TLDR: shield regeneration needs to be stronger; ships need to last longer after their shields go down. This is going to be long, so bear with me (or don't).
Many of you are familiar with the discussion around shield cell batteries and why people don't like them. Those threads have had a lot of great discussion, but I'd like to ignore SCBs for the moment and talk about another way we can improve the game.
So with that in mind, let's take a step back. Why do we have shields at all, instead of just more hull points?
The answer is that shields come back. Think about Halo: if you can get under cover for a few seconds, you're almost as good as new again. The regen delay is long enough that you're in trouble if your shields go down, but short enough that you've got an incentive to stick around to see if you can get your shields back and turn the fight around. It leads to tense encounters where you have to finish your opponent quickly or keep up the pressure to keep his shields down. (If you feel that Halo does not play this way, please do not bring it up in the comments. It's just an illustration).
Diagnosis
In Elite, we've got two problems:
In short, the slow shield regen and weak power plants lead to the current shield meta.
First, shields need to regenerate more quickly.
Second, ships need to last longer when their shields are down.
Together, these changes would make it viable for ships to stick around after their shields have gone down. They would encourage pilots to take risks with their hull, leading to more decisive victories (i.e., ship destructions) but also rewarding pilots who know when they can afford to stick around.
Finally, some more controversial changes to keep small ships relevant.
So that's my vision of combat: shields will go down more, shields will come back up more. We'll see more large ships sticking around and eventually limping away because their hulls can take the damage. We'll see more fighter pilots dying because they actually have a way to beat larger ships, but have to walk a fine line to do it.
If you've made it this far, I appreciate your patience. What do you think? Am I totally off base, or would this help?
Full disclosure: this is a cross post from reddit. The original thread is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/39laxh/differential_diagnosis_shield_regeneration/
Many of you are familiar with the discussion around shield cell batteries and why people don't like them. Those threads have had a lot of great discussion, but I'd like to ignore SCBs for the moment and talk about another way we can improve the game.
So with that in mind, let's take a step back. Why do we have shields at all, instead of just more hull points?
The answer is that shields come back. Think about Halo: if you can get under cover for a few seconds, you're almost as good as new again. The regen delay is long enough that you're in trouble if your shields go down, but short enough that you've got an incentive to stick around to see if you can get your shields back and turn the fight around. It leads to tense encounters where you have to finish your opponent quickly or keep up the pressure to keep his shields down. (If you feel that Halo does not play this way, please do not bring it up in the comments. It's just an illustration).
Diagnosis
In Elite, we've got two problems:
- Shields functionally do not come back in combat for any ship larger than a Cobra. Every ship has the same 1 MJ/s recharge rate (1.6 MJ/s if your shields are down). If your shields go down, they're not coming back.
- Power plant sniping means that even large ships go down quickly after their shields drop.
In short, the slow shield regen and weak power plants lead to the current shield meta.
- Because there is hardly any natural shield regen, there's no substitute for SCBs as a way to recover lost shields.
- Because unshielded ships die quickly and shields take a long time to come back, keeping your shields up is paramount. This also means that...
- There is no incentive to stick around once your shields go down. Combat usually ends in a relatively safe retreat.
- Because combat is largely decided by who loses their shields first, non-thermic weapons are highly devalued. This means that half of Elite's weapons (and the more varied half, at that) see little use compared to lasers.
First, shields need to regenerate more quickly.
- Active shields should start recharging after a delay from the last time they were damaged. Downed shields should begin recharging after a fixed delay, and their regen should not be interruptible until they come back online. Note: this is not a change from current mechanics.
- Shield regeneration should ramp up over time, and the maximum recharge rate should depend on the class and rating of your generator. It would still draw from the SYS capacitor, so your power distributor would also be a limiting factor.
- Shield boosters should reduce the recharge rate of your shields. Like they claim to. There should be a tradeoff between stronger shields and faster regeneration.
Second, ships need to last longer when their shields are down.
- Power plant destruction should not be an instant kill. The lucky strike on the big ship's power plant is a staple in sci fi, but nobody likes it as a gameplay mechanic. A power plant at 0% should require a reboot and repair, like any other critical module. Alternately, a power plant at 0% should trigger a countdown to ship destruction, during which time the module could be repaired/rebooted.
- Internal modules should not be vulnerable from all sides of a ship. You should feel like you won the positioning game in a big way if you can actually get a hit in on an Anaconda's power plant.
- Reinforced bulkheads should protect internal subsystems. Because of course they should.
- Hull reinforcement packages should come in varieties that increase hull strength (like they do now) and varieties that increase subsystem health. With power plant sniping gone, hull reinforcement packages will be useful. The variety would be nice, too.
Together, these changes would make it viable for ships to stick around after their shields have gone down. They would encourage pilots to take risks with their hull, leading to more decisive victories (i.e., ship destructions) but also rewarding pilots who know when they can afford to stick around.
Finally, some more controversial changes to keep small ships relevant.
- Larger ships should have a longer delay before their shields begin regenerating after taking damage while their shields are still up. This would allow smaller ships to win the game of shield attrition through careful piloting while still giving larger ships plenty of opportunity to call it quits.
- More massive ships should have more hull points proportional to their mass. This would balance out the previous change by making it more likely that large ships will be disabled before they are destroyed outright, and give them a last chance to use reboot/repair or AFMUs and flee. Also: right now it's easier to destroy a trader than to disable it, which seems silly for ships with very large hull masses. Basically, I want large ships to be a little bit more like capital ships, which limp away in need of extensive repairs more often than they die.
So that's my vision of combat: shields will go down more, shields will come back up more. We'll see more large ships sticking around and eventually limping away because their hulls can take the damage. We'll see more fighter pilots dying because they actually have a way to beat larger ships, but have to walk a fine line to do it.
If you've made it this far, I appreciate your patience. What do you think? Am I totally off base, or would this help?
Full disclosure: this is a cross post from reddit. The original thread is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/39laxh/differential_diagnosis_shield_regeneration/
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