[0.8.1] Megaton Cannon Explosion Radius Ignores Shields

[Makzevu]

So far in my TerraTech world, I've come across megaton cannons countless times. The very first time I encountered them, I was killed (I didn't have any or know what they were). The thing that made me question what did this to my tech wasn't the fact that I died, but the fact that I had shields and countless of full batteries. In fact my shields were still on when most of my tech was tearing apart.

Currently I have lots of megaton cannons on my tech, and when I get into a megaton cannon fight, the entire front half of my massive tech takes damage. Moments later, my cab explodes. Keep in mind, this bigger tech has many more shields and many more full batteries. The bullet notices the shield and hits it, but the explosion radius over-dominates the radius of the shield itself causing major damage to the shield generator, healing orbs, and batteries. Instead of just losing lots of battery energy since the bullet hit the shield, this effect is added the list just stated.

I like the explosion radius and damage of the megaton cannon, but the shields should notice the explosion radius as well and protect any tech from its devastating blow (while losing major amounts of energy). I don't know if this is intentional, but once megaton cannons are introduced (the easy way or the hard way), normal gameplay will change from seeing who's batteries will die faster, to the player killing enemies at a distance, or risking instant death.

[ZeroGravitas]

This is the game working as intended (rather than a bug, per say). All explosive weapons splash through shields, from the 3-Pound canons and mini-mortars on upwards to the Hawkeye Cruise missiles (even more OP than Megatons).

I'm not sure if damage and explosion radii will be tweaked to change the meta, again (not so long since last it was looked at). But for now you have to work around it:

► Ensure your main cab is far enough back inside your that splash damage can't take it out before the rest of your tech. Or have redundant cabs all over.

► Ensure there are shields as close to the surface of your tech as possible, to minimise the number of blocks that will require repairing if you get hit.

► Use overlapping regen bubbles to ensure the shield bubbles don't get killed by splash damage too (regen rate should stack). It's doesn't seem worth trying to tank damage with armour, though.

► Use missiles if you have them. From planes, if you can build them. Or fast techs that can run rings. Or build an artillery with angled up guns to shell the big enemies from 200m or more, when they're frozen. (Perhaps boring.)


The problem with removing splash damage from the game would be that it would also make it very slow and boring to wear down the shields/batteries of enemies. And simplify the defensive meta to *purely* building battery pyramids, as the 'right' way to do things.

I'd like to see some development/refinement of the current meta, still).

[Makzevu]

I wasn't asking to get rid of splash damage, I was asking to negate it from going through shields. When the shields fail, then it's the same as getting hit with a megaton cannon directly, spalsh and all.

I was deciding whether or not to list this as a bug, but I decided to do so because I figured shields were supposed to "convert" damage and splash damage to losing battery power (Invulnerable inside the orb unless the enemy's weapon is shot from inside of it; your bullets pass safely through it).

I do see your point of the boring battles and the battery pyramids, but new players to the game without knowledge of this intentional design will run into the same situation I was in. When starting the game, shields block all low tier weapons. If they decide to use shields a lot and make a tech that utilizes it, they will carry that midset until they run into a megaton cannon, and think there is an issue when they learn stacking batteries isn't the right way to go the hard way.

Based on this being a feature, I will try other ways to build techs. Hiding all of those geo corp batteries was a lot of effort.

[ZeroGravitas]

Originally posted by Doubletoad74:

I was deciding whether or not to list this as a bug, but I decided to do so because I figured shields were supposed to "convert" damage and splash damage to losing battery power (Invulnerable inside the orb unless the enemy's weapon is shot from inside of it; your bullets pass safely through it).

Yeah, there's a lot of rough edges with the game design.

But then players these days also have a plethora of information available about what's going on, too. So I guess they can afford to lean on 3rd parties to fill in some of the gaps, for now. I imagine Payload would like to incorporate ways to explain game mechanism, etc, to players better, if/when they are able. There was talk of an in-game wiki, for example.