Anybody else having this problem? Often times, mostly after having my shields taken down fairly low, the shields won’t fully recharge. All of my shield generators and everything else are fully repaired, but my shields will only recharge to about 2/3 full. This causes a major problem for me on survival, because the few waves will get my shields down fairly low, which is fine, but because they don’t recharge fully, the next time around they will drop altogether. It’s really frustrating to have a bunch of shield generators and not have a full shield!
the shields are actually tracked seperately. so if 2 of your 3 shields are knocked out, you’ll only charge one of them back up to full.
Does this include if they are fully repaired, though? I could attach a screenshot, but basically, all 3 shield generators are fully repaired, but only 2/3 of my shield is charged. I could see my shield generator taking a beating, but if I remember correctly, once something is 100% damaged, the repairer no longer repairs it. If so, that would imply that my shield generator was never destroyed, so it should still be recharging (at least, logically – maybe the game isn’t doing that).
yes. if the strength of a particular shield drops to zero, it goes down. even if there are other shields remaining.
And they take damage in series or in parallel? If it’s in series, this is a major problem for shields, because it means multiple shields aren’t much more useful than a single shield. If I have 3 shield generators, once my overall shield is brought below 2/3, it will never charge back above 2/3? That’s terrible.
I believe it’s random… IIRC a single hit can affect up to 4 shield generators.
Thanks. I’ll run some tests on this and see if I can determine the exact behaviour.
shield damage that gets through shield penetration gets divided by four
there are then four random ‘hits’ on shield modules, each doing a quarter of the damage.
Note that it is entirely possible all 4 blasts hit a single module, or all 4 are split across four modules (if there are four or more)
Thus it is possible for damage to leak through a single shield:
example:
shield #1 strength 60
shield #2 strength 8
shield #3 strength 44
shield #4 strength 0 (down)
impact with sufficient penetration with damage of 120. divided by 4 is 4 x blasts of 30 damage
impact #1 hits shield #1, reducing it to 30
impact #2 hits shield #3, reducing it to 14
impact #3 hits shield #4 going straight through and doing 30 internal damage
impact #4 hits shield #3 again!, knocking it out (14) and leaking another 16 internal damage
Thats how it should work, and this is typed looking at the code 
This is all by design. This way you can have ‘lucky’ shots that hit an already wobbly shield. On average, shields will all weaken at roughly the same rate, but its quite common for a ship under heavy bombardment which then gets away, to get away with one or two knocked out shields, just due to the way the impacts fell.
Hope that helps. One day, this will all go in a more technical addendum to the manual.
I wonder if it would be more transparent to the player if a shield modules who’s shields have been knocked out was displayed differently than ones that are still operational. Having such a hint would make it quickly obvious why the ship’s shields were only recovering a fraction of their original maximum.
To take the idea a bit farther, perhaps the shield module should be destroyed when the shields have failed. That would resolve another issue too: that repair modules waste valuable repair supplies on modules that will never operate again. Of course, losing the shield generator module would cost the ship some HPs, but perhaps they shouldn’t have very many HPs begin with (to allow clever fighter pilots to knock out the shields on the big nasty cruiser by shooting up the shield generator).
Also, destroying or damaging shield modules doesn’t seem to have any affect on shields. Fighters attacking under shields, having one or more shields down an a multiple shielded ship, or disruptor shot that allow shot to hit through shields some time allow a ship to take a lot of hull damage before shields are down. I’ve seen ships where it seems like every shield module is down, but the physical shield is still up…
Thanks for the clarification, Cliffski. I think this explains my confusion – I didn’t realize there was a disconnect between whether a shield was up or down and how well repaired it is. If this is by design, I suppose I’ll just have to change my strategy.
I think shields and shield modules should be more directly linked. Destroy a shield module and the shield should go down, likewise, dropping a shield should cause the module to get destroyed so as not to confuse players about fully repaired shields not coming back up. If you wanted to keep the hull integrity you could add a red X on the module to show that it is no longer functional but still contributing to hull integrity. Either that or make shields come back up after a few minutes of the module being at full health.
I second that remark, it would be nice to have an indication on the internals that a specific shield is down. I wish they could be fixed, even if it took time for it to happen, it would make having cloak and cautious more useful.
Yeah, I don’t like the way that the shields go down either. It sucks having a fully-repaired shield generator but no shield from it. Perhaps the shield is only offline for a short time? At the very least, some indication that the shield generator is offline (but not damaged) would be helpful.
This is also why it would be fun to have a few special crew available (maybe as unlockables)… I.e. an Elite engineer chief that can bring shields back and slightly increase other repairs. Special Captains that confer tactical bonuses… maybe even an elite tactical officer that can confer weapon firing bonuses or damage bonuses for certain weapon types.
Actually it could be very cool indeed to have ‘heroic’ crew that you drag and drop onto ships or modules, at a financial (or maybe honor) cost. There is so much potential for stuff like that. I just fear the game becoming overcomplex.
Something to consider anyway
Sorry to revive a long-dead thread, but I just ran across something very odd. I was playing the Veil Nebula mission and one of my Rebel ships had its shields reduced down to about 10% before getting out of range of the Order rad cannons that were tearing it up. The shield recharged quickly (it’s a fast recharge shield), but only came back to 50% of capacity, even though it was the only generator on the entire ship. See the screencap at this link…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63949019@N00/4558453805/
I understand that once a shield is knocked out, it can’t recharge again (even if it’s repaired), but I’d think that a totally undamaged shield that has never been knocked completely down should be able to recharge to 100%. So what gives?
That definitely doesn’t sound right. Can you reproduce that? Is it only in specific circumstances?
Okay, I’m a total idiot. Turns out the ship does have two shield generators. I’d forgotten that on the design specs, I just couldn’t see one of the generators because I’m playing in windowed mode and the window pushed the third row of ship’s systems down below the taskbar to where it was out of sight. So everything’s behaving as it should.
goes to remove his head from someplace uncomfortable