That other post http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=183719 was just a flight of fancy, however if anyone does know of a MMO game using the Armored Core license or just mechs in general, for goodness sake let me know. Anyway, I''m making an extremely moddable but by default balanced 2D space RTS whose focus is on ship deployment and design. As the ships get larger, so can the shields. Currently, nearly the only strategy that makes sense is to make the largest ships possible so I want to balance the use of shields for both large and small craft. You see, in my early design, shields regenerated instantly, but this is of course is totally out of balance. Often games have totally different systems for handling large and small ships, for instance, Freespace 2 doesn''t use shields on the capital vessels, but for my game, the construction system does not depend on size. The main sticking point is the rate of regeneration of shields. My current ideas include making the regen rate inversely proportional to shield strength, making the regen rate a constant, and only allowing regen to occur when the shield has been completely depleted. Things get really complicated when weapons are considered. The reason that shields regen''d instantly beforehand was because there was no limitations on weapon size either and there still isn''t. The game is mod-friendly, but I want it playable out of the box with a good standard. So, what are your suggestions and, forgetting all you know of my problem, how do or would you handle shields?

Why not just have these load balancing details taken care of in the design period for the various ships. Have a shield_max, and a shield_regen_rate in the ship class properties then base it off that.

quote: Original post by deepdene
Why not just have these load balancing details taken care of in the design period for the various ships. Have a shield_max, and a shield_regen_rate in the ship class properties then base it off that.

Should have explained, the ships are modular.
More modules = bigger effect.

[edited by - RolandofGilead on October 4, 2003 6:51:15 PM]

you could make the shields regenerate at a constant rate, but require larger ships to need larger shields. so, a ship that is twice as big would take twice as long to regenerate its shields. if a ship has double-strength shields, and is twice as big, it would take four times as long.

of course, you might want to include an expensive module to speed this up, so a truly huge ship could be equipped with shields that do not take weeks to fully regenerate them.

You could scale the effects of a sheild based on the surface area of the sheild. For instance a ship that is twice the dimensions of another would have roughly eight times the weight, with eight times the number of sheild modules. But assuming the first ship has sheild radius of 1 then the surface area is 4pi * 1^2 = 12.56, and

total sheild strength = 1 * strengthPerModule/12.5

while the much heavier ship with sheild radius 2 would have a surface area of

4pi * 2^2 = 50.26

with a sheild strength of

8 * strengthPerModule / 50.26

assuming a basic strengthPerModule of 1

the small ship would have sheild strength of 0.08 while the one eight times its mass would have a sheild strength of 0.16, which is only twice the strength for eight times the investment.

and so the benefits of super large vessels is minimised.

Gleno, that''s neat,
unfortunately, weapons cannot really scale that way either and I don''t like putting some artificial maximum, although one of the weapon types does have a max so it might not be out of the question

so you''re trying to balance benifits of shield use for large and small ships right? By the sounds of it you can buy shields that generate larger shielding fields, thus larger ships would likely use those to cover all areas of the ship. smaller ships would use the smaller scale shields. So ship coverage isnt much of an issue id gander, however logically speaking, the energy and time required to regenrate a shield would increase based on the size of the shield''s field.

You want larger ships to have a weakness im guessing, and here is my proposal to solve said problem: force large ships to only be able to use larger shield generators, which regenrate slower than smaller shields.

shield strength can be changed by the player so faster shield regeneration is possible but the strength might not be so good depending on the size of the shield.

smaller ships are faster and more mobile,
while larger ships can pack a bigger punch
with more weapons etc.Alot of the actual
advatages of large ships is simply power,
but speed is the general weakness of large
creatures/ships.
So to weaken( or more appropriatly, enforce the weakness of)
a large ship, slow it''s regenerastion down.
weapon fire rates could also be slower.

Now you also have to limit the number of shields the ship can get so that shield regeneration doesnt overlap and allow constant or semi constant coverage.

Well the way I see it there are 2 basic concepts for shields in sci-fi.
Barrier shields - they absorb a certain amount of damage and thus in order to damage the ship weapons have to have to be more powerful then absobtion level.

Energy Shields - these have an energy pool, which is depleated every time the shields take damage thus enough damage will bring down the shields, provided you inflict more damge then the recharge rate of the shields per cycle.

From what I''ve read of what other people have said your looking for a system where little ships are better then big ships. So that rather then having big ships battling it out there will probably be lots of little ship buzzing around like flies.

But here''s my idea, more shield generators means stronger shields and faster recharge. If each generator has an output of 100 shields and a recharge of 10/second, That will allow you to have big heavyily shield ships as well as small lightly shield ships which make sense, since a big ship should be more powerful then a little one. To offset the advantge big ships have with supeior weapons and shields. You adjust the weapons side of things. Have weapon accuracy based on to hit size X, meaning that there are 10 ships sizes with 5 being the average size. Where the the chance to hit increases when the target ship''s size is greater then the THSX and decreases when the target''s size is lower then THSX. Depending on how you to choose to balance the change, the change hit chances could become signficant(ie. exponenital). By making the more powerful weapons have a higher THSX it makes them less effective vs smaller ships. So while your big ship might be able to destroy a plant with its main gun, that gun will be basically useless against a fleet of star fighters. You can also compensate with the types of weapons such as having bombs, which would be powerful anti-capital ship weapons but have very short ranges. So you could counter big ships with lots of small manuverable bombers.

here''s a little example.
Mother ship:
Size: 8
Shields: 1200/120 shields/recharge
Main Weapon: Hyperion cannon - 5000/60 damage/seconds to recharge
Main Weapon THSX: 8
Secondary weapons: none.

Avenger Fighter:
size 2:
Shields 100/10
Main Weapon: Dual MASER cannons - 30/1
Main Weapon THSX: 1
Secondary Weapons: Corbmite bomb - 600/3 THSX: 5

Now in my little example it would only take 1 avanger to destroy the mother ship, and it would do it in under 10 seconds. So while the Mother ship is far more powerful it can still be brought down by a small ships. Thats why it needs escort ships, and other defenses to protect it. But by the same tokin the mother ship would be lethal to any large ships it encountered.

In the end players would design ships with certain goals and tactics in mind. But as long as the game is designed with diffrent checks and balances in place it should allow for all play styles.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

As long as smaller ships are harder to hit than bigger ships:

I say you have a constant rate of regeneration, a percent of total shield strength. Then, have shields only repair after they HAVEN''T been hit for 2 seconds (this depends on how often you can fire, but generally... I think the slowest weapons firing and time-to-hit should be this unless there is a reason not to). Now, it would help if you could adjust shields from front to back... so your front shields could regenerate, and then you could whip them to the back (you could adjust shield location 10% at a time (50:50, 60:40, etc...)). This way you have the ability to give yourself a weakness in order to heal some of your shields. Also, big ships could be taken down because you can''t really heal while being hit... it helps if more than one person attack them.

Another option is this.... Capital ships have overly massive shields that have a standard regen rate. The ticket is this... powerful nukes must be used to knock out a capital ship. The normal weapons won''t work. Since these nukes are slow, they must be guided in past danger. Or you could also have some capital ships that have some sheild generators on the outside of the hull. You must first get inside of the shield to knock out the sheilds.