What have you got to tell us about shields?

Some of the behavior is being updated. We're looking at having it scale. For instance, with ballistic penetration, you would have a certain amount of ballistic penetration when the shield is at 100% health versus when it's at zero, and it will scale between the two. So if you've brought the shields down a fair way, you'll be significantly more effective with your ballistics. And the curve on that means you probably want to have mixed loadouts. We're changing it so that the regen delay only happens when you hit zero. So if you hit zero, you get a big reprieve: now is your chance to really push, because they have some number of seconds before they even begin to recharge. And the recharge itself is switching to be basically on a curve as well. So you're recharging at all times. And when you take damage, it resets your regen rate, which then recovers over time. It doesn't actually reset it to zero. It chips away at it towards zero. So what this means is that, conceivably, the smallest weapon in the game could eventually overtake the strongest shield in the game. It will take forever, but it also means that those small weapons still have a place in a massive cap ship game. Because if we're dealing with something with hundreds of thousands of shield points, and you're doing 20 damage per shot, that still matters even though the regen rate is clearly going to overtake that, because you're interrupting the regen rate. And so if you have large ships doing the real meat of the damage and there aren't support ships, a lot of that health just comes back. Because at those larger scales, your rate of fire is reduced. You just have fewer incoming hits. So there is a reason to have the jabs from your small support ships.

And probably the biggest change that's going to occur is that each of the ships is going to have its own shield emitter. The shield emitter will derive the stats for the shield that it generates from the shield generators. So faces are going to be locked to each ship. If it's a four-face shield ship, it'll always have four faces. However, things like the overall health, the rate at which health recovers, shield hardening (where you choose the priority of a particular face, which means a bigger percentage of the overall shield health gets shunted to that face), how fast it recovers, the absorption factor and the waste ratio, those stats are going to be derived from the shield generators that you can install and then upgrade on the ship. So upgrading a shield is done by acquiring better shield generators. So if I have three shield generators and I get one that is much better at generating shield resource to repair the shields faster, I've upgraded the way the shield works. If I get one that is much better at the face hardening aspect of shields, getting one improves that aspect; getting all three and upgrading improves it dramatically.

The thing about shield hardening is that it's specifically a feature for multi-crew. With shield hardening, we can balance our shields so that if you don't ever touch shield management, you get basically the performance that it says on the tin. If you are constantly moving your shield health towards incoming fire, then you're increasing the amount of health, improving the percentage of health in that system, and that improves the hardening against incoming damage. And the way the numbers work out in some of our early tests, you could potentially be multiplying your total capacity for damage by a factor of as much as 5 to 10. So it's really powerful to have somebody, not in a supporting ship, but actually on your ship managing your shields.

Right. That's exciting, because it makes shield management a real thing. So doing things like shunting power, figuring out which face is going to be the priority, turning off shield generators if you need to conserve power, or regenerating the shield health at a faster rate at the cost of turning shields off for a limited amount of time. These are real things that we can achieve.

A lot of it is also coming out pretty systemically, which I'm pretty happy with. He mentions that if you turn off a shield face, it regens faster. And the reason it regens faster is that it's still drawing the same amount of shield power, or shield resource, but it's no longer using it for the maintenance cost of actually having it up. Which means that you can drop your shields to bring your shields up faster, accepting whatever window of damage you have. Or if you think you can get behind a rock real quick, drop your shields, they charge up faster, and now you have the benefit of all that hardening back. It's a pretty nice interlocking system.

Shields are hard. This also lets us do more realistic damage simulations. So if you damage one of the many shield generators you have on the ship, it has real consequences for the overall performance of the shield. Destroying one completely has a very dramatic consequence, but these are things that you can see and are going to be tangible.