Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: StargateSpankyHam on June 14, 2013, 07:48:06 am
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Is there a way to shut off the regeneration of a shield, when the shield is taking damage?
At the moment, I have several surface-shielded capships running around in my mod. In fact, shielded capships are going to be one of the large, overarching features of my mod. I have done a great deal of capship vs. capship playtesting, and fighter vs fighter playtesting. As I anticipated, I ran into a major problem when I started testing how well heavy fighters do against cruisers...
If capship shields are designed to meaningfully mitigate damage from other capships, then heavy assault fighters end up getting chewed to pieces by my modified (fury) AI and new PD turrets, usually without even making a shield quadrant go down. Alternatively, cutting the shield regeneration and HP so that heavy fighters can deal with cruisers and corvettes effectively means that a capship can fart in the general direction of another capship, and shields suddenly no longer exist.
Now, I thought I could solve this issue with an armor.tbl and some clever math, assigning each capital ship shield its own unique armor type, and each fighter weapon its own unique damage type, and additively buffing the damage of said weapons so that the 'actual' DPS done to the shield = Shield HP regeneration per second + normal weapon DPS. I hoped this would give the illusion of the shield's regeneration 'shutting off' when being fired on...
...But this only works when ships have a constant number of firepoints, and when only a single ship is attacking a capital ship. It works exactly as intended for a lone Herc II...but I have a Vasudan fighter with eleven primary firepoints. Two wings of those can shred a corvette in a single attack run.
At one point, I even considered making a Subach X2, for twin-firepoints, and a Subach X4, for four firepoint hardpoints...and so on and so forth. Even so, this would not solve the issue of the shield regeneration bonus damage (much higher than the normal damage) getting applied repeatedly as multiple ships attack.
Granted, the armor.tbl does have some freaky number-storage features which are less-than-clearly explained on the wiki...so I would be absolutely delighted if there was a way to apply 'anti-regeneration bonus damage' to the shield, only once per designated time period, up to a preset cap.
If shield regeneration shutoff cannot be made an innate characteristic of the ship via tabling, or crafty manipulation of the armor.tbl and damage values, then could it be done in FRED maybe?
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You could set shield regeneration to be zero for capital ships, and manage regeneration via scripting - http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Scripting_functions#shields
(so some logic like, when shield hp goes down, do nothing, else add on x points/time)
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Maybe just make capship weapon poor at dealing with shields? That would allow you to cut shield HP without messing with anything else.
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Maybe just make capship weapon poor at dealing with shields? That would allow you to cut shield HP without messing with anything else.
This...would actually solve a surprising number of issues.
Although I recall a while back, $Shield Factor did not properly modulate damage with "no shield pierce" flagged beam weapons - which would give them a remarkable advantage against shielded warships. Have recent releases of FSO fixed this? Even if not, the effect may not be completely undesirable. I can work something like that into the mod's storyline, along (very vague) parallels in Freespace canon.
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Eh, you could probably get away with globally-nerfing capship-to-capship weapon damage.
Stuff dies so fast with FS2 beam weapons that I often find myself adding damage-reducing armor types or just jacking up special hits to make ships not die in seconds to beam fire.
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Although I recall a while back, $Shield Factor did not properly modulate damage with "no shield pierce" flagged beam weapons - which would give them a remarkable advantage against shielded warships. Have recent releases of FSO fixed this? Even if not, the effect may not be completely undesirable. I can work something like that into the mod's storyline, along (very vague) parallels in Freespace canon.
I'm not sure, but you can always use shield armor types, which allow you much finer control over both shield piercing and damage factors than the old system, plus I'm fairly sure it's confirmed to work.