I modded the fed frigate to be able to hold 21 turrets and 28 modules. And stuck 21 lasers on it with the correct support stuff.
Now why when I have over 100, yes over 100, shooting 21 lasers each, why in the heck do those cruisers appear to be taking no damage?
I mean I understand how the engine works, but it’s kinda ridiculous at a certain point, when you have that many guns shooting at it.
Yeah, it is a flaw in the underlying design, having resistances completely discard each individual damage inflicted if it’s below threshold. One beesting doesn’t really hurt a guy (barring allergies), a thousand can kill him.
Common sense says that some small percent of the damage should still be inflicted, even if the total is below threshold. And I’m not talking about the 2% chance of a critical, either.
yeah, i agree. Well, it makes sense, but it just doesn’t look good. I mean, 2,100 (yes, 2,100) beam lasers shooting at a cruiser, and it’s crew are hardly even noticing? right…
I think it would be nice for it to be changed to a cumulative damage/penetration counter that is compared to the shield resistance, but I can see how that would be a difficult thing to do from a coding perspective. Perhaps an easier way to balance the shields would be to have the resistance directly affected by the current state of the shields. If the shield is at 75% power then the resistance should be 75% of what it is at full power. This way you lasers would still bounce off at the beginning, but once the shields have been “stressed” enough they would be vulnerable to laser fire. This should be a little easier to implement than a cumulative effect since it should just entail a check of the current shield level then multiply the resistance by that percentage value then compare that to the impacting weapon.
I actually sort of prefer this idea over the cumulative one because it forces people to keep a somewhat varied load out instead of just going all beam lasers and overwhelming all the enemy ships that way. They would have to have a few plasma launchers, missile launchers, or non-beam lasers in order to drop the shield enough, and then once it reaches the critical point where the resistance is below the beam lasers shield penetration they would just rip the shields and ship apart.
I rather like the fact that a properly designed cruiser can entirely shrug off most small weapons. It makes swarm tactics less effective. Anything that both can be countered effectively and counters something effectively is a positive thing, in my opinion.
I actually think that it’s good this way. The beams/lasers/whatever just do absolutely zero damage. It’s like throwing rotten peas at a brick wall: no matter how much you throw them, or how fast they are not going to damage it.
I LOVE the damage reflection exactly the way it is.
It stops the most efficient frigate weapons from killing a cruiser with shields up.
Without it you would never use a cruiser.
If you use less efficient frigate weapons with higher penetration values you can hurt cruisers.
Sammual
maybe laser weapons could be given a 0,01% chance to critical hit which would be applied to armor instead?
Because of the low fire rate of laser weapons and the fact that most shots miss, that 0,01% would be pretty rare to get. Even if this happened, a laser weapon won’t do that much damage: the ships shpould be able to dish out considerable amounts of damage before the shields go down. And if the ship has armor repairing modules, that 0,01% is compleatley useless.
Woden brings up a good point concerning alternative ways to factor in changes to shield resistance. I have long been pondering a beam weapon that, while not uber-mighty in terms of raw damage output, has as its main asset the unique ability to degrade the target’s shield resistance. Even more amusing in light of this thread’s original post, I conceived of it specifically as a weapon for frigates.
My concept was to outfit fast squadrons of 4-6 frigates with such a weapon and send them into the battlezone laterally, taking on enemy flankers before chewing their way into the opposition fleet’s vitals. I can well imagine aboard enemy command bridges their shouts of dismay and then acute alarm as ship after ship quickly goes from shrugging off these “nuisance” attacks to being totally unshielded. Especially with my war cruisers and missile boats right behind the frigates now targeting the unshielded foes…
I would love to see such an unusual weapon make it into the game. [-sigh-]
I would agree with this. If beam weapons could do reliable damage to shields, players could just spam their way to victory with lots and lots of beams with perhaps minimal support from long range shield destroyers. The current shield and armor design pushes people to design their ships more carefully to increase their chance of success. It might seem a little “unrealistic”, but it works well from a gameplay perspective imho.
Something I thought would be good is basically this:
Shields: 85%
Armour: 95%
Hull: 99%
Basically, what I thought would be cool, is to have a certain percentage of damage get through based on the difference between the maximum and the current amount of shields/armor.
Let me explain the above, you shoot an enemy’s shield down to 95%, the next shot will do 5% of normal damage to the armor, then the armor falls to 99%, next shot lowers the shields to 89%, and the armor falls to 97%, then the hull takes a nominal amount of damage, possibly at 99%. Do you understand what I am trying to get at? The lower the percentage of the shields, the more damage that gets through the next layer of defence.
I’m not sure I agree with you there alimarin. Being able to do damage through the shields before they are down with any weapon would pretty much make having shields at all pointless. By the time they went down your ship’s armor or hp would already be so low it wouldn’t survive more than a couple more hits.
Yeah, I still think that shields should be completely impenetrable until, of course, they go down.
shields won’t be completely impenetrable until they go down in my sense. so, in fact, this is actually a very good idea, as shields can’t absorb 100% of the damage until the shield just dies.
Well in terms of “realism”, I suppose this may be an improvement. But in actual gameplay, doesn’t this mean this mean you can simply hammer your opponent’s shields down to 40 or 50% and then kill him with massed beam weaponry?
The math looks interesting, but I’m not convinced that there is an argument for how this improves gameplay, and I really think that balanced gameplay should trump notions of what is and isn’t realistic when we are talking about loud explodey space battles brimming with laser-death.
Yeah, my first impression, seeing the OP’s picture, is that it was an issue that should be fixed at some point… but after some thought- that scene was created with a ridiculous multi-gunned creation that doesnt exist in the game. You’d be hard-pressed to ever actually see a shot like that in the standard game (aside from maybe in frigate swarm fleets where EVERY frigate is firing on one encircled cruiser). If those were cruiser beam lasers, she shield would fold in a second, and everything would ‘look’ right.
I would personally like to see the dynamic changed a little (suggestion in a nutshell: make resistance values percentages instead of hard pen-and-paper-esque dice roll numbers), but I also don’t have an issue with it as it stands.
On Realism:
Look up the famous very first battle between ironclads, the Monitor and the Virginia/Merrimack. They shot at each other for hours doing basically no damage until they got fed up and went home. They neither had weapons capable of penetrating the other’s armour.
There’s no good reason beam weapons have to damage/penetrate shields.
Well, there is a big difference between 1850 AD and 3350 AD
oh come on, what? the only difference is the looks of things, beam lasers, spaceships, but they all have one thing in common: they get fed up and go home. xD