Hull Damage and Shield Damage

posted on June 17th, 2010, 1:58 pm

I know that Engine changes are as difficult as hell to do. But I really think that this could significantly improve gameplay overall.

Code Hull Damage and Shield damage to become independent instead of a single merged code.

Here is my reason why:

You could have certain weapons able to deal more or less shield damage than hull damage. For Example... Breen Torpedoes quickly take down shields because of being energy based (I know the arguments of what is and what is not energy based, just don't bring it up) but the Breen torpedoes do 60% damage to the hull.

Or there are Ion Torpedoes, they would not deal too much damage to shields, but deal a lot of damagee to the ship's hull. Same with plasma torpedoes. Dominion Poleron Beams could deal 5x damage to shields since they often have the ability to penetrate shields. Federation Phasers might not do that much against shields, but once hitting the hull it can do alot of damage.

Of course there'd still be weapons that deal about equal damage. But this could also better apply shield based or hull based defensive passives. Like the Generix Frigate's passive is a shield based, the shields will get reduced damage, but the reduced damage is gone once the shields are out. The Borged Monsoon's Armor or Defiants Armor is hull based, so the effect does not come into play until they lose their shields.

I know this would be hard to do, but overall it would make gameplay much better, and a whole lot more interesting.

posted on June 17th, 2010, 3:33 pm

This could also lead to torps being more of a hull-destroyer (so dangerous that Ent-D hesitated to use a photon on the Borg when their own shields were down, one shot destroyed a derelict Miranda-class in another TNG episode) than a shield-destroyer.

posted on June 17th, 2010, 3:42 pm

I agree with this idea. Other games use Torps for hull and Phasers for shields, why not FO? They should still do some good damage to the one they don't specialise in though, they're still putting out quite a bit of power.

Assuming it's even possible...

posted on June 17th, 2010, 4:11 pm

Pretty sure they can already do that.

  The new Dominion Phaser turret deals more damage to shields, but less damage to hulls.

  Additionally, I'm sure it's not too different from the fact that there are codes in the ODF's that indicate how much damage is to be hull and how much it to be shield damage.

posted on June 17th, 2010, 4:15 pm

What if the weapons are in a state of chroniton flux, rendering conventional shields useless?

posted on June 17th, 2010, 4:19 pm

That's probably how Starfleet's modified Photons work.

posted on June 17th, 2010, 4:22 pm

What if the weapons are in a state of chroniton flux, rendering conventional shields useless?

I'd rather not see that happen, those weapons should stay in the Delta Quadrant. Maybe Optec could add in that ship as a map object.

That's probably how Starfleet's modified Photons work.

Possible, but I think they could just make the torp find out and match the shield's frequency. A lot easier to use specialized sensors to detect a frequency than figure out how to incorporate a particle previously never used by Starfleet.

posted on June 17th, 2010, 9:42 pm

I think it would be wise to keep the current system as otherwise that requires ships and factions to be very carefully rebalanced to take into consideration some of them having very few torpedo weapons, pulse weapons, etc . I like it best as special passives