and geometry to deflect the blow away from the ship, once again using some energy to do this.

As for environmental effects, they deal damage over time so the hardened ship might last longer but it'll still go down eventually.  A ship flying into the corona of a sun wouldn't take 10,000 damage all at once, that's bad programming.  It would start taking insane damage per second which wouldn't be affected by the shield anyway.

tl;dr - doooooo it.