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Stackable shield modules

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Skasi
Intro:
* A few players were disappointed with the Auto Repair nerf.
* I don't want old Auto Repair to come back, so I was thinking about alternatives.
* In an issue report PLrankAdminSprung suggested turning Area Shield into a conversion.
* An idea was born!


Idea:
People want their commanders to recover in-combat? Give them shields!! It's so simple.



☑ In-combat regeneration
☑ Adds variety
☑ Has weaknesses
☑ Omgz moar customizationnnss!!111

Like mentioned in the intro, Area Shield can be turned into a conversion module. Another option would be stackable Area Shield modules. This would let players pick the radius they want by repeatedly boosting shield range and may or may not change other stats. There can be other modules that mess with shields too, but for now let's not overdo it.

Since shields work very different than regular in-combat autorepair I think this can be a very nice "replacement" for the old autorepair module. The current, new Autorepair will still fill gaps that shields can not (like work while cloaking, etc.) so it wont need to be reverted to still be a viable option.


Possible problems:
This might not be perfect. We don't know yet. There's a couple thoughts I had. Stackable shields may very well completely ruin Zero-K's balance.

* Powerful Area Shields could bring back extreme cases of Commander-Turretcreeping
This problem is solvable by adding drawbacks to Area Shield to make them look like "+100% shield range, -25% Shield Strengh & Regeneration" or similar (numbers random examples)

* Funnelweb with high speed, buildpower, dgun and other special commander stuff
I couldn't think of a way to deal with this, but it may not become an issue seeing as players would be forced to reserve most of their commanders' available module slots for shields.

* Comm+Felonpush OP
I'm not exactly sure about this. It may not become a problem since unlike Thug/Convict shields, commander shields require energy to regenerate. For reference I'd compare this to Felon+Funnelweb pushes. Does anyone have experience with those? What do they look like?
+3 / -0

10 years ago
Personally I'd do stackable +regen, and make radius/health be a one-time conversion from personal to area.

Also, regarding Autorepair Module: IMO a good compromise might be to bring back its old stats, but restrict it to levels 3+. This way it won't affect 1v1 balance, but it will still be possible for teams players to max them out by level 5.
+0 / -0

10 years ago
at least, walking ballz dont cloak and are nice targets.
+0 / -0
Personal shields don't use energy Skasi at least last i checked.

Stackable personal shields is OK. Let the max shield strength experience a linear increase with each shield module on your commander!

Area shield should remain as-is: one module, one Aspis grade shield, and no shared charge or sharing of charge with the commander's personal shield.

Sharing personal shield charge to another Aspis or shield-comm which is then shared back to your area shield is A-OK.
+0 / -0
10 years ago
Stackable personal shields? blah #banisherface
+0 / -0
10 years ago
That's my point exactly. Stack-able personal shields are a replacement for auto-repair or armor, depending on how you look at it, but it's weakness is it's vulnerability to AoE, and being big enough to be hit by inaccurate weapons.

Oh, stack-able shields should also stack Regen, with diminishing returns.
+0 / -0
I see a great opportunity for choice:
Beyond the first personal shield module you could add amplifiers that each only amplify regen or max strength,even if each would give,say +120% of base value that would still be only 60% of the overall effectiveness of the original module.
*Regen boosters would probably need to disable link or add an E cost to prevent Felon-battery syndrome.
Or - if the code permits - the shields could perhaps stack literally like the layers of an onion and be more-or-less independent of each other.
+0 / -0
10 years ago
Felon battery is not much of an issue. There is a hard-limit to the charge rate transfer between individual units which is much lower the felon's DPS, gauranteeing the Felon's shields will always drop down to minimal levels, thus reducing the Felon's attack speed as it waits for more shield charge.

Stacking shields like an onion also means each shield has its own regen and shield strength, producing a nearly impenetrable shield-onion. Attacks that are stronger than a shield's strength pass right through, so a shield can still regen up until the SHield HP equals the projectile's damage. Outer shields would drop one at a time, then the outermost shields would regen enough to start catching shots, allowing the inner shields to regen up and up.
+0 / -0

10 years ago
Think bigger.

Have a shield module, which stacks on more shield HP, and a shield RANGE module, which stacks on more range (and maybe a little extra HP, to make it worth the slot). Then have a shield regen rate module too, and maybe a shield power drain effeciency module (probably max 1 with maybe some side stats).

Any one of these modules would give you a basic, short ranged shield focused more towards it's main stat, further ones would stack up.

The max modules can be 8, or 5, or 2, or whatever. The decision here is how large a maximum number you want, and what proportion of that you think is 'worth' a module slot. Say you might want only slightly more than a regular shield generator in range at max, but is 100 shield range worth a module? Maybe 200 is, so if your max range is 600, that means you want 3 range modules max. That's always how you should design module counts, the 8 module thing was always arbitrary.

Bonus points: Have the shield HP module sublty increase the opacity with each stack so you can see the effect.

Conversion modules have always been a stupid idea. You should be able to work incrementally towards them using tradeoffs.

The same thing should be done with everything: Slow or EMP damage, accuracy and spread, weapon velocity, Rate of fire, beamtime on lasers so you can slowly convert your laser into a HLT then a Anni just by adding stats, burst rate so you can have a triple d-gun with 3x the reload time or an EMG that fires in rapid bursts or higher alpha on your riot cannon.

Hell, you want more regen options? There is a toggle in the game that allows a unit to repair itself with it's nanolathe. Support+nano or res coms would naturally pick this over autorepair if they want survival: With the tradeoff that they can't fire, move or build while repairing themselves.

Why not different regen modules too? Idle modules AND combat repair: Or modules that increase or decrease the idle time for a tradeoff. Vampiric ammo, for offensive based comms.

And hey, more defensive options than HP. Armour states. One kind of armour turns on when stationary (Crabe armour), another kind of armour turns on when not firing (Halberd Armour). These can stack too, say at 25% increased effective HP each module (Google might hate violating the purity of armour consistency for that though). Hell why not let players stack both if they have nothing else on their comm, so they'd be an invulnerable ball with 500% effective HP if they sit still and don't fire.

Make drones stacking modules, one drone per module, and add more kinds: Repair drones, AA drones, EMP drones, kamikaze drones.

I have a lot of these stuff already half implimented in local copies of Zero-K, but commanders are fairly owled so it's not so much worth the effort. Maybe one day I'll embark on this, but there is a paranoia that this will make comms more powerful, which I don't want to do, they're at an OK power point. Either way it would throw balance slightly into flux and so there would be lots of arguing and negotiating to even attempt something like this, since it's currently in a stable and safe state and non-balance-critical (on purpose).

Editing the modules modside is actually really very easy. Any one of you can do it if you want to see this sort of stuff happen and put in the man hours.
+1 / -0


10 years ago
quote:
One kind of armour turns on when stationary (Crabe armour), another kind of armour turns on when not firing (Halberd Armour).

These will require animations, and ideally models to support those.
Oh, btw we need to get rid of armcom.
+1 / -0
10 years ago
quote:
Stacking shields like an onion also means each shield has its own regen and shield strength, producing a nearly impenetrable shield-onion. Attacks that are stronger than a shield's strength pass right through, so a shield can still regen up until the SHield HP equals the projectile's damage. Outer shields would drop one at a time, then the outermost shields would regen enough to start catching shots, allowing the inner shields to regen up and up.


If I recall correctly projectiles with damage higher than the HP of a shield will ignore it so a shield-onion offers less protection than just stacking the same amount of stats in a single shield, factoring in standard shield issues like preventing stealth movement and doing nothing against aoe, meele damage and kamikaze units a fully stacked onion-comm would still be much easier to counter compared to the old regen/armor+stealth terminator-comm while at the same time being able to absorb more attrition damage (in theory)
+0 / -0


10 years ago
Tradeoff tuning modules sound interesting for shields, but visually portraying them without onions might be difficult.
+0 / -0
Skasi
OH! On the topic of visualizing: TOOLTIPS NEED TO DISPLAY A BAR FOR SHIELDS! :)
+2 / -0
10 years ago
Soon
+4 / -0
10 years ago


quote:
\quote:
One kind of armour turns on when stationary (Crabe armour), another kind of armour turns on when not firing (Halberd Armour).


quote:

These will require animations, and ideally models to support those.
Oh, btw we need to get rid of armcom.


Animations can be somewhat avoided.
Take a leaf from Bungie's book and let a golden hexagon bubble shield appear for staying-still-armor protection and a purple hexagon shield for not-firing-armor protection. Purely for visual effect.
+1 / -0

10 years ago
Oh god that is the single possible worst way to impliment this Failer. >_<
+1 / -0
10 years ago
There may be a way to represent multiple shields in a single bar:



Something like in that picture, with each segment being the individual bar of a shield.
+0 / -0