What are the plans to differentiate shield types, grades and manufacturers?
TL;DRDifferentiating shields and other components is tied to the post-slowdown item rebalance, with trade-offs and physical placement mattering, and John says future physical shield emitters could add per-ship variation, though he doesn't promise it.
Yeah, so we've got the base tunings right now, and we're still settling on where the base tuning of the shields lines up and everything, and the grades of components. So once again, when we come back to combat speeds and we go through the big rebalance of all the items in the game, we're looking at what makes a difference between these items, what makes a military component. Is it stronger but it produces more heat, or it uses more energy? Or is it weaker but you get a super long lifetime with this component? Or does it give off a really big signal, but you get really good power all the time and it's really strong and it lasts forever? There are all those factors we have to consider, and then we basically put them in a big pool. And then we look at the items and go, right, that item is this, and it should pull more towards this direction, because it's that item type. And that's the future plan for items as we go through and add these. And as John said earlier, the items become much more important as they become physicalized within ships as well. So where they are in the ship will matter. So that might affect your choices. Because if you've got a ship where the item is right on the edge and it's not very protected, you might want a strong component that can take more damage or take more distortion damage, stuff like that. So we want all these factors to be a consideration when you're choosing the loadout of your ship, because it's a really important step when you get your ship. You go, right, what do I want that ship to be? Because it's got a purpose, obviously, but you can still customize that a little bit towards the goals you have for that ship. If you want it to be a pure energy ship and fight distortion, you might pick a certain item type throughout the whole ship. So we do want to give players that choice.
Yeah, and one other thing specifically regarding shields that is missing from the current live game is shield emitters. So what everyone has at the moment is the shield generators, which, as the name says, generate your shield. And they sort of have a bit of the emitter functionality built into them at the moment, where they dictate your shield faces, like a bubble shield, front-back, quadrant, whatever. But in the future, we want the shield emitters, which will be physicalized things on your ship. They are essentially the projectors for your faces. And that's going to be somewhat locked to your ship. You might have multiple emitters per face. I'm not going to say this is going to happen, but we'll use it as an example: a Hammerhead might have multiple emitters for its front face. So it has that sort of layered redundancy, in terms of: I can't just shoot one emitter to pieces and it brings down the front of this Hammerhead. I've got to take them all out to do it. So it's not going to be a simple one-to-one mapping, but that will be adding another layer of, not customization, but sort of complexity to the ship. You might have two light fighters that have a different shield emitter setup out of the box. So you could have the same generators on them and they give a different experience. So customizing these generators alters those two ships in different ways. So yeah, there's a lot of things going on with shields.