quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
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.

That''s the goal, said very well too. I would have quoted more but it was long, but I agree with a lot of what you said. Particularly, that large weapons are less effective against groups of small ships. There are two exceptions, beams and missiles, because in my game the missiles are fired rapidly like rockets are today(they have the max size) and because beams are solid lines and this is 2D. I limited the time beams are on and I limit the field of fire as weapons get larger to compensate.

AP: I like that, that fits well into the way I wish to balance things. I mention it cause I hadn''t thought of forcing a minimum time of not being hit before regen starts. I think for mine the default time will be proportional to shield strength. It fits so well because the goal of balance in this game is to make sure that equal amounts of resources will cancel each other out. Mods will of course blow that outta the water, but the point is to provide a standard.

How about something like this:

Since the shield is energy and must be constantly maintained, all the energy going into the shields must be made and used instantaneously. i.e. if you want shields right now, you have to create the energy right now (or get the energy from batteries). The size and power of the shields is then directly related to how much energy your main generator can put out. Large aircraft carriers would require much more energy for shields, but would also have a much larger power plant.

The shields protect completely up to the shields defense for a specific unit of time (like a second, whatever works for balancing). I.e. if you have a shield with 5 units of defense and all the combined attacked are under 5, the ship takes no damage. If the combined attacks are 6, the first attacks are wasted on the shield and the 1 point gets through. This way a lot of small fighters could still bring down a much larger ship but a single small fighter would not have much of a chance unless it had no defense and one heck of an attack.

Assuming that:
- you can only create a spherical shield
- it has to cover the entire ship
- the more power you give the shield the more protection it provides.

to create on point of defense for a fighter that is 50 feet long would require 7865.75 (area of a sphere 4*PI*(Radius*Radius)) units of energy
The same one unit of defense for a aircraft carrier that is 1100 feet long would be 3,807,023 since there is more area to cover.

You would probably want to add armor to the equation then to protect against the damage that gets past the shields. Larger ships that don''t need to be maneuverable or may need energy for other operations could have oodles of armor to make up for the massive energy that would be used in shields, while smaller fighters would have very little or no armor so they could be maneuverable.

This thread is fascinating.

Do you really want a small fighter to be able to match a capital ship one-on-one? That would seem to be a gross imbalance.

I like the idea that shields deplete, rather than mitigating damage. However, it''s not difficult to see a way to hybrid these two ideas. It''s fairly traditional to have two classes of weapons: one which damages shields more than hulls, and one with the opposite balance. Take out the shields with some plasma or ion bursts, then get funky with missiles and mass drivers.

As to the projection of the shields, how about this: Shield generators project spheres, or segments of spheres, which can be customized in size and strength. So a capital ship might have six shield generators: 4 broadd, medium strength overlapping fields that cover the dorsal, ventral, starboard and port sides, and two somewhat more focused shield for fore and aft. Add a supplemental shield for the bridge, and you''ve got seven different generators. However, due to the style of shield generators, these are more potent if mounted outside the hull of the ship, rendering them vulnerable to attacks by smaller ships. You can put them inside, removing or at least reducing this problem, but their power is reduced. For smaller ships, one or two internal shield generators could produce full spheres of protection capable of withstanding light munitions fire, and bigger guns will just have to be evaded.

This gives you a dynamic of battle where capital ships have to depend on quick, accurate turret fire and shifting shield focus to fight off lighter craft, and then just go toe-to-toe with other cruisers when the situation calls for it. They might even cross the "T", giving it an old-school naval feel. Light ships would have to keep moving and use hit-and-run tactics on the big guys, while dogfighting with their peers.

Of course, different custom balances could give you specialized ships, like a little ship with one huge shield-busting cannon, or a frigate with heavy shields and dozens of little anti-fighter guns, without any real defense against capital ships. The possibilities are endless.

As to recharge, I think a few different types should be available. Maybe one sort can only recharge if the shield itself is shut down temporarily, but recharges quickly to a high degree. Another could recharge steadily throughout the battle, with its rate dependent on the output of the ship''s powerplant. One shield could have two battery generators, so you could "reload" it mid-fight andput the other generator on standby, but this would run the risk of damaging the emitter or overtaxing the power supply with "background tasks".

Shields should do little or no damage to enemy craft. If they can hurt other ships, it should be on a surface area-of-contact basis, so that small ships can zip through a cruiser''s energy defenses and poke at the generators, but a close scrape between heavy craft will frazzle them both.

But it''s tough to get a shield that stops missiles and physical bullets without zapping a small spacecraft. Maybe a special "mole shield" could be used to neutralize the effect? It gets dicey, and an overly complex system can turn players off. Maybe the shields will cover the hull with a very tight, form-fitting membrane, and it''ll be unnecessary to fly through them to hit the generators, which would be small structures on the outside of the actual field they produce. Fighters would be inclined to use smaller, weaker, but harder to hit shield generators, while destroyers could just surround theirs with turrets, anti-missile flak, and an energy-resistent layer of hull.

Your weapon system should be a powerful influence on these decisions. Classes of weapons with different properties should be relevant, as should their power level. If your energy weapons and energy shields draw from the same power source, then there''s a new balance to be considered. Your shield might not bounce back as quickly if your lasers are pushing your engine''s output into an enemy ship''s tailpipe.

Well, I''ve made my contribution. Somebody should produce a definitive work on this subject. It''s really neat.

how about if a small fighter jet was to fly through a capital ship''s sheild, the smaller ship would loose all his sheild but would be in a position where any attack would ignore the capital ship''s sheild, but similaly the capital ship with defensive lasers would be able to quickly take out the small craft.

Iron Chef Carnage, I hope you didn''t get the idea from my post that a single fighter would be able to stand toe-to-toe with a capital. When I meant about a fighter with one heck of an attack, I was thinking about something with a nuke that would have to get in very close to use and would really need a LOT of cover fire.

Anyway some other shield balancing ideas:

Shields interfere with sensors. A shield that completely encompasses the ship on full power may miss the small squdrden of fighters escorting the bommer with a nuke or a small friggot(sp?) or may see another capital ship that is not there. A ship with only front shields might miss a fighter here or get incorrect positions of ships directly in front of it.

Shields of other ships are easier to pick up on sensors. They emit some kind of harmonic/wave/whatever that allows them to be targeted easier and don''t even think of a sneak attack of any kind with shields. Maybe the wave/harmonic/whatever actually acts as a magnet to mass and/or lasers and will "pull in" near hits to be hits. The bigger/strong the shield, the greater the attraction.

If you have hyper-space or some other FTL travel shields could interfere with using the FTL drives. If you don''t skip this paragraph.
- Any large shield within a radius of X causing the hyper-space drive to not work. This would reduce hit-and-runs, anyone who does a hit-and-run will arrive at the "hit" part with no shields and will need to charge up.
- Any shield more powerful than X will prevent the hyper-space drives from working. Small fighters can enter hyper-space with full shields, slightly larger ships could enter with partial shields, etc.
- Shields could react badly when another ship in hyper-space passes through the same "space". If one ship his his shields on it do partial damage (like like doing a belly flop) but if both ships have their shields on, it is treaded as ramming. To prevent abuse you may have to... I can''t think how to word it so here is an example. A fighter is in hyperspace going around the speed of light and capital ship in normal space moving around 4 units of speed. The fighter is treated as though it has hit a capital ship head on going at near the speed of light. The capital ship is treated as though it is hit head on by a fighter going 4 units of speed. So the ship in hyperspace is annihilated while the ship in normal space takes little damage. If the revers were true (capital ship in hyperspace and the fighter in normal space), the fighter will still probably be annihilated but the capital ship would also be annihilated or take heavy damage.

Robotech style shields: movable "spot" shields (about the size of a football field in the books) that protected the larger ship. Someone with on the bridge with a track ball type device would move the spots to block incoming missiles , etc so only some attacks were blocked.

Later in the books they fixed the full ship shields which worked in reverse. They didn''t deplete or "fade" away, the shield absorbed the energy of all the attacks. When it reached critical, the shield exploded outwards with the combined energy of all the attacks effectively annihilateing all surrounding ships, friend or foe and the shield generators were destroyed.

Dune style shields: blocks all kinetic attacks over a certain speed. So it would block bullets, missils, floating space debris, etc but would not block a smaller ship matching speed to slip under it''s shields. I personally see these shields as just distributing the force of any impact over the entire area of the ship, thus really transferring all damage equally to the hull. Only really solid/big hits would cause any real damage. But this is one of those mitigating shields that no-one in this thread really seems to like.

In Dune a side effect of a laser hitting a shield was that both would over load and explode, you would probably want to leave this part out. To compensate you could have the ships hull made of some kind of superconductor, so lasers are used in an effort to overheat or "cook" the crew. The smaller fighters would require less to "cook" but since the are fast moving it would be harder to hit.

That''s a lot to read. Those are some good ideas. I had not originally intended to different weapons to have varying effects on shields. That could work very well because currently, energy weapons seem to be favored over other types. Although I like beam weapons more than the others. If a game is decision-making, game designing is deciding what decisions to make. (Feel free to use that one)

I do have spot shields, but I don''t know if moving them would help all that much, except to protect something different but not to intercept particular shots as the game is based on the same principle as computer grahics, we''re trying to do 3D in 2D, thus shots can hit randomly or on specific points if the targeting data is good enough, but there isn''t a way to tell where any one shot will hit. Another issue with any quick-changing of shields, anyone play against the XPilot ai with ''shields available'' as an option? They would turn up their shields an instant before shots would hit, much faster than any human. (You can play as any ship you like.)

I like the shields messing with sensors, cloaks, decoys, false images, and sensor suites can play a big part...(and ftl).

Currently the shields hug the hull.

The absorbing thing is cool.

Currently shield generators hug the hull because one could bury them under too much armor, yet if the effect is lessened when they''re internal it could work, thanks, I hadn''t thought of that.