I've heard it mentioned about stacking regular mark 1-3 shields with the shields on the Spire cities, but that dosn't make sense to me, one of the HUGE benefits of spire city shields is that you can shoot from under them without any damage modifier being applied.
Yea, that is one of the biggest advantages, but typically I find I need the extra hps from the human generators until I research the highest tier of spire city shields, or the exos punch through before I can kill them.
well, that kinda sucks, why not just make them like the regular shields and make it so the spire city weapons are immune to the shield damaging thingy.
It presents a good tradeoff, though: with the highest tier of spire shields you CAN use them without human generators and get the full insane firepower of the city, etc. Or you can structure your defense in some other way so that you don't need quite as much "shield time" and get that full power earlier.
And if you position your capital ships properly they can get protection from the city fields but be outside the human fields, and still use their full firepower, etc.
It may actually be time to start introducing higher-mark forcefields in general. Perhaps we need to reduce the knowledge cost of the first three tiers only slightly, then add tiers 4-5 and make them cost enough knowledge so that getting to mark V is the same in K cost that getting to mark III previously was. People have definitely expressed a desire for more force fields in general, and this would allow some specialization with them.
I was thinking of adding a separate line of "hardened forcefields" that would have maybe 1/3rd or 1/4th as much hp but a truckload of armor so that generally they take 1/5th damage from most incoming fire. It's from a player idea some time ago I just never got around to. Combined with increasing the number of standard generators allowed for each mark and probably buffing their hp a bit that would probably go a long way.
I also think that probably now is a good time to start letting force fields travel through wormholes again -- maybe. Because the biggest exploit of cross-wormhole travel (engies repairing the force fields as they move with a fleet) is now solved in a much better way.
I thought the same thing but then realized it would let you do the ol' speed-build-a-new-generator trick on the other side of a wormhole and send it through straight into an under-siege ff-pile (almost always my piles are on top of a wormhole that leads deeper into my territory), which would get back into the asymptotically-high-durability problem, albeit in a less common case.
But yea, it'd be really nice to find some way of bringing back wormhole-traversing ff's in some way other than the Riot shields and spire capital shields.
