I encountered this when playing through the maps on normal and thought it was supposed to be a aspect of the weapon until I unlocked the rebel race and noticed that the weapon has the exact same description as the federation.
From looking at the cruisers it appears to be a Cruiser Heavy Plasma Launcher that is causing what I’m referring to. In the maps where the AI is the rebel fleets there are several Minotaur Cruisers that have multiple Heavy Plasma Launchers installed. However when they fire and hit intact shields they also hit the hull. I was able to capture a video of it in action and uploaded it to you tube which I’ll put below. In the video I first point out the cruisers which are firing the weapons. I then point out the ship being hit and show it’s health bar which shows that it’s shield is intact and stable, yet it’s taken sever armor damage. I then unpause it and it shows several plasma shots hitting and being absorbed by the shield…and then the same shot hitting the armor.
From what I understood of shields and these weapons they are not intended to work this way and I KNOW that same weapons I have on my ships have to take down the shields before inflicting any damage on the hull/armor. If there is any questions about the setup I created in the video just let me know…and I apologize about the menu in the beginning but it’s the first time I’ve captured video from my desktop
Also no idea how to embed the youtube into the message. lol
The shield on the target ship is already pretty low. I think what’s happening is the shot has more than enough power to drop the shield entirely, so it just passes straight through. Not 100% positive but I do notice this tends to happen more frequently as the shields begin to fail.
The manual could do with some clarification on shields though. I’m not sure if a shot which significantly beats a shields resistance punches right through, or whether a shot which is below the shields resistance bounces off to no effect.
If I understand this right, it might actually be working as intended. There is code that effectively makes the shields slightly ‘leaky’ depending on their configuration and what hits them.
The code basically takes the impact strength of a weapon and distributes it evenly across up to 4 shield modules. Each module gets a quarter of the impact, and if that impact is enough to take out a specific module, the remainder bleeds through into the ship itself.
So say you have 4 shield modules and their module integrity (hitpoints are:
32
88
90
100
And a big-ass weapon hits doing 200 damage (just an example)
each shield takes 50 damage, reducing them to:
0
38
40
50
This means one out of four shields got knocked out, and 18 damage leaked through internally. Effectively, the impact punched through a weak shield and hit the hull. The way the system works is that with 1 shield down, the next hit will be distributed across the remaining shields, so effectively they wrap around immediately to try and cover the gaps.
This system was designed to allow the occasional ‘lucky hit’ in a predictable way. The idea is that different shield projectors face different angles, and you can have shields weakened in particular places. It also means there is scope for me to one day get around to introducing a ‘shield stabiliser’ module that would auto-balance the integrity of the shields and thus make this less likely
Do shield resistances stack, or does it divide the penetration value of the incoming shot and then compare that to the various shields reflectivites as well?
I have noticed that plasma cannon are wonderful at bursting through shields in this way, even when a ship’s shields are still quite high, simply because of the high burst damage they do.
