My balancing suggestion is make it run use less power when shields are fully charged. The main problem being that in multi player you're not on all the time and most of the time you will have to turn off your shields to keep your base running or mothership from running out of fuel. if your offline and your base gets attacked you will lose because he can online his shields while your base or mothership is only got armor.

0.5-2 MW of power use when fully charged and make the power use while it is charging 20-35 MWs

I would also recommend that it has a bare minimum power state to retain charge so power spikes are less likely to reset your shield points to 0.

So I've played with these shields pretty extensively, against just about every weapon out there. Generally speaking, they're not useless, but they're not very good, either.

Strenght-wise they're not terrible. A moderate buff would be nice, but they're not atrocious. The biggest problem is variability of performance, especially extreme weakness against high yield missile-based weapons. A stationary shielded ship can be wasted even with relatively high shields with most weapons. I tested with a ship that has 6,200,000 shield strength, and weapons such as MWI's Telion cannon brought the shields down in about 10 seconds (I was using 32 of them - 4x8 pack). Most popular weapons (the Oki pack, the Large Ship Railgun, etc) behaved similarly. That said, a moving ship dodges shots and reduces damage, so, fine. If these things didn't suck so badly against explosive weapons they'd be a lot better, as even stock rocket batteries that do nothing to heavy armor except cosmetic damge do a lot to these. That probably can't be helped, as those weapons probably do a lot of splash damage that's inconsequential to armor penetration, but numerically drains shields. Fine, it can be lived with since I doubt you can do different resistances to the two weapon types.


What's unacceptable are the recharge times. A ship that enters combat gets no use from its shields if it hasn't spent like 10-15 minutes charging them first, even with an even split of capacitors and flux coils. The charge rate when the shields are near fully charged is fine, but I think the low-shield charge rate is too low. I think a small buff to the overall rate and a less agressive charge rate curve with such a drastic difference at the low end would make a huge difference here.

Originally posted by catamount1412:

So I've played with these shields pretty extensively, against just about every weapon out there. Generally speaking, they're not useless, but they're not very good, either.

Strenght-wise they're not terrible. A moderate buff would be nice, but they're not atrocious. The biggest problem is variability of performance, especially extreme weakness against high yield missile-based weapons. A stationary shielded ship can be wasted even with relatively high shields with most weapons. I tested with a ship that has 6,200,000 shield strength, and weapons such as MWI's Telion cannon brought the shields down in about 10 seconds (I was using 32 of them - 4x8 pack). Most popular weapons (the Oki pack, the Large Ship Railgun, etc) behaved similarly. That said, a moving ship dodges shots and reduces damage, so, fine. If these things didn't suck so badly against explosive weapons they'd be a lot better, as even stock rocket batteries that do nothing to heavy armor except cosmetic damge do a lot to these. That probably can't be helped, as those weapons probably do a lot of splash damage that's inconsequential to armor penetration, but numerically drains shields. Fine, it can be lived with since I doubt you can do different resistances to the two weapon types.


What's unacceptable are the recharge times. A ship that enters combat gets no use from its shields if it hasn't spent like 10-15 minutes charging them first, even with an even split of capacitors and flux coils. The charge rate when the shields are near fully charged is fine, but I think the low-shield charge rate is too low. I think a small buff to the overall rate and a less agressive charge rate curve with such a drastic difference at the low end would make a huge difference here.

How about shunting more power into the block to make the shields recharge faster? 10% power recharges a few hundred points a second. While 100% power recharges 2-5k shield points. only draw back of that being many megawatts of power to quickly charge shields? or something? or a device that uses ammo to boost shield strength? realy big...heavy ammo with a "balanced" relode time ?