Possible ground combat bug??

[Q]

I experimented a little bit in the combat simulator with ground combat and troop designs (SE Version 1.49) and found some strange things:

1.) Shields seem not to work. If you make troops with identical weapons but one with 240 shield points and the other with 100 armor points, the armor troops will clearly win if in equal number.

2.) Weapons range seems without effect. It seems not to matter if you use the small incinerator beam with a range of 1 or a weapon with higher range with the same damage.

Because this is completely new for me, I would appreciate any confirmation or contrary observations before I mail it to MM.

[PvK]

1) Please try a test with units with stronger shields against units with weaker shields, and/or reverse sides in your ground units, to confirm. My impression had been that shields were working in ground combat.

2) Yes, I'm pretty sure ground combat ignores range (uses range 1). Range only comes into play when those weapons are mounted on a space combattant, like a fighter.

PvK

[Q]

That's what I did now in SE IV Gold demo:

Troop 1: Cockpit, 1x ground cannon I, 1x small shield III generating 60 shield points, 1x small combat sensor III, 1x small ECM III. Total damage resistance without shields 10kT, with shield 70kT!

Troop 2: Cockpit, 1x ground cannon I, 1x small armor, 1x small combat sensor III, 1x small ECM III. Total damage resistance 9 kT.

You must keep in mind that the shield generator has a damage resitance of 4kT besides its shield generation ability! So this design was the closest the equal damage resistance of the two designs I could imagine.

If the shields work, there should be an important difference in the performance of the two designs in ground combat: 9kT against 70kT resistance!!! However this is not the case.

[Phoenix-D]

You did it on the smallest planet you can find, testing each on attack then defense, right?

Just making sure you didn't forget about the militia

Phoenix-D

[Q]

Correct.

One more strange thing:
Shields on troops work if you attack from the space!!!
And if you have troops and weapon platforms on a planet an attack from space seems always to destroy troops first.

It is hard to believe for me that more than a year after the release of SE IV I am the first to realize this. So I am still uncertain if I made some mistakes and would really appreciate if someone could try this and confirm or refute my results.

[Mephisto]

Q, I have tested it and you are right, shields do not seem to work.

I have created the same designs you used. You slightly miscalculated, the Armor trooper has a health of 13 plus 3 points of emissive ability, so 16 in total (emissive armor always subtracts 3 points of damage, even if damage is greater then 3, as I found out)

In a battle 100 defenders plus 20 militia against 100 attackers the attacker always lost about 180 to 190 health points. This resulted in ~11 lost armor troopers and 18 lost shield troopers.
Conclusion: Shields are not working at the moment for troopers.