Will shields ever return?

[Spikey00]

Now that armor has replaced shields and attack bonus types, shields have disappeared from the game (beyond forcefields); however, would it be possible to have entertain this mechanic within future expansions and such?  I imagine if there were a faction who possessed the traits of traditional shielding it would be an interesting re-acquaintance to the mechanic.  Of course, if that isn't impossible to implement at this point.

[Lancefighter]

would certainly, for us old timers at least, provide an interesting situation, but i can foresee many a noob going "why wont my ships hit this  stupid alien tank? whats this green effect..."

[x4000]

Unlikely.

[Buttons840]

Maybe they'll come up with a different concept/mechanic for "shields" but from what I understand the previous shield mechanic was just a big CPU hog with all those random number generations.

[x4000]

Right.  And I wouldn't have stripped out all the code for it if I thought it might come back.

[Lancefighter]

well, code is only lines of text once youve written it.. Surely you kept a backup someplace......

[orzelek]

Actually - is that green effect needed now? It looks kind of strange - what is actual condition under which it's shown?

[keith.lamothe]

The green effect is shown when hitting a forcefield.

But yea, I don't think the word "shields" is likely to come back unless it's as a replacement for "forcefield", but that isn't super-likely either.

[Sizzle]

Brainstorming:

Have current armor degrade in effectiveness as a function of current ship's health

Add a new armor type :  shields. This type's effectiveness regenerates over time.


I'm still a fan of individual mini forcefields for some ships but understand there are some challenges with implementing that.  don't remember what they are, but .... . Just trying to think outside the box.

At the end of the day, the niche that would be nice to fill is an independent raider ship that doesn't need engineers or MRS to tag along with it so long as you're careful with it to let it self heal. (role that ships with good shielding serve in many tactical games -- less armor but it does X where x is : regenerates, reflects shots, stops low power shots entirely or regenerates faster than pew pew guns can hurt it, free damage that doesn't hurt internals, kitchen sink, something for spock to fiddle with and save the day)

[x4000]

well, code is only lines of text once youve written it.. Surely you kept a backup someplace......

Sure, we keep everything in source control.  But shields-as-the-old-concept was hundreds of lines of code in about 15 files.  If I wanted to try to hunt that back out... well, I don't.

[Lancefighter]

oh man.. I'm guessing armor is nowhere near that complicated (being just a few extra values on the damage formula).

[x4000]

Actually, you'd be surprised.  Lots of stuff talks about armors, and considers it, and assigns values to it, etc.  Actually, I was undershooting it on the shields thing.  On that, just the assignments of what had shields was easily 800 lines of code in one file.  But the rest is all talking about it, etc.  The AI has to consider shielding, it has to go in the interface, it has to be valued in the exports, and on and on with a fundamental stat like that.

[Gallant Dragon]

Will someone tell me why tanks have so much more armor than armor ships?

[keith.lamothe]

Because we never changed it to not do so

I'm intending to reduce it at least to some degree, though the problem of stuff not damaging them much is more complex (without nerfing the armor down to a point where it would no longer be distinctive) so that takes more investigation.

[x4000]

Armor ships are weak enough on attack that it could be interesting to simply switch their armor with that of tanks and see what happens.