Behavior of Shields

[Quess Renor]

I have a ship, actually a large ship, but despite having 10 large shields. I only have 30 shield points. i understand the concept :

--"Modified the Behavior of Shields
Shields now take the size of the ship into account. When the size of the ship grows the strength of the shield is reduced to a degree, as the shield needs to cover a larger area compared to a smaller ship."--


but doing so even if I build a star destroyer, it will have the worst of it with a small corvette.

My big shields have 3/3 point...

[di eshor ribly]

How big did you make your ship? I've got what I thought to be a somewhat chunky 3x2 6-point ship. Four large shields, 70 shield points. You'll need to ... "trim some fat" to improve your shield coverage.

[Quess Renor]

15 ship point XD, 22000 mass.

My last ship is similar to your. i have 10 shields point and 13.000 mass, but i try to build a very confortable ship with more space for all.

[di eshor ribly]

Yup, there's your problem, you modified your ship to be way bigger than the base game normally allows. You're going to need more hull stabilizers and shield arrays to compensate.

I'm not sure, so don't hold me to it too much, but I think I read one of the devs say no matter how big you change your ship you can only have ten stabilizers. Ship system points are limited by that, so you may not be able to throw on an extra ten shields.

You'll have to build smaller or live with weak shields. Or split your ship into smaller ships. Of course that leads to it's own set of logistics/personnel issues.

[Bobucles]

Shields get diluted across ship size. It's a mechanic that punishes single beefy motherships and encourages smaller combat vessels. I dunno, not really a fan of it but at least beware of meteor storms on larger ships.

[Xanthiras]

Yeah, don't like it either, the game is in essence a colony sim (just with a moving colony), and then it basically punishes you for growing bigger, which is supposed to be a goal. In the end the game just becomes less satisfying.

Also it's very counterintuitive, since in general larger objects (ships, tanks, etc.) are easier to protect due to the square-cube law - if larger shield generators generate stronger shields proportionate to their mass, and stress on the shields rises proportionately to surface area, doubling the linear size should lead to doubling of the shield strength. Many people may not be able to articulate the square-cube law, but intuitively everyone expects that larger vehicles or creatures can get better protection. It's the "propulsion" that typically limits size, not protection.

[Paradoxity]

The diminishing returns in general are pretty harsh. A 2x3 ship gets 51 system points- 6 1x1 ships would get 66. that's a pretty major difference, especially considering 6 1x1 ships are going to be able to dedicate fewer of those points to power nodes and engines, and they'll get full effectiveness from shield gens. 6 1x1 ships are also going to be much tougher overall- individually they'll be weaker, if not by that much, but they'll have 6 separate sets of regen going, as opposed to just 1, and destroying 1 of them leaves 5 more, whereas one big ship is one HP pool and that's it.

Edit: and having just looked at it, a 1x1 ship, with 1 stab, has around 70 hull points. a 2x3 ship with 6 stabs has... 156. Running it out with math, that means 6 1x1 ships, with a total HP pool of 420, will spend 4 system points each on engine (1), power node(2), and a generator(1) for a total of 24 out of 66 available, and have 7 free each for shields and weapons, for a total of 42 free points on weapons and shields- and keeping in mind each only needs 1 large shield to match 2-3 on a big ship.