Armor Weapons and shields and the future of depth in combat
When we talk about ship combat in a game like Space Engineers 2, durability shouldn’t just come down to how many hit points a block has.
Instead, ship survivability should come from three core systems working together: armor design, shield engineering, and the way weapons interact with those systems.
The goal is to make combat feel less like shooting health bars, and more like fighting real engineered spacecraft.
Let’s start with armor.
In Space Engineers, armor already exists in two materials: light armor and heavy armor, and in two grid scales: small grid and large grid. These differences can naturally represent different levels of protection in a penetration-based damage system.
Light armor works well as structural plating. It’s lightweight, inexpensive, and great for shaping hulls or building internal framework. But it shouldn’t stop serious weapons. Most kinetic rounds should be able to punch through light armor unless it’s angled or layered.
Heavy armor, on the other hand, represents dense protective plating. This is the kind of armor you would place around reactors, hydrogen tanks, ammunition storage, and bridge sections. It should be significantly harder to penetrate.
Grid size can also represent physical thickness. Large-grid armor naturally represents thicker structural sections, while small-grid armor provides lighter protection suited for smaller craft.
But armor isn’t just about material. Geometry matters too.
Space Engineers already gives players wedges, slopes, and corner pieces, and these shapes could influence how weapons interact with armor.
Flat armor provides consistent protection but offers little chance to deflect incoming fire. Sloped armor increases the likelihood that projectiles will lose penetration energy or ricochet. Carefully shaped hulls could effectively increase armor thickness and deflection angles.
This means ship protection wouldn’t just come from stacking blocks—it would come from how you design your ship.
Now let’s talk about shields.
Instead of being a simple health bar, shield strength should depend on three main things: emitter size, emitter quantity, and total power input.
Shield emitters would come in multiple sizes and would scale with the amount of reactor power supplied to them. However, they wouldn’t have unlimited efficiency. The more power you push through an emitter, the less efficient it becomes.
This encourages players to spread shield generation across multiple emitters instead of relying on a single oversized generator.
Each emitter would also protect only a portion of the ship.
For example, a small emitter might cover roughly twenty-five meters of hull area around where it’s installed. A larger ship would therefore need multiple emitters distributed along its structure.
If you had a ship around seventy meters long, you might need an emitter near the bow, another near the stern, and one near the center. Depending on the height of the vessel, you might also need emitters on the top or bottom of the hull.
This turns shield placement into a real engineering challenge.
Another important mechanic is shield projection distance.
The larger the emitter and the more power you feed into it, the farther away from the hull the shield projects.
Small emitters create shields that hug the ship’s surface closely. Larger emitters generate shield bubbles that extend farther out.
This has an important gameplay consequence.
When a shield sits farther away from the hull, it creates space between the shield and the ship itself. Smaller ships, fast strike craft, or specialized torpedoes could potentially slip inside the shield bubble and hit the hull directly.
This prevents shields from becoming simple damage sponges and adds interesting tactical opportunities during combat.
In terms of balance, smaller ships with shields would have lower overall shield durability, but their shields would sit very close to the hull, tightly following the ship’s outer shape.
Larger ships would have stronger shields but larger gaps between the shield surface and the hull, creating opportunities for shield bypass attacks.
Smaller emitters would also recharge faster, while larger emitters would provide greater protection but recharge more slowly and require significantly more power.
Now finally, we get to how weapons interact with all of this.
Weapons shouldn’t just deal raw damage. They should behave differently depending on penetration, deflection, and explosive interaction.
For example, explosive weapons should interact with armor realistically.
If a missile detonates against spaced armor two meters away from the hull, and the blast radius is three meters, the explosion should destroy the outer plate but fail to damage the hull itself.
That means spaced armor becomes a meaningful defensive system.
Kinetic weapons would interact with armor based on angle and penetration capability.
Gatling guns might penetrate thin armor but bounce off heavy angled plates. Autocannons could punch through medium armor but deflect at shallow angles. Railguns might penetrate multiple layers of armor entirely.
This creates a rock-paper-scissors relationship between weapons, armor thickness, and ship design.
A well-engineered ship might have a thin outer hull, spaced armor plating, and internal armored compartments protecting critical systems.
In combat, missiles could blow away the outer armor while leaving the hull intact. Smaller weapons might bounce off angled plating. And heavier weapons could punch deep into the ship until they finally reach something critical.
The result is a combat system where engineering matters.
Ships survive not because they have the most health, but because they were designed intelligently.
And in a game about building spacecraft, that’s exactly what ship combat should reward.
I like this feedback
Good job bringing up this issue. One thing is sure, we need better combat mechanics in SE2. Armor shape, shields or thermal mechanics, anything that can spice up the combat tactics and strategies, reward you for clever design, and prevent gunbricks domination :)
Good job bringing up this issue. One thing is sure, we need better combat mechanics in SE2. Armor shape, shields or thermal mechanics, anything that can spice up the combat tactics and strategies, reward you for clever design, and prevent gunbricks domination :)
IMHO shields are very hard to do right because they are just wrong as a concept in general.
As they are not backed by any known physics, then all design decisions are pure magical and it is hard to design consistent and objective rules what and under what conditions can go through shield.
Is it velocity? Is it mass? Is it both? Can "friendly" objects pass? Can engineer with grinder pass through? Can "terrain" pass (but allow landing?) What about crash? What about "bump" and ramming? Are rules symmetric regarding in/out direction? What if something detonates just in front of shield does the explosion pass through? And so on and so on....
As the result most games implement them as just magically regenerating HP bar which leads to situations when it is a race of HP regen rate vs incoming DPS. If DPS is too low then there is no chance to even create scratch on the target. That leads to shield-centric meta because it is easiest and regenerating way of protection which just requires energy.
I'm not saying SE2 should not have shields because many people want them. What I'm saying that they require a lot of thought and are difficult to balance.
Instead I would focus on more options for point-defense - specialized rapid turrets, laser beams, smart missiles, drone swarms, reactive armor, EWAR.... maybe some blocks for damage control, maybe auto-repairing by micro drones/bots (consuming energy and materials) etc. anything which is not magically protecting the ship by just consuming energy which is easy to store and something which prevents situation when any participant can leave the battlefield with zero damage.
I love the idea of various damage types dealt by different kind of weapons. EVE Online has it quite nice: EM/Thermal/Kinetic/Explosive damage types. On top I would bring some kind of EWAR - jamming, masking, hacking etc.
But before any of this happens SE2 must develop solutions to problems which were known for long time based on SE1 experience, I'll just list few from top of my head:
1. Gunspam - just add more guns, up to the absurd levels. Without thermodynamics, recoil, structural integrity or any other mechanics to limit number of blocks, modders and server owners had to develop block limiters, grid cores, points etc.
Something like that needs to be added and balanced in the vanilla game of SE2.
2. Block spam - same problem but on more general level. Just add more armor. Ship to heavy? Add more thrusters. Add more gyroscopes. Shield too weak? Spam more reactors... again - I see it as a huge challenge for SE2 to implement this better, maybe taking inspiration from mods, maybe from multiplayer servers, maybe from other games....
3. Short range - dogfighting at few kilometers range is not happening even with current technology. In space it is just fantasy backed by Star Wars pew pew fighters with space wings.
There are good YT videos by SpaceDock explaining it so I'll not go into details here... the problem is that SE requires close range for any combat to happen.
4. Top speed limit, acceleration, no impact of G-force to crew - again, spam thrusters and gyroscopes and suddenly ship can outrun all fighters, torpedos, drones and missiles. And it can do crazy maneuvers even if they would kill the crew onboard.
5. Poor performance - swarms of drones, torpedos, explosions, damage, even projectiles could bring SE1 to sim speed of zero. SE2 will have to deal with that taking into account that grids will now have many more blocks than SE1.
Let's see what will be presented in VS2.2.
IMHO shields are very hard to do right because they are just wrong as a concept in general.
As they are not backed by any known physics, then all design decisions are pure magical and it is hard to design consistent and objective rules what and under what conditions can go through shield.
Is it velocity? Is it mass? Is it both? Can "friendly" objects pass? Can engineer with grinder pass through? Can "terrain" pass (but allow landing?) What about crash? What about "bump" and ramming? Are rules symmetric regarding in/out direction? What if something detonates just in front of shield does the explosion pass through? And so on and so on....
As the result most games implement them as just magically regenerating HP bar which leads to situations when it is a race of HP regen rate vs incoming DPS. If DPS is too low then there is no chance to even create scratch on the target. That leads to shield-centric meta because it is easiest and regenerating way of protection which just requires energy.
I'm not saying SE2 should not have shields because many people want them. What I'm saying that they require a lot of thought and are difficult to balance.
Instead I would focus on more options for point-defense - specialized rapid turrets, laser beams, smart missiles, drone swarms, reactive armor, EWAR.... maybe some blocks for damage control, maybe auto-repairing by micro drones/bots (consuming energy and materials) etc. anything which is not magically protecting the ship by just consuming energy which is easy to store and something which prevents situation when any participant can leave the battlefield with zero damage.
I love the idea of various damage types dealt by different kind of weapons. EVE Online has it quite nice: EM/Thermal/Kinetic/Explosive damage types. On top I would bring some kind of EWAR - jamming, masking, hacking etc.
But before any of this happens SE2 must develop solutions to problems which were known for long time based on SE1 experience, I'll just list few from top of my head:
1. Gunspam - just add more guns, up to the absurd levels. Without thermodynamics, recoil, structural integrity or any other mechanics to limit number of blocks, modders and server owners had to develop block limiters, grid cores, points etc.
Something like that needs to be added and balanced in the vanilla game of SE2.
2. Block spam - same problem but on more general level. Just add more armor. Ship to heavy? Add more thrusters. Add more gyroscopes. Shield too weak? Spam more reactors... again - I see it as a huge challenge for SE2 to implement this better, maybe taking inspiration from mods, maybe from multiplayer servers, maybe from other games....
3. Short range - dogfighting at few kilometers range is not happening even with current technology. In space it is just fantasy backed by Star Wars pew pew fighters with space wings.
There are good YT videos by SpaceDock explaining it so I'll not go into details here... the problem is that SE requires close range for any combat to happen.
4. Top speed limit, acceleration, no impact of G-force to crew - again, spam thrusters and gyroscopes and suddenly ship can outrun all fighters, torpedos, drones and missiles. And it can do crazy maneuvers even if they would kill the crew onboard.
5. Poor performance - swarms of drones, torpedos, explosions, damage, even projectiles could bring SE1 to sim speed of zero. SE2 will have to deal with that taking into account that grids will now have many more blocks than SE1.
Let's see what will be presented in VS2.2.
You're right to complain, but it's pointless.
Unless the game were built on at least roughly physically accurate and consistent foundations and rules, you’ll keep complaining.
The author writes about various effects of a projectile hitting an obstacle...
For example, the projectile’s ricochet...
But according to the linked video, he doesn’t understand at all how, when, and why a projectile ricochets. What effect does impact velocity have? What effect do the densities of the projectile and the armor have? What effect do the hardnesses of the projectile and the armor have? How does the ratio of the projectile’s caliber to the armor’s thickness affect things? How does the shape of the projectile’s warhead affect things? Why was the anti-armor caped shell invented, and how does it work?
You're right to complain, but it's pointless.
Unless the game were built on at least roughly physically accurate and consistent foundations and rules, you’ll keep complaining.
The author writes about various effects of a projectile hitting an obstacle...
For example, the projectile’s ricochet...
But according to the linked video, he doesn’t understand at all how, when, and why a projectile ricochets. What effect does impact velocity have? What effect do the densities of the projectile and the armor have? What effect do the hardnesses of the projectile and the armor have? How does the ratio of the projectile’s caliber to the armor’s thickness affect things? How does the shape of the projectile’s warhead affect things? Why was the anti-armor caped shell invented, and how does it work?
Projectile deflection/penetration would be nice, SE1 has it so I imagine some form will eventually show up in SE2.
Shields are a cool concept, but the health bar that they are will probably break combat by forming a hard meta around shields and acceleration the same way it always does, that you need multiple emitters and a big reactor will not change that.
-Diminishing Returns: People will probably pick where they find most efficient (as determined by evaluating roughly where the extra mass/space required eats in to their ability to evade so much that it results in a net reduction in survival time). This will have some variation based if the particular engineer can tune it to best match their piloting skills and/or if they have enough self-respect to at least throw a decorative hull around it, but will generally result in everything meant for combat turning in to roughly a copy-paste of whatever hydrogen-propelled shield-brick comes up when someone googles "SE2 Combat Meta".
-Multiple Emitters: That you can have multiple emitters covering different zones each with different hp values would suggest that you can also put multiple emitters in the same area, potentially rendering any sort of cap or diminishing returns pointless. It would also suggest one can mix emitter types to try and get the best of everything.
Projectile deflection/penetration would be nice, SE1 has it so I imagine some form will eventually show up in SE2.
Shields are a cool concept, but the health bar that they are will probably break combat by forming a hard meta around shields and acceleration the same way it always does, that you need multiple emitters and a big reactor will not change that.
-Diminishing Returns: People will probably pick where they find most efficient (as determined by evaluating roughly where the extra mass/space required eats in to their ability to evade so much that it results in a net reduction in survival time). This will have some variation based if the particular engineer can tune it to best match their piloting skills and/or if they have enough self-respect to at least throw a decorative hull around it, but will generally result in everything meant for combat turning in to roughly a copy-paste of whatever hydrogen-propelled shield-brick comes up when someone googles "SE2 Combat Meta".
-Multiple Emitters: That you can have multiple emitters covering different zones each with different hp values would suggest that you can also put multiple emitters in the same area, potentially rendering any sort of cap or diminishing returns pointless. It would also suggest one can mix emitter types to try and get the best of everything.
Best to use real-life examples to design gameplay and balance questions around.
For example, we -do- have energy shields in real life. The earth's magnetic field. The ability for us to 'shape' and to ' condense' the emitted field is the 'magic' needed for gameplay shields.
So, a normal shield is a sphere shape dispersed over a wide area, for general space travel safety, powered by your generator. Combat shields condense the field into a thin shell, that can now be shaped how you want it, into various conic sectional or toroidal shapes, the wide thick field now becoming a narrow thin shell, shaping and spacing depending on power constraints. The amount of capacitor vs amount of generators decides on shield strength vs shield recharge, respectively. Three mid-powered cigar shaped ones along the three axis of movement, for example, along with one short range high powered sphere for in close weapons. Or whatever.
Weapon balance, as mentioned above, could use a heat/recoil system, that damages the block's components until it becomes inoperative, just like normal. It would apply more so to 'player designed weapons system', for balancing, as Keen would have to decide on the damage rates and proper usage of weapons when they release them, which will (edit:) inevitably lead to complaints and player gameplay hacks to mitigate Keen's balance design limitations.
Maybe have the weapons firing parameters adjustable, with included heat/recoil damage to components. Would fix a lot of issues. (edit:) or weapon modules, which Keen has shown off a couple in their concept art, could go towards individualizing a person's weapon, and their own benefits/drawbacks.
Best to use real-life examples to design gameplay and balance questions around.
For example, we -do- have energy shields in real life. The earth's magnetic field. The ability for us to 'shape' and to ' condense' the emitted field is the 'magic' needed for gameplay shields.
So, a normal shield is a sphere shape dispersed over a wide area, for general space travel safety, powered by your generator. Combat shields condense the field into a thin shell, that can now be shaped how you want it, into various conic sectional or toroidal shapes, the wide thick field now becoming a narrow thin shell, shaping and spacing depending on power constraints. The amount of capacitor vs amount of generators decides on shield strength vs shield recharge, respectively. Three mid-powered cigar shaped ones along the three axis of movement, for example, along with one short range high powered sphere for in close weapons. Or whatever.
Weapon balance, as mentioned above, could use a heat/recoil system, that damages the block's components until it becomes inoperative, just like normal. It would apply more so to 'player designed weapons system', for balancing, as Keen would have to decide on the damage rates and proper usage of weapons when they release them, which will (edit:) inevitably lead to complaints and player gameplay hacks to mitigate Keen's balance design limitations.
Maybe have the weapons firing parameters adjustable, with included heat/recoil damage to components. Would fix a lot of issues. (edit:) or weapon modules, which Keen has shown off a couple in their concept art, could go towards individualizing a person's weapon, and their own benefits/drawbacks.
I’d really like to see shields implemented in a way that isn’t just a flat “block all damage” mechanic.
Instead, shields could:
This would immediately give smaller ships a real role. Fighters could:
Shield emitters themselves should be physical, exposed blocks — similar to thrusters.
Placement would matter a lot:
So shields become less of a “DPS sponge” and more of an engineering and design challenge.
A key ideas:
So you’ll need proper point defense to protect them.
There’s also a cool tactical layer here:
If you shoot directly at an emitter, shells will likely get deflected away.
But if you shoot slightly to the side, there’s a chance deflected shells will actually hit the emitter.
So skilled players might intentionally aim off-target to destroy shield systems. That’s the kind of depth that makes combat interesting.
To prevent spam:
Instead:
And since they’d be:
…you won’t be able to spam them all around your hull.
So yeah — this would be a non-fantasy shield system.
It helps you survive, but:
Combat becomes more tactical, and ship design becomes way more interesting.
Small ships get meaningful roles again, and you will have more creative freedom for your designs. Having a strategically placed shield emitter on your fighter or even bigger ship could afford things like exposed cockpits and bridges, instead of just burying everything under armor.
Overall:
more creativity, more engineering decisions, more combat depth. 🚀
I’d really like to see shields implemented in a way that isn’t just a flat “block all damage” mechanic.
Instead, shields could:
This would immediately give smaller ships a real role. Fighters could:
Shield emitters themselves should be physical, exposed blocks — similar to thrusters.
Placement would matter a lot:
So shields become less of a “DPS sponge” and more of an engineering and design challenge.
A key ideas:
So you’ll need proper point defense to protect them.
There’s also a cool tactical layer here:
If you shoot directly at an emitter, shells will likely get deflected away.
But if you shoot slightly to the side, there’s a chance deflected shells will actually hit the emitter.
So skilled players might intentionally aim off-target to destroy shield systems. That’s the kind of depth that makes combat interesting.
To prevent spam:
Instead:
And since they’d be:
…you won’t be able to spam them all around your hull.
So yeah — this would be a non-fantasy shield system.
It helps you survive, but:
Combat becomes more tactical, and ship design becomes way more interesting.
Small ships get meaningful roles again, and you will have more creative freedom for your designs. Having a strategically placed shield emitter on your fighter or even bigger ship could afford things like exposed cockpits and bridges, instead of just burying everything under armor.
Overall:
more creativity, more engineering decisions, more combat depth. 🚀
The SE "game universe" is literally pocket-sized—planets with diameters of up to 200 km, ship speeds of up to 300 m/s, and projectile speeds of up to 500 m/s or even 1,000 m/s. It would be nice if all game mechanics were adapted to this “pocket-sized universe.”
For example, projectiles from handguns should have a velocity of only 100–150 m/s, projectiles from the most powerful cannons 200–300 m/s, the fastest “hypersonic missiles” up to 600 m/s, and projectiles from railguns up to 1,000 m/s.
For the purposes of the game, it is sufficient to reduce all real-world weapon velocities by approximately a factor of 10.
Then, for example, a hit by a 5 kg projectile traveling at 150 m/s should count as a hit by an APFSDS anti-tank projectile traveling at 1,500 m/s.
Given such a general reduction in velocities, it would make more sense to examine the behavior of armor and blocks when struck by projectiles traveling at different speeds, as well as other effects of a projectile striking an obstacle.
The effective range of a weapon could be defined in the same way as the "lifespan" or lifetime of a projectile.
The formula could be simple: let the projectile’s lifetime be “the square root of the projectile’s mass in kg + five seconds”; small projectiles from handguns exist for 5 seconds and have a range of 500–750 meters; a 20-kilogram projectile traveling at 150 m/s has a range of 1,450 meters. A 5-kg projectile from a railgun has a velocity of, say, 500 m/s—its flight time is just over 11 seconds, and its range will be 5,590 m.
Of course, the formula could be modified to be more balanced than this tentative proposal.
At the same time, we would hear the cries of various immature Richthofens. These boys don’t realize one simple thing—their main killer isn’t “gun spam,” but the high velocity of the projectiles compared to the speed of their small vehicle.
The SE "game universe" is literally pocket-sized—planets with diameters of up to 200 km, ship speeds of up to 300 m/s, and projectile speeds of up to 500 m/s or even 1,000 m/s. It would be nice if all game mechanics were adapted to this “pocket-sized universe.”
For example, projectiles from handguns should have a velocity of only 100–150 m/s, projectiles from the most powerful cannons 200–300 m/s, the fastest “hypersonic missiles” up to 600 m/s, and projectiles from railguns up to 1,000 m/s.
For the purposes of the game, it is sufficient to reduce all real-world weapon velocities by approximately a factor of 10.
Then, for example, a hit by a 5 kg projectile traveling at 150 m/s should count as a hit by an APFSDS anti-tank projectile traveling at 1,500 m/s.
Given such a general reduction in velocities, it would make more sense to examine the behavior of armor and blocks when struck by projectiles traveling at different speeds, as well as other effects of a projectile striking an obstacle.
The effective range of a weapon could be defined in the same way as the "lifespan" or lifetime of a projectile.
The formula could be simple: let the projectile’s lifetime be “the square root of the projectile’s mass in kg + five seconds”; small projectiles from handguns exist for 5 seconds and have a range of 500–750 meters; a 20-kilogram projectile traveling at 150 m/s has a range of 1,450 meters. A 5-kg projectile from a railgun has a velocity of, say, 500 m/s—its flight time is just over 11 seconds, and its range will be 5,590 m.
Of course, the formula could be modified to be more balanced than this tentative proposal.
At the same time, we would hear the cries of various immature Richthofens. These boys don’t realize one simple thing—their main killer isn’t “gun spam,” but the high velocity of the projectiles compared to the speed of their small vehicle.
I think another fun way to do shields is to try to incorporate a system not unlike what the Covenant has to do in Halo, where the shield is forced to iris when friendly stuff passes through it or when guns want to fire out, leaving the ship with a tiny vulnerability that can be exploited by skilled players.
Essentially forcing you to give up a bit of defense to be able to use something for offensive.
Some of the points about armor aren't great, armor thickness, density, material, and slope are stuff that have to come into effect
but also shell type, speed, density, and material also come into play, realistically, without modeling armor as large pieces, a system like this cannot become too complicated without stripping away stuff that defines Space Engineers, and I think the system SE1 had as is was already pretty decent when it came to how shell penetration was done, sloped armor, despite what you may think, actually was pretty effective due to how armor works, and if it isn't changed, should still be fairly effective, just not having a chance to bounce shells.
I think another fun way to do shields is to try to incorporate a system not unlike what the Covenant has to do in Halo, where the shield is forced to iris when friendly stuff passes through it or when guns want to fire out, leaving the ship with a tiny vulnerability that can be exploited by skilled players.
Essentially forcing you to give up a bit of defense to be able to use something for offensive.
Some of the points about armor aren't great, armor thickness, density, material, and slope are stuff that have to come into effect
but also shell type, speed, density, and material also come into play, realistically, without modeling armor as large pieces, a system like this cannot become too complicated without stripping away stuff that defines Space Engineers, and I think the system SE1 had as is was already pretty decent when it came to how shell penetration was done, sloped armor, despite what you may think, actually was pretty effective due to how armor works, and if it isn't changed, should still be fairly effective, just not having a chance to bounce shells.
One of the problems with realistic assessment of hits and damage lies in the simulation of ship structures itself. The "armor" blocks have very low density. They are very light relative to their volume.
This makes it impossible to use any realistic collision models or penetration and ricochet models to assess the collision between a projectile and an obstacle (armor) in the game.
Given the density of the projectile material and the density of the armor material, a projectile could never be ricocheted.
One of the problems with realistic assessment of hits and damage lies in the simulation of ship structures itself. The "armor" blocks have very low density. They are very light relative to their volume.
This makes it impossible to use any realistic collision models or penetration and ricochet models to assess the collision between a projectile and an obstacle (armor) in the game.
Given the density of the projectile material and the density of the armor material, a projectile could never be ricocheted.
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