SHIELDS: As people said, using shields would prolong a fight. But it would make things much more interesting. Right now figting is quite borring and its about the quantity and not quality. Also I don't think you can do only the things that are more fun, after all it is the year 4000 something.

To do both how about this:
1) Shields do not stop every attack, but only a percentage based on the shield strength/type (for example 10-75%)
2) Shields take a while to recharge
3) Shields consume energy, so if they are turned on, they will eventually deplete your energy. Therefore firing weapons and using turbo will deplete it even more.
4) To make it alot more fun,you could adjust power division, for example shields(60%), weapons(0%) and engines(40%).

You mean like speicial sheilds? they already have sheilds...

But i do that thats an okay idea. Oh, make cool visulals though, lol.

but anyway, if that happens it should be made so that the Itani can have better (like they drain slower than the others or they block dammage better) of course there should be a standard type of "Advanced Sheilding" thats the same for all nations.

Shields are suggested fairly often. To the best of my knowledge there are no short-term plans to include them.

I see ups and downs to it. This is the first spacegame i've played that has no shields at all - just naked armor. A bit uncomfortable at first because you cannot regenerate your defences (defenses to keep USA happy). When you get damaged you have to wear it. Then head to station for repairs. Brings about an oldschool flavour to space combat. You damage your bird, you have to limp home instead of magically regenerating. Makes for some really tense flights sometimes.

It sure would add another dimension to ship customization though. Being able to select your defence method. And the power division idea is great. I would like to see this lengthy to adjust in space (through engineering menu). As in Independence War 2, i quickly utilized this feature to exploit. I diverted all energy to engines while flying, then instantly diverted all power to guns while taking a shot, then in a heartbeat diverted all to shielding when about to take a hit. I bound the power divert functions to Z,X,C keys. In effect, I had an all-uber ship. I made a mockery of the system. However, if they had a time-imposed penatly for re-routing power, and the fact that you had to access engineering panels to achieve this, I think its a great idea pilot. It gives the pilot another choice in ship customization and opens up a whole new strategy.

Not only that but being able to buy more addons to ships. The game says that they are really customisable, but I'd like to see it get clsoer to EV nova. Things like cloaks (though that would be really hard to balance well) sheild buffers, ECM etc.

I would like to have sheilds where you can direct your sheilding. It would add a slightly different element of strategy to the game. For example, if you were bot hunting, you would probably want to concentrate your shields in the front, because if your like me you make circles around them as you take them out. 90% of all hits taken are taken on the front. But, if I'm not careful, a few shots to the rear would do much more damage as the sheilds wouldn't offer any protection.

"I don't think you can do only the things that are more fun, after all it is the year 4000 something."

So...in the year 4000 we have the capability to do things that are less fun. Hot dog!

P.S. I am against shields.

I'm against both shields and power balancing.
Power balancing would negate the effects of choosing different ships / setups in many ways. (I've already covered this in many of my other posts, I don't want to reiterate it here.)
My reasons for disliking the idea of shields are complicated, and I'm too tired to explain them at the moment.
-:sigma.SB

i have nithing against shields, but i think that they would be best if implemented in combination with capitle ships and patrole ships.

here is one way this could work:

shields drain 50 energy/sec (that way a fast charge batery could maintain shields indefinately but couldn't charge while shielded)

Patrole ships could mount multiple bateries

Capitle ships hav acces to VL weapon ports and can mount multiple bateries.

there are several sheld generators:

Shield generator MK1 (L): generates a regernerating hp field that can absorbe 1,000 hp, and repairs itself at a rate of 300/sec.

Shield generator MK2 (L): same as MK1 except it can absorb 1,500 hp, and regenerates at 325/sec.

Fighter shield generator (S): this shield generator prevents all damage taken as long as it is active but drains 1 additional energy for every 10 points of damage it prevents. When the batery is drained the generator shuts down and has to be reactivated.

Heavy Shield generator (VL): Prevents 600 damage from every hit the ship takes as long as the generator is active.

These numbers were chosen mostly at random, so they would need to be tweeked.

The intent is to make shield generators not especialy usefull to any of the ships curently available. They would be able to withstand more damage but they would be sacraficing almost all ability to return fire and turbo. Larger ships with multiple bateries could make beter use of the existing shield generators, but there are weapons that could overcome the shields and still be efective. Then the gratest use of shields comes with Capitle ships. Cap. ships would have multiple bateries and acess to the VL generator. Cap ships could become efectively imune to attack from small ships, but there would of coarse have to be more powerfull weapons by that time.

Some negaives of shield generators would be that they would prolong PVP batles, and they would make pirating moe dificult as traders could beter survive an attack. But i think that these drawbacks would be minimal as the shields i have described provide protection at the cost of masive amounts of energy, only ships with 2 or more bateries could maintain turbo for any lenth of time, and the same goes for weaponsfire.

Please, add shields!! I mean it's the future, armor doesn't seem to do the trick. It seems if your flying a bus or Centaur armor doesn't give much protection.

Same name, different opinion: shields remind me of Space Invaders and those days are long gone now.

Uhm I was around when space invaders came out and they didn't have shields as I recall you had to hide under a block if you didn't want to get killed. Also I think there is nothing old school about shields. How about this, instead of all ships having shields you can purchase a shield generator. That way those who think armor is better can stay with a bare ship. Those who want a little more protection can have it. That way everyone is happy.

No.

Shields are bad, not because of style (although shields are in fact passe) but because it is necessarily detrimental to VO's gameplay. What is truly meant by "shields" from a gameplay perspective is "regenerating HP." Now suppose you have a pilot who's a really capable dodger, and she only gets tagged infrequently enough that her HP never goes down, because of the regeneration, or at least goes down so slowly that she effectively has 100,000 HP. That is game-breakingly unfun.

This cannot be solved by lowering the regeneration rate to a point where it's useless in combat. That is the same as not having shields -- it's just "more armor." And if you think the game would be improved by doubling everyone's armor, you are welcome to have that opinion, but I do not think it will happen.
The same goes for the eternity of waiting for super-slowly regenerating shields to actually regenerate. It's much faster to dock at a station and get repaired.

This also cannot be solved by boosting the damage of weapons. That is an arms race that will lead us *precisely* back to where we are now: it will take the same weapon the same number of shots to blow up a ship. So that is a lot of useless work.

Sheilds are bad. Leave it alone.

VO already features the *shields* of the initial Space Invaders. They are called *roids*.

I'm pretty much a newbie to this game but I'd have to say that I did like the idea that Oracle Systems used in their game Independence War. The idea was that there were two shield projectors per ship. Ok, now the "shield emitters" could only track one target at a time (ie if you have a ship targeted that means your shield emitters will track it. AND the shield emitters only covered about 1/3 of your ship's top or bottom hemisphere. Another thing was that the shield emitters couldn't cover your back end because of the engine and the stuff it emits (radiation, plasma, whatever). Granted the original Independence War had MANY subsystems that could be damaged or destroyed that would impact the reliability of the shields (and other systems). VOs current system is rather basic and does not contain a subsystem destroy ability.

Anyway I think that shields are workable and could add a flavor to PvP fights. Example: 2 vs 1 fight where the 1 ship has ENEMY A targeted. His shield emitters only track ENEMY A, meanwhile ENEMY B slips around and either attacks the vulnerable rear or the area where the emitters are not tracking.

wylfing,

What if shields were a system that had to be equipped, and were extreemly heavy? That way if you want the extra HP you have to give up some manuverability. This efect would be reduced on larger ships because of their higher mass/thrust, but larger ships are already heavier and have more HP.

As for shields being "passe" that isn't because they don't make sence in a future setting, but rather they are expected in any sci-fi setting. as such while shields are not especialy cool or fancy they should still be present in some form in VO

I am against any shields on vessels of the current size. I am against any "X-Wing Style" shields (ie: a second layer of armor that can take a certain amount of damage before needing to recharge). What I would support is armor as discussed in the Toys thread (bumping...). IE: A capital ship owner might purchase a Light Reflective Armor addon that would reflect the first 500 points of damage from any shot by an energy weapon. So a Gauss Cannon hit would do 700 damage, instead of 1200. Optionally, I suppose they could make this rechargable, preventing less damage with each hit and recharging back to the full 500 damage prevention, and call it shields. Same difference. But I find that armor of this sort makes a game much more enjoyable when compared to the boring X-Wing style shields.

And I think power distribution is the stupidest thing of all time. I played every X-Wing game, and I found that power setup to be not only useless, but time-consuming and distracting.

I'm more or less in agreement with roguelazer on this. Shields dont make sense on ships as small as we have them, and even on ships that are capital class and semi-capital class i would prefer them to be specialized.

Maybe you can choose to have an anti-energy shield that absorbs a certain amount of the damage from each energy shot, or you could have an anti-missile armor that absorbs a certain amount of the damage from projectiles, but not both. This way ships are veunerable to one or the other.

Obviously larger ships would be able to mount larger versions of these, potentially making the largest capital ships immune to anything a fighter could carry in whichever form of damage they have chosen to shield against.

THat's the goal. I think that a battleship or frigate should be IMPOSSIBLE to destroy using our current weapons, with the exception of the rockets and the Avalon. It should have enough armor to be effectively immune to all energy weapons. This means that if a weak spot is discovered, nobody can fly in with a bus and put a book on the left mouse button.