rev [5927] - inability to damage Drone Factory

[Dilvish]

I was surprised to find myself doing no damage to a drone factory (see screenshot). After this point it seems I'm not doing any damage to (nor taking damage from) monsters, though I had fought them normally earlier in the game. :

noDamageToDroneFactory.png (318.65 KiB) Viewed 754 times

[Geoff the Medio]

I suspect you're using 5929, for which the commit log is "Made ship shields act as damage reduction instead of additional structure."

[Dilvish]

Ah, hmm, ok well my screen says 5927, but yeah checking my working copy revision says it's 5929, perhaps when I built I didn't update the highest level to update the version number on screen.

So... is there some plan to adjust shield values then? I recall this as a discussion, hadn't realized there was any definite plan to actually do this. I've updated to [5931] now but it looks like there's no adjustment to shield values. Even if there's no adjustment to shields about to be committed momentarily, do you have any suggestions for good values to use? Or else I guess I can experiment a bit, or just revert to something earlier...

[Geoff the Medio]

So... is there some plan to adjust shield values then?

I expect they will be adjusted, though I hope I don't have to do it all myself.

Even if there's no adjustment to shields about to be committed momentarily, do you have any suggestions for good values to use?

Setting all shield values to 0 will get back to similar results as before, just with lower total damage required to destroy ships.

[Dilvish]

And drat, I've been pretty happy with how the AI assessed fleet strength (even if tactics weren't so hot). I haven't given any thought yet to adjusting for this change. I guess I'll go ahead and experiment with some very low but nonzero values so I can get a bit of a handle on it.

[Dilvish]

It looks like planetary shields still act as they used to; is that expected to stay as-is, or change in the same fashion?

[Geoff the Medio]

The overall result of the shields change should hopefully be to make fleet strength a more interesting / strategic issue. If an opponent is fielding lots of small-damage weapon parts, damage reduction from shields will be valuable. But against fewer weapons parts of higher damage, armour would likely be more beneficial (assuming armour costs much less per point than does shielding).

It should now be possible to have interesting things like very powerful / ancient empire ships that are not aggressive, but which are invulnerable when attacked due to their high shielding.

It looks like planetary shields still act as they used to; is that expected to stay as-is, or change in the same fashion?

Planet shields didn't change and aren't expected to. I'm not overly fond of the different meanings for shields between planets and ships, but the discussion thread didn't seem to think it was a problem.