ice for shields, and other grit-tech stuff

[Puke]

so if you make it an armor component, conventional weapons would have to skip armor, and regular armor would have the shield ability?

and then you would have to go back and destroy the armor once the hull was hollowed out? hmmm.

if using the emissive idea, conventional weapons would need to do enough extra damage to account for the emmissive armor, but what if it ran up on a ship without the shields? they would do an extra 35 points of damage per shot, or so.

These ideas are definitly better than what i had come up with though, thanks guys. if anyone has more to add, i would be eager to hear it.

[Spoo]

You could use an allegiance subverter (change the range to 1) to represent the boarding parties. Then you could still use shields as shields.

[Puke]

hey, thats a good idea. how would you do boarding defenses then? is it harder to subvert (i used to think so, but have not tested in a while) a ship with more crew-quarters?

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Spoo:
You could use an allegiance subverter (change the range to 1) to represent the boarding parties. Then you could still use shields as shields.

Damn, I was just about to suggest that! That's what I just did in my mod to alleviate the "board once to take out their security stations then board again for sure victory" exploit! Of course this will make Master Computer ships unboardable, but when you think about it this is logical - if the ship has no crew, why would it be designed with open spaces for enemy troops to occupy?

[Spoo]

is it harder to subvert (i used to think so, but have not tested in a while) a ship with more crew-quarters?

I know it's this way for boarding parties, but I think that the only factor for allegience subverter success (besides actually hitting the ship) is the "damage" of the subverter in the form of a % chance to subvert. A damage rating of 80 has an 80% chance to convert the ship, 100 has a 100% chance, and 110 still has a 100%.

[Suicide Junkie]

if using the emissive idea, conventional weapons would need to do enough extra damage to account for the emmissive armor, but what if it ran up on a ship without the shields? they would do an extra 35 points of damage per shot, or so.

Actually they don't all the weapons would be affected somehow by the ice shield. A plasma stream would waste a small portion of its energy on the ice, and a projectile would take some damage from it as well.

The key is that the weapons which can be blocked by the shield all have reload 1, low damage per hit, and are almost completely absorbed by the EA ability.
The weapons which skip the ice shields do a lot of damage in each shot, with a larger reload. The damage is only reduced by a tiny fraction because the shot is powerful & slow reloading