Shields and Hangar Force Fields

I hope you are wrong ;).

I was thinking they would like it too, given that in one of the last added outpost they use a SafeZone to mimic as a shield for the central base. I liked the idea but having properly shields is another thing.

I will wait, luckily hope dies last.

@Federico Peruzzo: the SafeZone is meant to be like an admin tool of sorts where people don't have to worry about offline raids on their bases or ships so long as it has power and chips. It's meant to protect a base from having to deal with direct combat and pvp being forced on people unwanted. While it may use a shield like visual to indicate the boundary of the zone, by no means is the safezone meant to be a full on shield. I still want to see a shield akin to Cython's but the safe zone isn't that shield.

You know that Darkstar has retired from SE right. Sure its possible he might mod in SE2 but prob not tho. Dealing with players is such a hazzle you see :P When players come and feel entitled about "Your mod" thats when you feel like you dont want to mod anymore. Suggestions is good but when they come of as entitled and they often do...then yeah no more modding for me.

Would be nice to find solutions to drain water from submarine bases.

Adding pumps blocks and so...

(Instead of syfy forcefields: could be a mod, like on SE1)

I also like a steampunk or/and industrial style, but Se right now is way more futuristic than industrial.

Being a lover of Sci-fi space based series and movies, I love seeing futuristic drives(jump drives) or shields.

I think that having the freedom to do not use something but still have it in the game is better than not having it at all.

or you could just turn them off if you don't like them much like people turn off economy or other features they may not like now. should they add a shield of some kind you would always have the option to disable it. Thus you're only effected if you choose to be.

It would be nifty if the features were available in the base game, but you can easily turn it off if you want to when you configure a new world. Perhaps something like a configurable per-grid/player/faction block limit, where you can say, "no shields for anyone".

I love all of this. Well done with the explanations and parameters.

The problem with just turning them off is that weapons and combat would be balanced around them being on.

Balancing is all about giving something on a side and adding up enough on the other to reach balance.

So, if shields are added to protect ships from kinetic damage, there is also the possibility to add weapons(energy weapons) that aim is to disable your grid's energy (gradually), in this way, when the shield is down you can attack with the kinetic weapons.

@Gregory Jennings: Yeah that's not how that works. You still have to decide how much health individual blocks have as just breaking the shield isn't enough to break the block. You still have to define how much health heavy armor has, how much health gyros have, how much health reactors have and so on. Shields are just an overbar like having a riot shield AND a kevlar vest. You CAN adjust the base health of the blocks to account for shield health but you by no means have to do so. It would be dumb to balance a kevlar vest around the presence of the riot shield.

To balance the shields you only need to define 3 things. Total health X, regen per second Y, power draw Z. From there it's a player thing. With any survival game or block building game, if you're balancing around anything other than singular blocks you're wasting your time.

If it takes 1000 shots to break a shield (number purely to quantify a point) from a single gatling turret you've now defined your baseline. If a player brings 2 gatlings, they've now cut the time it takes to drop the shield in half. If they bring 4 gatlings they've cut the time down to 1/4 of what it would be otherwise as the amount of time shaved off grows exponentially. So again it's a player problem.

Also respectfully, using that argument and similar arguments as to why shields shouldn't be a thing tells me people are too afraid to try and engineer around them. If folks say they want engineering challenges but complain about shields, this tells me they don't truly want challenges like they say. By turning them off you're literally uneffected by them. If you think baseline health for certain blocks is weak, mod it. I created 3 different types of armor in SE1 because I hated how weak the baseline armor is. My armors are 7x vanilla light armor, 7x vanilla heavy armor, and 11x vanilla armor respectively in terms of strength. If people are really as good as they claim they can engineer around it. If this were jump inhibitors that can actually harm another's grid purely by existing you would have a valid argument, but here you don't.

Every iteration of shield requests I've ever seen has always assumed you could turn it off if you just absolutely do not like it. This way people who don't want them are only effected by them if they choose to be.

I was thinking about Hangar forcefield not to avoid engineering an interesting and complex bigger hangar door, but in the case you are playing underwater or with other players and you don't want either to drown anyone or building giant multistage hangar entrance(that you will be able to do anyway, if you want) only to enter with a ship in hangar

All they need to do is go with something simple like Cython's and call it a day. Define the defaults for total health X, regen Y, power draw Z. From there let players adjust as they please or even disable. They can even give a 4th slider to to say you can't have more than (number here) shield generators per grid, which solves the stacking issue. They don't need to add a bunch of extra mechanics when players can make adjustments to their liking beyond that. Keep it simple, then let players do the rest.

Well then... plasma shields it is. Re. https://journals.le.ac.uk/index.php/pst/article/view/2177

I know lot of players prefer industrial and realistic features, and I am not here to say they are wrong or right. These are preferences.

I like a game that doesn't have to be completely realistic and where I am able to do things I cannot do normally.

Obviously I will adapt to what's coming, but I always liked the idea of shields, the modded ones in SE1 have a lot of flaws and rely on someone else willing to keep them updated and bugles.

@captainbladej52 absolutely not. If shields block all damage, they become a boring addition to combat, a blanket health pool with no interesting mechanics behind it. If shields are to improve the combat, rather than worsen it, they need to add some mechanics to the combat, such as allowing kinetic weapons mostly through and plasma beams blocked, as I suggested. At the very, absolute least, there needs to be something like shield redirection to add to combat. A blanket health pool would just be a boring thing to have to get past before you get to the interesting combat utilizing SE's incredible creation and destruction mechanics.

@Star_Kindler: As I said to you on the other post, I disagree with a blanket pool being boring as you wouldn't have well over 500k subs between Cython's and Defense Shields alone. In game development be it the small time mod level or AAA studio level, sometimes less is actually more. You don't want to overthink things which alot of people do with shields. We get them to give us a baseline vanilla block that works, then if you want to add a bleedthrough for certain weapon types, we can do that then with mods if we have to, but first lets get our foot in the door. Star Trek Online is another game that has a bleedthrough on shields so they don't completely stop everything. Stopping a shield from blocking all damage is as easy as putting them on a damage multiplier. As an example if you want to have it block 50% of income damage you tell it to multiply damage by 0.5 and there you go.

Getting through a shield that's a blanket health pool is no different than someone having a kevlar vest AND a riot shield in ground combat. The riot shield blocks bullets until it breaks, then the kevlar vest is the next line. In this instance the energy shields are the riot shield and the kevlar vest is the ship's armor.

Also I'm going to ask you to define "shield redirection" because what you call redirection and what I think of with redirection may be 2 different things.

Oh I guess I should leave my response here too then:

The defense shields mod you mentioned isn't even a blanket health pool. It has bleedthrough, heat and shield redirection mechanics to make it more interesting. If that kind of thing were to be implemented, it could be fun, but something like the energy shield mod has never been fun, at least for me personally. I've not heard of Cython's before so I can't speak on it.

By "shield redirection", I mean redirecting the strength of your shields to different sectors of your ship. For example, redirecting shield power to the front.

It's 10k in the future... And you already have jump drives and more. Childish excuse

Jump drives and grav gens are only there for gameplay reasons

It's 10000 years in the future, that's true. But the Space Engineers spent those years in cryo. Not inventing!

it's a fictional setting anyways - the sanctity to realism is moot. I get the want to keep an aesthetic and design ethos, but invoking realism or arbitrary development milestones carries little weight.

In se1, the meta is always in favour of agile small ships, on mp servers it was like this: build a small cube with a railgun and destroy everything. It need buff artillery guns (it still limits the capabilities of capital ships) or add shields (at least so that they only reduce damage, not block completely). Meta in Se1 right now just terrible(

unless you attack in a team, so i don't see the problem.

why would a small ship damage easy a big ship anyway?

@Maurice: Yep, a good point. On the other side a small ship made in SE1 hardly damage on a larger ship or station even without shields. On the other side in SE2 there is no "small ship" in that way anymore, you can use any weapons on them as well, only the size of them could be a problem. :D

If you have decent shields it can also allow the smaller ship to survive longer. Also I'm going to ask where you got your numbers as well. If you catch your foes with their pants down and/or have superior tactics, builds, and so on, you will win. If the only difference is them having a shield and you not having one and that alone makes the difference, it means you're not at the level you think you are and need to adjust. As always with shields if you don't like them you don't have to use them. Stick the option in game and leave it off by default, then those who want them can use them and those who don't like them don't have to use them. Just like people who enjoy meteors can turn them on, same with lightning damage. Shields hurt no one purely by existing.

@Maurice, @Balmung: Smalls aren't going to take a huge-ship in 1v1 easily (if at all), but a good pilot with a good design can either target specific points to degrade a larger ship's function, or inflict wildly disproportionate damage when left to point-defenses if bigger ships draw attention away from the small (been in a few group-events where I got a last-minute invitation and didn't have time to get the stuff for a proper large-grid together). Shields typically prevent precision-strikes from ships of any size until someone's burned through the ammo to bring them down, and smalls have a hard time with enduring that long due to limited ammo/fuel.

@captainbladej52: I'm fairly certain Frumpkin's numbers come from whatever server they've been on that allows ships to have multi-million hp shields on large-grids, or shields that regenerate thousands of hitpoints a second on a large-grid. Sadly that isn't a short list of potential servers as far as I know so your guess is as good as mine.

Also, we are all well aware of the fact that "SE1 isn't SE2", and that Frumpkin isn't a precog, and that you think its a skill/design/tactics issue when someone can't fit 18,000L of ammo in the cargo of their small-grid fighter along with the fuel to last long enough to fire it all to eat through a large-grid shield while evading return fire from something a few orders of magnitude larger than the fighter. It doesn't change the fact that Frumpkin is right by all currently observable data, unless you have some ideas for balancing the shield mechanic you'd like to share that aren't just "the host/admin can figure it out". I hate ship-maintenance and would love to hear any ideas for balanced mechanics that also reduce the amount of repairs I need to do.

While I agree that I don't like shields, not for the reason you said. I don't think fighters should be able to 1v1 capitals. I personally just don't like the aesthetic of shields in SE. I prefer the point defense method, as I find it to be much more cinematic and engaging. Shields are kind of just a value go up or down mechanic. Point defense on the other hand provide tactile resistance, and are a primary target in an engagement so once they are destroyed the ship becomes more vulnerable. I agree that always welding stuff up can be tedious, but for me personally I don't find shields to be a satisfying solution.

I only disagree with this because the assumptions of "fighter can only do 5%"

Considering that it's still something that isn't in the game yet and the details only based of of other mods or ideas. It's just not true.

If ship shield HP was only 1 rocket. Your entire argument is invalidated but I get your point. Slightly.

You're in that category of people that severely overthinks it when it comes to shields. All you need to do is define the default settings for total health X, regen rate Y, and power draw Z. Once you have your default settings you leave it up to individual servers to adjust the settings of those things up or down using sliders and/or mods, or outright disable them if you don't like it. Just like meteors, lightning damage, weather and so on. If you don't like the shields you can turn them off. Or they can be off by default and then I turn them on. No one is hurt purely by the feature existing.

I didn't used to think things through like that, but then I played online games with people who had no interest in "balance", "fair", or often enough even "rules", because they knew their reputation wouldn't follow them past the "change your screen-name" page, and I learned to think like that. Funny how that works.

As for "nobody being hurt by the feature existing", you missed my point entirely. Shields are cool, but they need to be carefully balanced by default, be it either via the design of the shield mechanic itself, or by the inclusion of other mechanics. If hosts and admins need to take the time to think major features like shields through the same way I do before running a server for some casual fun, then the feature is better off left to the modders or whoever else is willing to put in the time and consideration.

@Tael: If a server owner can't take all of 5 minutes to configure settings for their server and make sure it's how they and their community want to play, they have no business running a server. It would be like my saying I hate meteor storms yet left them on in the settings. That's my own fault on that one, not that of the game. If you can take the time to decide if you want to use the 1x welding speed or 2x, whether you want a higher cargo capacity, weather, and so on, you can take a minute to decide if you want shields and to set a couple of sliders. Suggesting otherwise is a copout. Just like you build your deck for games like Pokemon, Yugioh, MTG, set your class in CoD, or similar, you define the settings for your server.

The only valid way to balance in a block building game like SE if you don't want a headache for yourself is to balance around individual block performance and shipping it off to players. In my case I created the DuraMax armor mod which is 3 tiers of armor beyond vanilla light and vanilla heavy. When creating the heaviest variant I had to sit down and decide how many shots I wanted it to be able to tank from each weapon type before it broke. Take the gatling gun as one example. Did I want it to take 20 shots before it broke, or maybe 50, or 100+. From there I set the values for damage from the weapon and health of the block accordingly. If I set a basic heavy duramax cube to take 100 shots from the gatling and the gatling fired at 1 shot per second (yes I know it's actually faster), then for purposes of discussion it would take 100 seconds to break that cube using a single gatling. From there it's an arms race on the side of the players. the guy defending can add more armor so it takes longer for the gatling break through to internals, and the guy attacking can bring more gatlings to get through the armor faster. If it takes 100 seconds to break a cube with a single gatling, it would take only 50 seconds to break it with 2 gatlings. If I bring 4 gatlings it now takes 25 seconds. If I bring 10 gatlings it now takes 10 seconds to break that cube. If you balance around anything other than singular block performance you're doing it wrong.

For shields you balance them by defining how much total health you want them to grant X, you then define how much regen you want them to have Y, and how much power draw it takes to get there in Z, then adjust the stats accordingly. Once you've defined the default it's not a player problem. They can adjust up/down as desired or turn it off. If an admin isn't capable of defining basic server settings then they have no business being an admin. Not everyone likes to play with the same stuff which is why different servers can have different settings, and mods can fill in gaps. If "leave it to the modders" is the new standard because folks can't tick an extra box or move a slider or 2, we may as well stop all development going forward and tell folks to just "mod it in." Again you're overthinking what's required to balance shields or any block for that matter.

balance in the game should be by default, and if people don't like it they are free to go to mod servers with customisation, but a good meta should always come first. In se1 big ships are just mobile bases. Shields will add a new ship criterion - power generation of the ship, small ships just can't afford to put shields. Capital ships will become an important part of the game, especially with the improved se2 physics. Pvp servers in se will no longer be a stuffy place just for dogfights of boring ships

I agree with Tael and Plandra, shields should have some balance and interesting mechanics by default.

@captainbladej52 It would seem you are erroneously equating balance with arbitrary settings. Anyone can move sliders around to arbitrary values for shield settings, that someone has decided on these values does not mean they are balanced.

-I've seen games where shield regeneration was based off of ship power-output, everything even vaguely pvp-viable was a large-grid brick of large reactors wrapped in guns.

-I've seen games where shield-power was a function of block-count, and so the only pvp-viable ships were beefy small-grids with the thrust to evade most shots while still having the shield to tank several simultaneous large-grid rail hits.

-And I’ve seen games where shields were a static bonus, and everything was just the biggest shield-generator wrapped in a gravity-drive and guns and nothing else, because evasion made the shield last longer, and the buffer was big enough that you could reliably just jump out before the shields failed, and anything extra was just dead weight that reduced your evasion.

Each time there was only one possible design with one singular strategy that was capable of winning. There was effectively no variation from one player to the next, and anyone not using that design and that strategy was guaranteed to lose because the shield had no balance. In a game about building and destruction a block/mod isn’t balanced because it has had arbitrary values assigned to it, its balanced because its inclusion creates more viable builds and strategies than it negates. The shield as you have currently proposed here isn’t balanced, it negates far more options than it creates, and until something is changed to balance it a shield is a bad idea.

And before you repeat the “if you don’t like it then you can turn it off” statement again for the umpteenth time like it resolves all arguments, it can easily be turned around as “if you do like it then you can enable the mod”.

If you insist on continuing, please come up with ways to balance the shield.

@Tael I was thinking about something to balance. Could you give me your opinion.

The idea was a weapon that fits ships of every size, that cannot cause damage to blocks/grids but that has the aim to "overload/overheat" shields independently from grid's available energy.

The only difference is made for station/static grids that are in contact with a planet or asteroid, they can equip a disperser that slow down the overloading effect through voxels.

Obviously because a static base cannot escape combat as a ship could do.

This will give the possibility to get enough time to call reinforcement to protect your carrier or to escape combat, without damaging any block

@captainbladej52 You miss something most important. Once you decide shields are in you need to balance other mechanics around it. Weapon damage magnitude, weapon damage type, weapon projectile speed, power generation block efficiency, fuel material latent energy, etc. All of these get balanced around the "vanilla" shield values.

Anyone changing shield values either winds up with an unbalanced mess or needs to rebalanced all those components. It's better left alone at that point which means shields are the defects way to play the game which many players do not like.

Ultimately this is a decision for Keen now. Enough voted for the idea that it will now get explored and maybe implemented. Will I abandon SE2 because of this? Probably not but who knows, it depends on the implementation. I do feel that shields and the inevitable energy weapons will make SE feel like too many other Sci Fi genre games and less unique.

I really wish we had a downvote option so Keen could see the relative enthusiasm for some of these proposals.

@Federico Peruzzo That would be a possible way to help balance them, though exactly how well it does would likely be dependent on both how the shields are designed and how the weapon functioned against them. If it knocks them down too fast then we'll be asking "why have shields at all", too slowly and the shields would still risk invalidating too many other possible builds and strategies.

As for carriers and bases... bases I can see calling for help thematically (though typically not in modern/sci-fi settings given response-times vs surprise bombing-run times) as resisting siege while waiting for help was more or less the intended purpose of old castles and forts. Carriers on the other hand are already effectively their own fleet, and should probably rely more on an escort ship and/or keeping a defensive fighter-screen than a shield.

It would also be advisable to consider additional balance mechanics to ensure the shield/anti-shield blocks aren't inadvertently made in to a minimum requirement for pvp that can only be accessed relatively late game.

The best I've come up with so far wouldn't be shields so much as deflector-emitters, reducing damage from a particular direction but not negating it, and needing to be placed in a relatively exposed portion of a ship's exterior where they can be subsequently disabled or destroyed by precision/concentrated fire. A full omni-directional shell would need 6, you can have redundant emitters but they add no benefit, still consume power, and have a warmup time to keep someone from just using a script to instantly switch fresh ones on mid-fight while avoiding the extra power-cost. Unfortunately I can't think of a good way to solve the tech-gate without involving tier'd-tech (which is its own issue).

@Tael Your concept of deflector-emitters might be the best implementation possible given the simplicity of the idea, the unique balance considerations, and the fact that it would avoid it being the all-powerful defensive play. With proper limitations, any energy shielding tech should be a trade off that one might not want to engage with and still be viable.

@Tael: The only person failing to see something here is you as you're making several erroneous claims yourself. The only thing Keen needs to do for shields is defined the default values for total health, regen rate, and power draw. From there they ship it off to plays and allow people to adjust the values up or down with sliders and/or mods or turn them off. Yet you're acting like everyone across the entirety of the community would be forced to use the exact same settings and that's not even remotely how it works. Different servers will use different settings for shields for their worlds just like servers do with other features already. Server A may keep them as is, Server B might buff them, Server C might nerf them, and Server D may turn them off entirely. In that instance all 4 of them get to play with shields how they like. The ability of servers B and C to adjust the strength of shields up or down in no way harms server A or server D as the only people effected are those on servers B and C respectively.

If you think server B buffing shields would make them unbalanced, you're certainly entitled to that opinion. Your solution is to not play on server B. I know it's hard to imagine but yes different servers use different settings and not all of them are the same. That's the entire point of having the ability to change settings. I run around with an armor mod I created in SE1 where my strongest armor is 11x the strength of vanilla heavy armor. If I double stack the armor that's the equivalent of 22 layers of vanilla heavy armor. Some may call that unbalanced and they're entitled to think that. Their solution is to not use my armor mod and not to play on worlds where my armor mod is in use. What they don't get to do is tell me or others we're not allowed to use my armor because they think it's too strong. Complaining that others could use sliders to give shields "arbitrary numbers that could make them unbalanced" when it has zero effect on them is like the people that make fun of other players for "being too scared to play with lightning damage on" or similar.

The difference between you and me here is I'm saying people like yourself would and should have the ability to alter the shields or disable them if you don't like them. You on the other hand are saying no one should be allowed the option at all because you don't like them. If you don't like them, then change them or disable them just like you would anything else. If you can tick a box to turn them off but you don't, then you have no right to complain.

@Gregory Jennings: I've already explained to you why you're wrong in saying you have to balance everything around the existence of the shields and why that's a non-issue. No amount of you wishing otherwise makes you correct. As I explained before you CAN balance around the existence of shields and take them into account when setting values for the health and durability values of blocks. However you're by no means required to do so. Again I've been creating content for games for 20 years, I know how to balance things. Whether one likes said balance is another story.

A shield again is an overbar of health that you either have or you don't. If you have it then you benefit from the extra health/protection. If you don't have it then you stick with the baseline values for health/protection. Regardless of whether shields exist or not, they still have to set default values of health for blocks. Such as our basic armor cube being one example. That cube still needs to have a default value for its health regardless of whether shields exist or not. Yet you're behaving like the only time it matters is when shields enter the picture, and that's again not how that works. You're so desperate to be right that like Tael you're behaving like everyone is forced to use the exact same values universally for their worlds on every single feature and they're not. If you want to take shields into account it's as simple as having 2 lines for stats and slapping a couple lines in to check if shields are present in the world. If they're present all blocks use X for their stats. If no shields are present all blocks use Y for their stats. This is basic coding 101.

As I also explained to Tael above, different servers will use different settings for different features and not all servers/worlds are the same. I know that's a shocker to you that not everyone plays like you do or has the desire to play like you do, but you are not the arbiter of what is balanced or not. As I explained to Tael, let's say you have 4 different servers. Server A may keep the shields at the default Keen values, Server B may buff them using sliders and/mods, Server C may nerf them using sliders and/or mods, and Server D may disable them outright. All 4 servers are able to exist simultaneously and play how they please without any of the 4 having an impact on the other. The only way for someone who hates shields to be effected by them is if they choose to visit servers where they're in use. In which case you don't get to complain if you do.

Whining that others can change the values to something that's "unbalanced" in your book and saying that's why shields shouldn't exist is like complaining that other people can choose to play without meteor storms, or like complaining that I disabled ammo racking in my worlds. Stay in your own lane and worry about yourself instead of trying to dictate that I shouldn't be allowed a feature purely because you don't like it.

As I said to Tael, the difference between you and me is I'm saying people should have the option and can adjust it to their liking, or even disable it if they wish. No one is forced to use shields if they don't want them. You on the other hand are trying to gatekeep a community from a feature because you don't like it. We're not the same dude. Your solution to shields is not to use them if you don't like them. You're certainly free to dislike them, but that alone is not valid reason enough as to why the hundreds of thousands of others who do like them shouldn't be allowed to have them.

@captainbladej52 Everyone else has been polite to you, either you will return the courtesy when you post, or we will get the mods involved. Just because someone disagrees with what you want is not an excuse to start degrading others with insults and accusations.

You have thus far only repeated that your idea that balance is simply someone being able to set their own rules. I disagree, and it is now plainly apparent that we are not capable of seeing eye to eye on this matter. Similarly, I strongly suspect anyone else who dislikes shields will also never agree with you for more or less the same reasons. Some will agree with you, some wont, you have made your case, and I have made mine, unless one of us has something new to add I would think it best if we both kept quiet so that others may be heard.

@captainbladej52 I must agree with Tael's last post in that there is no reason to become so uncivil over a mechanics disagreement. Neither Tael or I have made erroneous claims or failed to grasp things, we simply see things in a different light.

My last comment on this will be that I believe you are over simplifying the issue while asking for the creation of a system that will be more complex for the end users. If things are not fully balanced in vanilla then Keen will be the one blamed for poor balance, unfinished systems, or poor design choices. Each feature needs to be fully fleshed out, not just a set of value sliders for an additional health pool.

Shields in a game like this must be more than a boost to armor hit points. They need to account for build cost, powering cost, and other dynamics. Each of those will have impacts further down the like as I mentioned previously. This isn't like adding a shield to a character in Action game or shields to craft in a basic space fighter sim. In those games you aren't building the system from the ground up in game. You don't need to worry about shield component material cost and how the base resources will be consumed for energy for those shields. They are as you describe, a simple additional health pool. That is not how such a system would work here of done right.

If they do it, I hope they put a lot of thought and effort into it so it's not just a few sliders I can adjust and hope get balanced. It should be an engineering challenge that makes me think about pros and cons. It should be woven into all the other systems considerations, otherwise it is just a gimmicky add on.

@Tael: I'm sorry dude but nah we're not playing that game. You don't get to attack others first then hide behind the gaslight of "no need to be hostile bro." You started off by saying others were wrong and now you want to play victim.

Second, I know it's hard to imagine, but yes individual servers get to set their own rules for how they want balance to work and what kind of settings they want to use for their worlds. If they want to use non-default settings, they're allowed to do that. If they want to use stock default settings for everything, they're allowed to do that. If they want to use 100+ mods or just a singular mod, they're allowed to do that. If they want to use a mod to completely rewrite how parts of the game like combat is handled such as Weaponcore, they're allowed to do that. And yes people are allowed to play with mods and settings you believe to be unbalanced. Keen has long established that community ran servers are free to do as they please when it comes to customizing the game to their liking, and thousands of servers do it daily.

Trying to argue that the entirety of the community shouldn't be allowed shields because you think they're unbalanced is like trying to say people shouldn't be allowed to put ketchup on pizza because you think it tastes bad. If you think ketchup on pizza is bad, your solution is to not put ketchup on your pizza and leave everyone else to eat their pizza how they please. Likewise your solution to disliking shields is to adjust/mod them, or simply not use them. I despise most food systems in games because almost every single one of them is a carbon copy "eat/drink this or die" with absolutely no benefits to interacting with the system. Should a food system come to the game in that form, I would likely disable it because it's not to my liking. Thus the food people get their feature, and I don't have to deal with it. It's no different than my disabling ammo racking because I hate that mechanic. Folks who want it can have it and I don't have to use it.

The entire argument is centered around what the default values for a prospective shield should be should one be implemented. We can debate what those default settings and costs should be, but that's the entire point. If you don't like the default values for any block, be it shields, the strength of armor blocks, how strong weapons like the railgun are, or so on, you can adjust the blocks to your liking. I created my own tiers of armor that are far stronger than vanilla armors because I dislike the strength of current SE1 armors. The weakest is 7x the strength of vanilla light armor and weighs a little less, medium armor is 7x the strength of vanilla heavy, and heaviest variant is 11x strength of vanilla heavy and slightly heavier. Some like the balance I've set for the armor, some think it's OP. The people who think it's OP don't use it, and the people who like to use it do. Saying all shields would be OP is like saying prospective higher armor tiers are automatically going to be OP purely because my custom armors exist. It's a non-argument and a bad one at that.

I get it that you don't like shields, as you're free to dislike them. That said you've not produced a valid argument against them from a mechanical standpoint. The only thing you've shown is a need to make sure all parts of them are adequately accessible for adjustments so folks can change overall health they give, their regen rate, their power draw, the component costs of the block and so on.

@Gregory Jennings: See above to Tael, you have in fact made some erroneous arguments. You're assuming that all servers are forced to use the exact same settings and that all servers are the same, and they're not. Each server is allowed to customize the game to their liking by altering already existing settings, and/or using mods on top of it if they wish. If you think Server A is unbalanced, then you may wish to check out Server B. This doesn't mean Server A has done anything wrong, it means you're not their target audience. Servers are allowed to alter the settings in game to their liking, even if you personally think it's unbalanced. Thousands of servers exist side by side in game right now that all use different settings with no issues. Keen has long established that servers are free to customize to their liking. If they want to use pure default they can, if they want to rewrite entire parts of the game with something like Weaponcore combat changes, they can. Keen has only ever changed something for a balance purpose twice since 2016. First was when they buffed default hydrogen tank capacity. The second was when they changed the spool up time for safe zones from 20 seconds to 120 seconds. Yet even then Keen never hardcoded it, meaning people can change hydrogen tanks back to their original values, and change the spool up time of the safe zones back to 20 seconds on their worlds if they want.

As for balance with a game like SE, the only way they can safely balance things is setting default values for individual block performance, then shipping it off to players to adjust to their liking. Because they can account for what individual block A does to block B and so forth. Otherwise there is an infinite number of possible block combinations they would have to account for, and there is no way to do so. Do they balance around builds that are 1000 blocks total? What about builds that are 5k block? Or what about 1m blocks?

As for your comments around build cost, power cost, and similar, that applies equally to every block in the game and isn't unique to shields. When creating a large grid large reactor as one example in SE1 they had to define how many components it took, how much power it can generate at peak, how much space it took up and so on. Once they set those defaults, people were free to alter the power output, component costs, and the like as they saw fit. Likewise with a shield, if you thought the power cost was too low, component cost was too low, or both, those are easy changes. If it takes 100 MW to keep the shield running, you can change the SBC to take 2 gigawatts if you want. If you think component costs are too low, you can raise them by changing the SBC. If you want them to take a custom component that's tough as nails to get, you can create a component with simple copy pasting of SBCs and slap that into the block. Would take about 5 to 10 minutes.

What you're failing to see is that each server already had to define what settings they're going to use, and not all of them will play with the settings YOU think they should. They're allowed to play with things you consider unbalanced, just as you're allowed to play with things I consider unbalanced. I hate ammo racking so I turned it off. If you like it you're free to use it.

What you've done is prove my point that different people will alter the shield to their liking or disable it. I'm all for having something like shield facings similar to STO or Defense Shields now. However that doesn't have to be there the moment they go live. You can get a basic model done first then fire it out the door. Everything you've said has easy fixes that take no time at all. Especially the fact that people who don't like shields could just turn them off, just like I would likely turn off a food system, or people leave meteor storms off if they don't like them. Yet you're acting like everyone is forced to use the same settings and they're not.

@captainbladej52 I am not the victim.

-You are wrong in how you've treated Gregory Jennings, as well as the generally toxic behavior you've recently shown this board.

-You are wrong in saying that anyone who can't balance a pivotal combat-mechanic shouldn't run a server.

-You are wrong in straw-manning every argument that disagrees with you in to "nobody should be allowed to play any way except this singular way", <dadjoke> and enough with all the straw-men, those things are a fire-hazard </dadjoke>.

And if you don't like people disagreeing with you or calling out your poor behavior, then I invite you to get the board's moderators involved. It's your choice, either we can all be respectful and polite, or we can get the mods involved.

If you want to mod things on your server, go for it, the only people that care what you do to the rules and balance on your server are the people playing on your server.

If you want to enable and disable and tweak every single stat, mechanic, and visual in the game, go for it, the only people that care what you do to the rules and balance on your server are the people playing on your server.

If you want to start a topic asking Keen to set up some special code-space that they'll leave alone so that future patches/updates don't overwrite and/or break mods, go for it, I will up-vote and post to help you get keen to make it happen.

Those of us that don't want shields aren't saying that everyone who does want them shouldn't have them. We just want the game's default "click play and go" settings balanced such that instead of the one monolithic meta shields always produce, there are instead a variety of viable designs and strategies ranging from battleship fleets throwing huge broadsides to dogfights and ace-pilots trench-running larger targets.

@Tael: For someone who says you're not a victim you're certainly acting like you want to be one. Second, I post where I please and do not require you permission to post here. If you don't want to risk responses you don't like, don't post on a publicly visible forum. Third, the only person who is strawmaning anything here is yourself.

What you refuse to understand is you are not the arbiter of what is balanced and what isn't and not everyone plays like you or wants to play like you. You're allowed to dislike shields, but your dislike of them alone is not a valid reason as to why hundreds of thousands of people who DO like them should be denied the feature. Especially when you can TURN THEM OFF like you would with thruster damage, lightning damage, the economy system, the jetpack or a host of other features.

You're behaving like all servers are forced or should be forced to use the same settings. The only thing Keen does is define default values then lets servers alter it from there. If you can't take all of 5 minutes to decide what kinds of settings you want, then yes you don't need to be playing. Different servers have different settings and it's highly uncommon for 2 servers to be the exact same. Different servers use different settings and lists of mods daily. You are responsible for the settings on your server. You sit here and say "well we're not saying you shouldn't have it" when yes in fact you are. You're making all these excuses as to why no one should be allowed the feature as vanilla all because "they're unbalanced" or "people shouldn't have to balance it themselves." It's the same circular argument that was said about the new weapons in Warfare 2 "disrupting balance" because now people had to learn new weapons. Balance in this game is subjective outside of very specific egregious examples.

Your arguments fail because "muh pvp balance" can be applied to any potential new features and be said to disrupt pvp balance if one tries hard enough. Someone wants radar, nope can't have it because it makes it easier to find someone's base. Someone wants new weapons, nope can't have them because they could be OP. Someone wants to have stronger armor tiers, nope can't have it because it's not fair to the people who don't have it. The "but muh pvp balance" can also be used to justify taking features we already have now. Someone wants to change the welding speed for their server, nope can't do that because it could give certain builds an advantage. Someone wants to change anything from default, nope can't do that because then they could use "unbalanced" values. Someone wants to use mods or download a blueprint, nope can't do that because they could download something "unbalanced". So by your logic we may as well stop all development and just "mod it in".

Trying to say "shields are OP so they shouldn't be in game" is like saying you hate ketchup on pizza so no one should be allowed to put ketchup on pizza. Your solution is to simply not put ketchup on pizza if you don't like the taste. Likewise your solution is to not play on servers that use shields. Thus the hundreds of thousands of people who like shields can have a feature they like, and you don't have to be effected by it. Otherwise if you choose to play on a server that uses something like shields or any other feature you don't like, you have no right to whine and complain because you chose to put yourself in that situation.

You're allowed to say you dislike shields and that's perfectly fine and something I have no issue with. The issue is trying to assert no one else should have them because you personally don't like it when you can just turn it off. Just like aerodynamics, food systems, hurt no one purely by existing, neither do shields. If you can take a few minutes to look over settings and alter stuff like PCU being on or not, how much PCU on a server, whether you want to use thruster damage or similar, you can decide what you want to do with shields, or have someone help you get it to where you want, or just disable them. Simply because Keen puts a feature or block in the game doesn't require you to use said feature or block. I don't use pistons or rotors 99% of the time, but I'm not demanding they be removed. I hate ammo racking so I turned it off for myself and people who like it can use it. Point blank aside from saying you dislike shields, all your arguments are rendered void by the fact you could turn them off.

@captainbladej52 Wow... where to start...

-You should probably lay off the whole victim thing, not only is it nonsensical, but the phrasing you chose there would legally qualify as a threat in some jurisdictions. While you are quite plainly neither threatening nor likely capable of carrying threats out, the possibility that someone could construe otherwise is absolutely a can of worms you don't want opened.

-I don't believe I've said you need my permission to post anywhere. All I've said is that if you refuse to be polite and respectful in your discussions with others on this board, then I'll get the board's moderators involved. If you don't like it, then I invite you to get the board's moderators involved, because we both need their permission to post here and as such they do have the power and authority to decide if one, both, or neither of us is in the wrong.

-I am absolutely not an arbiter of balance, just an advocate for it in multiplayer games.

-At the time of my typing this there are 192 votes on this topic, which puts you approximately 199,808 votes shy of having hundreds of thousands of people wanting shields. And because I've read some of your other posts I am fairly certain you are about to reference the number of subs to one or more SE1 shield-mods and suggest they are all individual people waiting for SE2 that want shields, I should like to point out that by that same logic all of the several million people that own a copy of SE1 and aren't subbed to a shield-mod are waiting for SE2 and don't want shields. Both arguments of course neglect the number of people that have a shield-mod because at some point in time they joined a shield-server and had it automatically downloaded, only to then decide they didn't like it but didn't un-sub when they left the server (I am one of them), and the number of people who bought SE but later stopped playing, and the number of people who don't care one way or the other and just happened to have or not have a mod subbed. So, if you feel like playing the "hundreds of thousands of people want this" argument again without having hundreds of thousands of votes on this topic, I will play the "millions who don't" argument again, because both arguments possess a similar level of accuracy.

-You can download a shield-mod just as easily as I can turn one off. Difference is nobody I know of has ever demonstrated a balanced shield system in SE, and "the host can adjust it for how their players will want to play" isn't balance, it’s just trying hide that nobody can produce a shield system balanced enough to avoid creating one singular combat meta by suggesting that a game's host is somehow capable of doing so. People can play how they want, but the game needs vanilla to be balanced enough to create a wide variety of options so that they can learn what they like and how best to make it happen, and that isn’t likely to happen with shields pushing a horribly unbalanced meta.

-Telling you "You can play how you want and mod your game to your heart's content, but the game needs to be balanced so as to allow other people a variety of options in default vanilla" is telling you "You aren't allowed to play how you want and players are only allowed to play one singular way"... that you think that is a you problem, I don't know a anything I could reasonably do or say would solve that. I wish you the best of luck in figuring it out.

-If they found a way to add a properly new weapon or other feature to the game in a way that didn't reduce the total number of possible viable builds and strategies once a month every month from now until they released SE3, I would be concerned about eventually overwhelming new players, but would otherwise find it extremely cool. Change in a game is fine so long as things are still balanced enough to allow a variety of options afterward.

-Since you seem set on repeating that argument over and over again, I may as well repeat its equivalent here: "All your arguments are rendered void by the fact that you can mod shields in."

So, until you or someone else successfully produces a balanced shield-system for default vanilla, something that doesn't reduce pvp to "play this one meta or you are guaranteed to lose" and instead allows for a variety of options for play-styles and builds without someone having to change the server-settings from their default, I will continue to say shields can't be balanced and that putting them in to the vanilla game is a bad idea.

But it's not even close to "play this one meta or you are guaranteed to lose". Lol arguments here are too childish to even respond.

It's 10k years in the future. We'll have force Fields. Bet.

Are you aware of a shield-mod that doesn't eventually push a server's pvp-population in to a cavalcade of virtually identical ships and strategies?

The stipulation of "is should probably not encourage a singularity of build/gameplay/combat styles" sounds like a pretty valid and reasonable stipulation to me. I'm all for the idea of shields, but definitely agree that it can't encourage that singularity.

Some of y'all need to take a breath and actually read what people are saying.

Your argument is low IQ. On the verge of a 9 year olds excuse..

Stop bringing up mods. When they were added into SE1 with mods. You have nothing to base your excuses off of.

@BlueBytes Same thing I've told others, I have no problem with you posting your thoughts and ideas here, but you will keep it polite and respectful, or we can get the board's moderators involved.

As for mods, nobody cares what gets modded in because mods are not pushed on everyone. What people care about is the default vanilla game, and in my case that there be a diversity of options that I don't think shields will allow.

why wait. let's get the moderators involved now.

Sigh... I guess I'll make another reply...

@captainbladej52... Again no erroneous statements have been made, only differences of opinion. Some would rather have shields as a default vanilla option, others as a mod possibility and out of vanilla.

Where you get hung up is assuming everyone is on a server, everyone is interested in playing with options. There is a large community of players that stick to mainly vanilla. There are many who mod and tinker but never join a server or host one.

The vanilla default needs to be for everyone and that means it needs to be balanced and accessible to even those that dont want anything to do with mods, servers, and a bunch of options. Keen needs to make the game work out of the box better than SE1 or they've not really delivered on their stated promises. We can't just wave hands and say "options", "other servers", etc. What is default will define the game for many people.

Additionally to your block balance stance, you are not seeing the whole picture. Each block needs indovidulanbalnce. This is hard enough when you have so many blocks and block pairing options. A system like shields however doesn't call ilfor just shield block balance but cascading balance issues across myriad blocks and systems. If it was just block balancing that would be simple. End of the day with so much balance work and the feel of the game in combat hinging on shield balance if added, I personally prefer that Keen spend their time and resources elsewhere. That is my opinion amd some others agree. Others don't and that's cool. You however are the only one that's been hostile about the difference of opinion. That's not okay in this type of debate and forum. I recommend a bitnof maturity.

@Gregory Jennings: "Again no erroneous statements have been made, only differences of opinion. Some would rather have shields as a default vanilla option, others as a mod possibility and out of vanilla."

Difference of opinion is one thing, but you have made several statements that are factually incorrect. You're allowed to have a difference of opinion, but don't post objectively false information and expect not to be called on it. Even in your most recently reply you still cling to outright incorrect info.

"Where you get hung up is assuming everyone is on a server, everyone is interested in playing with options. There is a large community of players that stick to mainly vanilla. There are many who mod and tinker but never join a server or host one."

What you're failing to see here is that whether it's one person playing on a world by themselves, a guy hosting a server for himself and friends, or someone having a paid for retail server, you still have to specify what settings and features you're going to use. There is no way around it. Some people will choose to use default settings, some will customize them further, some will customize settings AND use mods on top of it. All 3 are valid ways to approach it. If you absolutely do not like a feature such as meteors, lightning damage, thruster damage, economy, or similar, you have the option to turn those features off and not use them. If you think the base PCU default is too restrictive you can dial that up or disable PCU completely. If someone hates shields, they would have option to turn them off. If someone is so helpless they can't even take 5 seconds to tick a box and turn off a feature they say they hate, then that's their own fault and they have no right to complain. People that would whine about shields yet refusing to turn them off is like someone whining about their TV being too loud while having the remote in their hand but refusing to press the volume down button. You're choosing to be helpless purely to complain at that point.

"The vanilla default needs to be for everyone and that means it needs to be balanced and accessible to even those that dont want anything to do with mods, servers, and a bunch of options. Keen needs to make the game work out of the box better than SE1 or they've not really delivered on their stated promises."

Breaking this one into separate parts because there's 2 points that I see here. First up, you and Tael keep using the words "balance/unbalanced" or things like "accessible" but have yet to actually define those words. So I'm going to say the same thing to you as I did him. Define balance. If you're going to say shields would be unbalanced and make all these arguments as to why they shouldn't be a thing, then you clearly have some standard in mind as to what you consider balanced. Otherwise if you refuse to define what you mean by balance then that would tell me you're just looking for excuses to bash shields and no one should take your arguments seriously at all. So, define what you mean by balance since you're arguing against a potential feature for everyone.

Once again to this point, what you're refusing to see is that people are only as helpless as they would choose to be. Folks who want to use default settings are already able to do this and can go into the game right now and fire up a world without ever messing with the options, hosting a server, or downloading mods. Folks who want to customize the game by changing settings and/or using mods can do so. If someone chooses not to look over the defaults and end up with a bunch of things they don't like that's their own fault. If they're unsure of what certain settings do, they can always look it up actually speak up and ask more experienced players "what does this setting do". Heaven forbid people actually show a little initiative. As to whether Keen delivers on their promises or not for SE2, time will tell. Some people will believe they have, others won't.

"We can't just wave hands and say "options", "other servers", etc. What is default will define the game for many people."

And this is where you completely lose the argument for a number of reasons. By saying "we can't just say options and other servers" you're assuming there is one objectively correct way to play and everyone else is doing it wrong. It ignores the fact that yes, there is more than one server out there, and yes there are community servers that exist beyond the official servers, and yes some of them do in fact use different settings than purely the defaults. If the rest of those servers can tick a box to enable/disable features they like/dislike, use sliders to alter different settings, or even download mods if that's their thing, other prospective players can do it too. If they need help it can be given to them. People are only as helpless as they choose to be.

As much as you don't like it, if you hate shields, your solution is to turn them off. Just like I despise Weaponcore for a number of reasons as well as PCU. So my solutions are to play on worlds/servers that do not use Weaponcore or PCU. Otherwise little Timmy doesn't get to march onto little Johnny's world/server and tell Johnny he has to turn off Weaponcore and PCU because he doesn't like it. That's not how that works. If you can take the time to spin up a world and tell the game what world type you want, gameplay type and so on, you can take the extra 5 minutes or so to look over your settings and decide what you want to use/not use, and if you can't be bothered then you don't need to complain. If you know by sticking to defaults it will enable settings you don't like, yet you go with defaults anyways, you've lost your right to complain. Just like people who whine about the difficulty of certain games yet refuse to turn the difficulty down even though they have the option.

The entire point of SE is that it's a sandbox game. If you want to build a gothic castle you can do that. If you want to build a European castle you can do that. If you want to build a sci-fi type castle you can do that. All of them are valid. Simply because one chooses to build gothic instead of sci-fi doesn't make goth guy wrong or vice versa. The goth guy asking for more goth options doesn't take away from the sci-fi guy, nor does the sci-fi guy asking for options take away from the goth guy as it's not mutually exclusive. Not every update is going to be made with every person in mind as you can't please everyone. Just because the game adds some sci-fi stuff for the sci-fi guy doesn't mean the goth guy is now required to use it, or vice versa.

"Additionally to your block balance stance, you are not seeing the whole picture. Each block needs indovidulanbalnce. This is hard enough when you have so many blocks and block pairing options. A system like shields however doesn't call ilfor just shield block balance but cascading balance issues across myriad blocks and systems."

And this is where you are just plain objectively wrong. The only thing you even remotely got right was saying that blocks are individually balanced, which is something I already said. Where you're wrong is how that takes place and what's required to get there. I've been creating content for various games for over 20 years now and from a programming standpoint you're DRASTICALLY overthinking it. I've already explained alot of this to you, but it seems I must do so again.

Anytime you create a block, be it something like a shield, a weapon, or even a basic armor cube, you have to define the stats for the block and what it does. You define how it mounts to other blocks, the function of the block, and its stats. As part of the stats for a weapon, I tell the game what kind of weapon it is, what kind of ammo it uses, how much damage that weapon does, how fast it fires, how much power it takes to do so and down the line. These are simple stats in an SBC file that can easily be changed. When creating something such as the vanilla heavy armor cube, Keen had to sit down and decide how many shots they wanted it to withstand from each weapon type. How many shots from a single gatling it takes to break the block, how many rockets, autocannon hits, assault or arty cannon shells, how many hits from a railgun and so on. If they wanted it take 50 gatling hits and to take 25 seconds break the cube, they would set the damage and fire rate of the gatling the appropriate settings, and make sure the block's health matched. Once they've set those numbers those blocks are done and don't need to mess with settings beyond that.

When creating my own custom thrusters and jump drive I had to decide how I wanted them to scale far as their stats. For the thruster I had to decide how much thrust I wanted it to provide, how much power I wanted it to take (electrical thruster), and how much influence a planet can have on its thrust. Meaning can a planet cause it to not perform as well similar to ions being bat guano in atmo. If people go over a certain weight threshold, the effectiveness of the thruster will not be as good and they will need further thrusters. For the Jump Drives, I had to decide how far I wanted my Jump Drives to be able to go at their maximum effectiveness, how much weight they can transport before they start to lose effectiveness, how much power they require to execute a jump, and how long they take to charge. To keep the numbers simple, let's assume my small grid jump drive can carry a mass of 100k kilos up to 1k km before it starts to lose effectiveness. Anything under the 100k will get the full range benefit. If I want to move something heavier than the 100k and still maintain a 1k km jump range, I would need to add extra drives according to the amount of missing range, which is simple math. Should I ever decide I want to buff the range of my modded jump drives by a factor of 10, all I have to do is go into the SBC and add a zero to the end of the max distance number, save it and go.

As the modder in that situation, all I can do is define the defaults for my jump drive or thruster. I have no way of accounting for every single build that could ever exist. So I can only set defaults and leave it up to the players to figure out how many of my jump drives or thrusters they need for their goals and let them do the engineering. Hence the whole purpose of the game. Just as I can't account for every build type that could ever exist, Keen can't either. All that can be done at the modder level or studio level like Keen is setting single block defaults as I explained and letting players do the engineering to figure out how much of what they need to accomplish their goals. Either myself (mod) or Keen (vanilla) provide the basic blocks, the players then use however many they need. If I wanted to do a modded reactor, I have to decide how much power I want it to supply and how much fuel it takes (if applicable). Outside of setting basic stats for singular blocks that's all I have to do. So yes, it really is just balancing singular blocks and shipping them off. Energy Shields are functionally the same as armor, the only differences are their form as well as resources needed to maintain them. An armor block stopping 25 gatling shots and having to be repaired with physical components is no different than a shield stopping 25 gatling shots and repairing using power. You're still burning something to repair either one, the question is just what and how much of it.

@captainbladej52

-Ballance pvp feature we've tried to explain several times, you've even referenced our descriptions of it once or twice. At this point you are either refusing to or incapable of understanding, but I holding that against a pve player would be a bit silly.

-"If they're unsure of what certain settings do, they can always look it up actually speak up and ask more experienced players "what does this setting do". Heaven forbid people actually show a little initiative." Isn't a great argument to make for a game many people will give their children who may not have the same level or reading comprehension as you do, or in in light of what happens if you go ask a question on how to play in League of Legends chat.

-"Options" and "other servers" is just pushing work on to other people who may not understand the concept of pvp balance any better than you do and who lack access to Keen's development team and army of testers (us) to figure it out. The game needs its default to be for everyone, people changing their own rules comes once they have the experience to know what they are doing.

-Here you are just erroneously conflating arbitrarily setting stats with balance, they are not the same. While it is true that nobody is going to bend space and time to describe everything that will ever be built and tell Keen how to make it all perfectly balanced, they will still give it their best attempt, and the army of people here testing will point out to them where they messed up, and what needs fixing, and it will repeat until they've removed any easy meta and release the game in full, and then they'll still keep an eye on it incase the player-base finds another one. Shields are an easy meta, lots of people will help you add them in, but they can't be part of the default vanilla game because the lack of balance they cause would break pvp.

And what's stopping you from turning them off should they ever be implemented save your own unwillingness to do so? It's no different than people that don't want to play with thruster damage, economy or similar. Your dislike alone is not a valid reason the hundreds of thousands of others who do want it shouldn't be allowed to have it. Realism also went out the window with jump drives, grav gens, artificial mass, and especially the small grid small reactor, not to mention that we don't have a food system or similar. You're allowed to like whatever you like or dislike, but I'm so tired of these bogus arguments that try to constantly cite realism "and I just don't like it" as reasons everyone else should have to go without it when you can just turn it off. Not to mention the whole "it just stains that atmosphere of the game" stinks of elitism.

I despise almost all food systems, yet I would simply turn it off and/or mod it if I don't like it. Shields hurt no one purely by existing unlike something such as a Jump Inhibitor would.

Firstly: if I alone dislike it and everyone else wants it, including Keen, I don't expect them to not implement it. I'm just expressing my opinion that I think it would ruin a lot of stuff. Call me elitist, I don't really care, these are my opinions. That's what this forum is for.

Secondly: the concept of "you can just not use shields" is pretty shortsighted. If you're in a PvP -- or even PvE, really -- situation, and everyone but you is using shields, you will either be slaughtered or be forced to use shields yourself. If Keen develops them in a way where you can entirely participate in combat without shields and keep up with other players who are using shields, then it kind of defeats the point of having shields? In addition, "just not using shields" doesn't change the fact that shields don't really fit in with the mood of the game at all in my opinion, or the fact that I would still be in combat with other people that use shields, which is half of the issue for me. You bring up interesting points about the gravity gen and jump drives, though both of those are theoretically possible given our current knowledge of science, so I don't think this applies.

Note: If they did add an option to disable shields in the world configuration menu, I would be satisfied (begrudgingly).

These are my opinions. You can completely disagree with me, that's totally fine. My individual opinion and your individual opinion are just as valid as any other individual's opinion who wants to play the game -- and I'm certainly not alone in disliking the idea of shields, given plenty of other people's opinions below. I'm not 'ruining it' for everyone else by having my own wishes and desires. Worst comes to worst for you, someone makes a really good shield mod like in SE1 that everyone uses. Worst comes to worst for me, someone makes a mod that disables shields that I use. We both prefer our opinions be in vanilla, and that's fine.

@brights0ng: The pvp balance argument doesn't work here because everything can be said to disrupt pvp balance if you try hard enough. People whined and complained about the new weapons we got in Warfare 2 because they "disrupted pvp" balance. So the balance argument on its own is not valid at all. Not only this but the "it disrupts balance" can also be applied to the ability to use mods and anyone using non-default settings. If people are allowed to change settings at all, or especially download mods, they could use non-default settings that are unbalanced or they could download mods that are OP. Thus we may as well stop all development on the game because it could give people something that is OP.

All Keen can do is specify a default starting point balanced around singular block performance, then ship it off to players to customize to their liking. Some people will like shields as is straight out of the box, some will buff them, some will nerf them, some will outright turn them all. All 4 styles are valid. If you think they're OP you might want to nerf them or turn them off. If you think they're weak you might want to buff them. If you think they're fine you can leave them as is. However saying that the game as a whole shouldn't have shields because you think they're OP is like saying only the people who play without them are playing "correctly". Your preferences in pvp balance are not my concern anymore than my preferences are yours. Outside of egregious examples, balance is subjective and every change to already existing settings, and especially every mod added will alter pvp balance.

With any feature YES you would have the ability to turn it off, just like you would with thruster damage, economy, or a host of other things. From there you're only effected if you choose to be.

I also do not accept the realism argument either as there are plenty of other blocks that violate realism in this game, such as the Jump Drives, Gravity Gens, Artificial Mass, and the worst offender being the small grid small reactor. If folks want true realism then those blocks need to go too. Yet people want them.

Folks aren't ruining anything purely by having opinions or disliking shields. Where it easily gets into that territory is when they demand no one else should be allowed to have the feature purely because they don't like it. I despise most food systems in games which is why I would turn it off most likely, just as I did with ammo racking. Folks who don't like food systems or ammo racking may want to play on my server, and folks who do like those things won't. I am not demanding anti-shielders be forced to play with shields. I'm saying people should have the option and those who want to use them can. Like saying people who like chocolate icecream should be allowed to eat it. Where as some of the more rabid anti-shielders are screaming "no chocolate icecream for you because I don't like it."

@captainbladej52 I did not bring up balancing. I have no doubt Keen/the community can balance shields. My issue is playing with people who use shields, when I dislike them. Unless they balance they game in such a way to enable a player to play without shields against players with shields, then any player in any combat capacity is forced to use shields. Most people in the MP scene don't get to run their own server so they cannot choose to disable shields. I definitely cannot afford to run my own server, they get pricey by my standards. You don't get to "choose to be" affected by a server's rules. And unless they change it up, singleplayer SE is dry.

As for realism: first, the small grid small reactor is hardly a stretch at all. The smallest built reactor to date is the NASA KRUSTY, about the size of a small trash can, and theoretically they could go much smaller (though they would be far less efficient). Second, the aforementioned blocks are also theoretically possible -- or at least have some level of basis in real science, as opposed to shields which are just fantasy (except the artificial mass, though my issue there is that all things should have mass/weight within an artificial gravity generator; certainly a gripe i have with the game).

As for your last claim, my first point above still applies. If SE2 added my little pony as a significant gameplay mechanic (somehow lol this is entirely hypothetical) to the game, I know I would be irritated at the very least. SE2 can't just add mechanics to the game saying "well you can just play without them" because they are still a part of the game. If MLP was added, it would genuinely ruin the atmosphere of the game, even when disabled, as you would always know "canonically, I should be using the MLP rainbow thruster". That's how I feel about shields. Even disregarding the multiplayer aspect, its an officially endorsed part of the game that I feel would ruin the atmosphere. I am NOT demanding they not be in the game; I don't think anyone here is. But if I get to share my opinion, I am going to share my opinion, and I think the game would be worse off with shields.

@brights0ng: -"My issue is playing with people who use shields, when I dislike them."

This right here tells it all. Why are you deliberately playing on servers that use settings you don't like? That's a you problem not a community problem and is not a valid reason everyone else should have to miss out on a feature. If you're confident Keen and the community can balance a shield as you say, Why would you not play on a server using the settings you like? No one is going to hold a weapon to you and tell you "play in this server using shields or else" like something out of a bad Southpark episode. If you don't want to play with shields, then play on a server that doesn't use them. There will be plenty that don't, just as there will be plenty that do. There is no issue unless you deliberately play on a server that has shields in which case you no longer get to complain.

-"As for your last claim, my first point above still applies. If SE2 added my little pony as a significant gameplay mechanic (somehow lol this is entirely hypothetical) to the game, I know I would be irritated at the very least."

I'm glad we can at least agree on our disdain for MLP. That said, if I can turn off the MLP rainbow thruster then it's not going to bother me because I can turn it off and not worry about it and still have that "serious" SE atmosphere on my worlds and servers and can pretend it doesn't exist. IF people are forced to keep it on, which is a very big if, then and only then would there be valid gripes against it. Otherwise a MLP rainbow thruster hurts no one purely by existing unlike something such as a Jump Inhibitor would. Originally this is why I was pissed when ammo racking was introduced to SE, I was forced to play with it turned on as originally it couldn't be disabled even with mods as we had no access to that part of the game. However Keen stuck it on a damage multiplier that modders have access to. So my solution to my hatred of ammo racking was to use a damage multiplier of zero for my custom ammos. Meaning the ammos can still be "racked" but it's little more than a pretty light show. Thus people who like ammo racking can still use it and I don't have to.

Now we can certainly debate aesthics, atmosphere and so on, and again I actually agree with you on MLP being barfaroni with cheese. But point being different servers will use different settings and so on. This includes some servers using shields and some not. Even if you feel the game would be worse with shields, it's only worse if you choose to use them. Otherwise they're just another block you won't use like my never using pistons or rotors. Nothing against the folks that like them, but I've yet to find a use for them for how I play.

Yes a shield is meant to stop damage, just like a riot shield comboed with a kevlar vest irl. No one goes into battle wanting to get hit and having to repair, yet that's a reality of battle that can happen. If you just drastically outclass your opponent or pull off a good ambush you can nuke them now without having to repair. The whole "you just don't want to have to repair" is a dumb argument because no one with a brain goes into battle wanting to take damage or wanting to be hurt, yet it's a real thing that can happen. If you go into battle wanting to get hit and take damage or be injured you have no business being there.

It boggles my mind how many people will make all kinds of excuses about why we should use anything but a shield. Good grief.

If you can't understand why people don't like how OP shields are, then that's on you. No need to be toxic.

@brights0ng: see my other response to you. balance is subjective outside of egregious examples. If you think shields are OP don't use them. Simple as that. Just like I turned off ammo racking for my custom ammos as I think ammo racking is a garbage mechanic in all games that have it. realistic sure but it's an extremely unfun and unskilled way to win or lose a fight. Folks who want it can keep it and I don't have to see it. Everyone wins. I am not demanding everyone play with shields, especially the people who don't like them. I'm saying everyone should have the option since literally hundreds of thousands of people in the community want them. Problem is some of the more rabid anti-shielders are stuck on no one having the option based on their dislike alone.

@brights0ng Saying "they"re OP" is shallow and lazy. You need to understand how easy it is to balance such a mechanic. For one example off the top of my head shields can have a satisfying use as a buffer against minor damage, (skin type shield) enabling a "hit and run" offense styles where your shield soaks limited damage from low caliber accurate weapons while you manually dodge heavy projectiles. You can balance the energy draw, activation time, cooldown, what happens when it pops (such as the generator melting), and even open up the possiblity of countermeasures like EMP weapons so you have more variety. There's a lot to work with. Don't get misled by what you saw in a mod. Use your head.

@Denninja Shields have this bad habit of being plainly OP because nobody bothers to balance them all that well. People say "we have all these ways to balance them" and more often than not we subsequently end up with numbers so absurd it takes mod-weapons powerful enough to 1-shot the moon and still kill an un-shielded ship behind it to even try, and all of combat is reduced to "use this design and this strategy or you are guaranteed to lose".

From what I've seen everyone opposed sits in one of two camps, either "It doesn't match the aesthetic", which tends to boil down to some manner of dislike for generic weapon-does-nothing-bubbles, or "It can't be properly balanced", all of whom would probably change sides if someone actually proposed a balanced shield system instead of just suggesting it was possible. I don't think it can be done, my best try so far (posted above) was to come up with something that reduces damage but doesn't stop it all and has to be placed where it isn't too hard to shoot off, but that doesn't seem to fit what people want for a shield. If you have an idea for a shield that doesn't reduce the number of viable designs and strategies (and doesn't raise the question why have the shield at all?), I'd love to hear it.

@Tael It's nowhere that difficult, the easiest way is to buffer an amount of damage based on the grid size and how long it has "charged" before taking damage. Bigger ships should require more generation and likewise draw more power. Also either disallow firing from within shields, or simply don't cover weapons with them. Maybe even expose thrusters, which would lead to some interesting designs. Partial damage reduction is also a good idea, could even be an option so we have actual variety in shield types.

Suggestion :

The destruction of a fully charged jump drive results an area wide EMP, all shields are down, 20 second delay for power systems to re-establish and then shields are required to recharge from scratch.

@captainbladej52 my point in this comment isn't about balance, its about toxicity.

@Denninja OP in the sense of being unable to play with shields when fighting opponents with shields. Personally, I do not find shield mods enjoyable in SE1, as I dislike the intrusion of the immersion of the game (due to the game being set in a near-future atmosphere, and shields are fantastical, not even theoretically realistic) and they basically entirely disable destruction, which feels cheap and like the game is holding your hand like a child. So, if I chose to play without shields in any combat capacity, I would be obliterated, unless they managed to balance it so shields aren't necessary, which doesn't make sense from a balancing perspective.

@brights0ng I'm not talking about SE1. Ideally they would only give your ship some extra HP before the blocks start taking damage. You would not be able to reactivate the shield without fully withdrawing and recharging it, maybe repairing the emitter. It would not make your ship invulnerable in any form, merely act as an ablative layer that's effectively just a full-body armor segment that's easy to repair when in safety. Another way to balance this could be to consider when people, like you say, don't want to use shields but want to stay competitive in PvP. For that effect the shields could slow down your ship while active, or maybe make the shield components heavy enough that it's a significant detriment to the ship's maneuverability. That way it would be more effective to use shields on ships with light armor, while they compete with shieldless ships made of heavy armor.

@Denninja When you say the hp-pool is to be determined on grid-size, do you mean block-count, mass, or volume? And at what default ratio of units (example: having 25 blocks gives the shield one 2.5m light armor block's worth of hp provided it's had time to fully charge).

Also, how large would the shield-gen block be? And how does it handle:

-Ramming?

-Subgrids?

-Utility Blocks? (grinders/drills/new-stuff)

-Grid Detachment (merge-blocks/undocking/ect...)

@Deon Beauchamp Most people bury their jump-drives, so to set off such an emp you'd either already be through their shield, or you'd be building jump-drive-based weapons. One of those would be annoying as all heck because you (and possibly your fleet) would keep getting emp'd in the middle of a fight every time you killed a drive, and the other would be funny for about as long as it took someone to work out the math and design a JD-weapon that left a target crippled while the user had 20-seconds of free-reign to pummel someone before their target was allowed to react.

@Tael The way I would do it is have a charge capacity determined by the total block count times maybe 5% of a light armor block's HP at base. Increased with extra shield devices. It could be reasonable for a moderately shield-using craft to have 20% bonus health. Add a penalty to thruster output based on current shield HP. If someone has shields and wants to escape or do a flyby they'll be mostly going in a straight line.

When facing collisions, apply extra damage to the shield equal to maybe 2x of what an impacted component would have taken from the collision. In my mind they should be weak to explosives and precise ramming. Build a guided missile tipped in heavy armor and holding a warhead too.

Also require that the shield emitters have open space above them, and they're *not* shielded themselves. I would require the emitters to stick out just a bit so they're not super bury-able. Would be cool to have 2-3 sizes of emitters that affect charge, and capacitor blocks for capacity. Capacitors would of course further slow down the thrusters from their added HP.

To prevent very large craft from becoming too tanky, maybe damage the shields by a % of their current value every time a shield component explodes.

Keep shields strictly on their grid of origin. Rotors and pistons should function at the cost of being unprotected by the main grid, possibly however able to house their own emitters.

Require shields be inactive to use grinders, drills and welders.

Don't extend shields past merge blocks and gear. Though if someone wants to, for example, add a "shield slave" onto a ship and play R-Type by blocking shots with the other grid, I think that's good effort and should be allowed.

I don't get all the hate on the idea. When it's certainly just a idea. And most of the negative feedback about it is crazy too. Like shields being unrealistic lol. Technically so are jump drives at this point. Lol

@Denninja That is a definite improvement over the standard weapons-do-nothing shield though it isn't without flaws to potentially exploit.

-I strongly suspect people would quickly learn to take advantage of the shield's effects not propagating though sub-grids/merge-blocks to circumvent the some of the listed drawbacks (internal welders and thruster-banks on sub-grids), while relying on slabs of small/detail blocks to get potentially insane defensive numbers (assuming reasonable pcu allotments given the requirements of detailing in the unified grid system). Negating this would require that the drawbacks propagate (though we shouldn't propagate the buffs, lest we end up risking shielded custom-turrets), and we'll need to consider non-standard propulsion such as gravity drives and klang drives too.

-Fixed weapons would probably end up at the back of a narrow tunnel with one or more doors that could be closed between shots (or pistons to pull them out of alignment with the tunnel). Turrets obviously wouldn't be directly shielded, but if Keen gives us decoy-blocks again then proper placement will serve almost as well as shielding. I don't have a good solution to this that doesn't risk creating other potentially very significant issues depending on what Keen brings over from SE1.

-Unless the shield-emitters are required to be placed such that they are visible from the side they're protecting then they're liable to all end up in the back and so become untouchable in 1v1. Obviously you could attempt surprise, but given some of the functions and subsequent potential interactions of SE1's blocks I wouldn't count on it as a reliable solution.

While I'd still very much prefer shields remaining the realm of mods, this would definitely be better than most of the oversimplified game-breakers people post. If you've got ideas on how to fix the stuff I've pointed out, or other ideas on shield-balancing then I'd love to hear them.

I'd have drills/tools disabled even if any connected grid has shields online.

When it goes down you should be able to use tools immediately, but when going online have a short readying period with neither tools nor shields.

When a shield goes offline maybe have a grid-wide cooldown where the emitter cannot be repaired for a time, so it can't be leapfrogged or hidden welded.

Depending on the shape (could have some variety) I imagine the outward/top having a restriction zone pointing out but also 1m thicker than the emitter so there's enough space to shoot it. If someone still wants to armor it with a corridor, that would end up taking a lot of space so it should be fine.

Possibly apply a scaling multiplier to shield emitters based on their proximity to other emitters. So stacking them in a "safe spot" stacks penalties to all of them and becomes very inefficient, but having them evenly spread out is rewarded with full power.

@Tael - Hmm...many words...head hurts...I would be a good thing to be able to test and refine these things and not leave it to conjecture and speculation, but it is not a perfect world...sigh.

Oh the joy of spamming weapons, without consequence, at a crippled ship that has lost its shields. Where is the dilemma? Where is the honour and mercy? A mindless frenzy of a kill, like a beast of the plains.

An EMP jump drive would need to be destroyed, not just damaged. Shields are down, all power is temporary down, so only hydromen can operate, no functioning vessels, now moving without control, 20 seconds to glory in the chaos or 20 seconds of repair and GT*O when power is restored.

Lets add two things, all other jump drives will need to recharge and the area will count as a planetary gravity field for those 20secs, preventing anything from jumping in.

Radius of EMP?

Choose your priorities, charge the shields or charge the jump drives?

Stand alone jump drive weapons become sitting ducks s they would have no charge.

Still too many words..

SE1 shield mod is OP, needs nerf or counter measures if vanilla in SE2

@Deon Beauchamp You seem to be a poet good sir. Alas, were I only eloquent enough to make good response.

...

Anyways, I'd prefer jump-drives not have an emp as someone would find a way to make it OP, and current jump-drive missiles are an amazingly funny prank I'd prefer not be forgotten for fear of use in other ways. Also, I agree that shields are not balanced and would need to be so before being implemented in SE2.

@Denninja While hiding a shield at the bottom of a chimney might be difficult for something the size of a small fighter, 25cm blocks would make it child's play for a large ship were it any smaller than a large reactor, and even then I doubt the largest would have much trouble. At that point we've got a trench-run with the odds of hitting a womp-rat, except we don't have the force, or plot-armor, and the target ship probably isn't going to be compliant enough to sit still and let us try.

@Tael if you read my other points you'd find that the ship in your theory either wouldn't have much shield, or wouldn't be able to effectively dodge a "trench run", which wouldn't even be necessary as a large ship would likely have multiple emitters to hit and the % loss per explosion point takes effect. I understand your concerns perfectly, that's why I try to cover what you bring up. It is past clarified that the mechanics are malleable enough to result in a fun and balanced system.

To clarify a bit more, shields should only provide protection against inaccurate sloppy attacks from weapons such as auto turrets. For a limited time. Basically let the attacker do a fly-by without accumulating annoying wear and tear, and avoid depressurization from lucky shots.

Also this *creates* a previously inaccessible way to bunker down defensively, for heavier craft. Meanwhile the thruster debuff ensures that unshielded craft have a huge maneuverability advantage. For shielded craft that are doing a fly-by, having poor rotation means exposing their front and back during an attack. That needs to be considered. That's just my version of it though. I'm out of interest for this topic, will be reading some others that got buried.

I did read the points above, and I disagree. I could of course be missing something obvious, or you could think something obvious that isn't. Unfortunately without hard numbers to play with or other changes of note, it is likely we'll be stuck disagreeing on this matter. Can't be helped, but the discussion is good regardless, it gets people thinking, and we may get a better option from a 3rd party that sees the conversation and comes up with something good.

Not entirely true, as if you want to play in a server, private or public, that uses shields, you're essentially forced to use them to survive. And not everyone has the money/close friend group to host their own server.

Then you would play on a server that wouldnt use them, its just like any other setting for servers.

you dont play on a 3rd person view server if you dont want 3rd person view.

I have a strong hunch that if shields are an official part of the game, the number of servers with shields enabled will drastically increase. And if its anything like SE1, it will be a struggle to find a server that ticks all the boxes, considering how expensive they can get to run large servers. And I definitely cannot afford a server lol

@brights0ng: then join a server that doesn't use shields if you don't like them. If you can tick a box to enable/disable something like economy, thruster damage, the jetpack, or so on, you can tick one for shields to be on/off. Not everyone uses the same settings and if you're so lost that you can't tick a box, then you don't need to be playing anyways.

@Denninja: disliking shields is certainly valid, but that's not the issue. the issue is the people coming up with all these excuses as to why everyone else shouldn't be allowed to have them because the small handful doesn't like it, all when they can just tick a box to turn them off. I'm not a fan of food systems generally but would just turn them off and/or mod them. But the way certain people act with it you would think one insulted the mom from the way they complain about "even then we still can't have shields".

Also to illustrate the point as to why anti-shielders have no valid arguments other than them not liking the idea of shields, you can turn them off and/or mod them like we do with everything else. If you don't like the default starting point of them cool, we can debate what the default settings should be. That said, change them with sliders and/or mods like you do with a host of other things now. It's as simple as ticking a box to turn them off, messing with a slider, or grabbing a mod to dial them up/down like people do with things like thrusters or other stuff now. If you can tick a box to change things like economy, the jetpack, or use a slider for things like PCU, you can use a box or slider for shields. No different than me not caring for food systems that are "eat/drink or die" with no positives, or my despising ammo racking. I can turn them off and both sides win.

Rarely are any 2 servers exactly the same unless they stick to pure defaults and different servers use different settings all of the time. Folks who like shields would be allowed to use them, and those who don't wouldn't have to. The only way an anti-shielder is effected is if they purposefully go to a server that uses shields. Likewise I'm only forced to deal with ammo racking if I go to a server that uses it. Saying no one should be allowed to have shields just because the small handful of pvp people don't like it is like saying no one should be allowed chocolate ice cream because some people don't like it. Their solution is to simply not eat it. Shields are just chocolate ice cream to some what vanilla ice cream is to others and Keen in this instance being the shop capable of selling multiple flavors to multiple people so EVERYONE wins. Just because they may sell a particular flavor of ice cream you don't like doesn't obligate you to order it. Likewise them adding a block or feature you don't like doesn't obligate you to use it. I don't use pistons or rotors 99% of the time but I don't demand they be taken out.

Saying "but pvp balance" as to why they shouldn't be added is not valid on its own and can even be used to demand removal of features we already have and preventing new features from being added. You want radar, nope can't have it because it might make it easier to find little Johnny's base. You want better armor tiers, nope it's not fair to those who don't have it yet. You want a new weapon, nope can't have it because it might break balance. Then for features we already have, it could be used to argue for removal of the ability to use mods and share BPs because if people can use mods and share BPs they can potentially download a mod or BP that's overpowered. Might as well just lock everyone into default settings only because anything else could be overpowered. The "but pvp" in this instance ignores that Keen has ALWAYS allowed people to customize their worlds to their liking, even rewriting large parts of the game with something like Weaponcore changing combat to a massive degree. Those who want it can use it, those who don't want it don't have to.

Aside from bug fixes, Keen has only made changes for balance purposes twice since 2016 that I've been playing. Once when they buffed defaults for the hydrogen tank capacity and reworked hydrogen gas. Second being when they changed the spool up time of safe zones from 20 seconds to 120 seconds. Yet even then they never hardcoded that stuff and if people wanted to mod them back to their original values they can. If someone wants to get a mod to make safe zones pop up in 2 seconds they can. All Keen does is set the default values then ships it off to players and lets us customize from there. If folks like default values then cool, stick to defaults. We can certainly debate what the defaults should be, and disliking shields is a valid position. What is not valid is thinking no one should have them because a small handful don't like it or cite "but pvp" or similar. Shields, aerodynamics, food systems, and a host of similar stuff hurt none purely by existing, unlike something such as a Jump Inhibitor would. Point being, different flavors of ice cream for different people.

Shields are a bad idea. I've yet to see anyone actually create a properly balanced shield system for a game like SE (and I'm at the point of thinking it can't be done), and even if someone did, turning them off server-wide would unbalance the game by leaving weapons balanced for a defense you wouldn't have. People can download a mod for shields easily if they want them, and adjust their mods appropriately to how they want to play. It would be best to let default vanilla be balanced to give people a variety of options until they decide they want otherwise instead of requiring them to play to the singular meta shields always produce if they want a chance of winning.

@Tael: Once again if you think they're a bad idea don't use them. The more you speak the more you show you have no idea how balance works. First off in a game like SE it's largely subjective outside of very niche examples, this is not one of them. The whole "but muh balance" argument is not valid on its own nor is "just mod it in" because they can be applied to ANY feature that could ever be proposed and be used to demand removal of already existing features. Someone wants radar, nope can't have it because it might make it too easy to find people's bases.. Can't turn it off because the game will be balanced around radar being there. Someone wants stronger armor, nope can't have it because it won't be fair to those who don't have it. Can't have people downloading mods or BPs from the workshop either because they could download something "unbalanced."

Point blank you have no valid arguments here aside from you not liking shields. You're free to not like them, and your solution is to turn them off like you would now with economy, meteors, lightning damage, the jetpack if you wanted a no jetpack run, or a host of other features. If you can tick a box or slide a bar up for more PCU or to change another feature, you can take the all of 5 seconds to disable shields for your server. And if you can't then that's your own fault. You keep assuming all servers are forced to use the exact same settings and all servers are the same and they're not. If a server changes welding speed, they've altered balance as now some builds become easier/harder to produce than others. If they use PCU and change the limits they've altered balance because now certain builds may or may not be able to be utilized. If they download a weapon mod they've effected balance because that mod may be OP and it might not. The only way to ensure "balance" using your logic would be to force everyone to use the exact same settings across the board, prevent everyone from using mods, and force everyone to use the exact same prebuilt ships. And sorry but nah I'm not doing that. If you don't like them, turn them off or change them. It's as simple as changing numbers in an SBC text file.

If you're as good as you want us to believe then your opponent having shields will only delay the inevitable and if you really want challenge, then engineer your way around the shields. If the only difference is you have shields and your opponent doesn't and he's beating you ever time, the problem isn't the shields, the problem is you. If you're as good as you pretend to be, then you will find a way to get through the shields, even if it's not on your first attempt. Also on this point, this game is an arms race and they can't balance around anything other than single block vs single block if they want to get anywhere. There is an infinite number of possible combinations in block building games like SE they would have to account for otherwise as you could bring a ship that's tiny, or several kilometers or more if you can engineer it. All Keen has to do is define the basic defaults and ship it to players to customize as they see fit.

Otherwise I don't care about your balance or your "meta" as what you do on your server is your business. You're free to download whatever mods you want or use whatever settings you please. But who the heck are you to tell me and hundreds of thousands of others we shouldn't be allowed a feature we've wanted for years because your lone server is worried about balance? Why should we have to miss out on a feature because you stubbornly don't want to tick a box? Because that's essentially what you're arguing. It's no different than saying your neighbor shouldn't be allowed to cook a steak on his backyard grill because you're a vegan and it offends you. Sorry but you don't get to dictate he's not allowed a steak because you don't like it anymore than others should be denied a feature purely because you don't like it.

Lastly your "but they're balanced around shields being there even if they're not" is an easy one. You run a simple check when the world boots up. If shields are present all blocks use damage resistance X and if they're not they use damage resistance Y. This is how other games like WoW, SWTOR, Destiny, and a host of others allow for weapons to have different values in pve and pvp. I've created content for games for over 20 years now, and everything you've complained about has easy solutions, you just refuse to acknowledge them. You may as well just stop hiding behind the mask and say you don't want shields polluting your game.

-Is "you can mod it in" any more or less applicable than "you can turn it off" for someone claiming 20 years experience in what sounds like modding? What about when someone else does the modding for you and you only need to turn it on? SE2 will have shield mods, feel free to use any of them you like.

-People change the rules in their servers as they want, I just want a balanced default. Having multiple options is far better than having one unbeatable monolithic meta. Unfortunately you're probably either going to skip reading this part, or ignore it, as you've skipped or ignored all other similar statements.

-I don't believe I've commented on my skills in pvp but if you think of me as talented at it then I accept the compliment. Thank you.

-I am apparently the guy speaking for the millions that don't want shields, and for those of you that don't get it, you'll probably have to scroll up a bit. My apologies.

-I don't recall any of those games doing that, though its been a while since I played or paid attention to any of them. That said, having the stats of more than just shields change when server-shield settings are toggled would be a decent idea. I still don't think shields in the default vanilla are a good idea, but if they get implemented then I do hope Keen follows your idea and has stats adjust when a server toggles them on or off.

-You are literally the first person to respond to my first post in this thread, have you already forgotten that the first full paragraph amounts to "I'd like them so I could spend less time on repairs, but don't think their balanced"?

Give me a good balanced default, something that doesn't invalidate as many builds and strategies as it creates and I will support them. Until that happens, they are a bad idea.

@Tael: -Is "you can mod it in" any more or less applicable than "you can turn it off" for someone claiming 20 years experience in what sounds like modding? What about when someone else does the modding for you and you only need to turn it on? SE2 will have shield mods, feel free to use any of them you like.

Funny that not long ago you were accusing me of being toxic yet here you are saying "but you just want someone to do the modding for you and turn it on." Funny how that went out the window. Since you want some of my background as just a few examples, I created several maps for Timesplitters Future Perfect which were EA recommended downloads for weeks at the time. I've also created several levels for Star Trek Armada 2 and an odd game mode or 2 among other similar games. I've also worked with companies at times to help test for bugs and so on to stop a string of DDoS attacks. I also have other projects in the works I'm not at liberty to discuss. As for SE currently I maintain the 2125 Era mod and subsequent similar mods. Whether it's a 1 man team for mods, 1 man team creating one's own game, or someone working for a studio is irrelevant, as all are developers. The only difference is the scale. Need I remind you minecraft was one guy updating at one point. And to answer the question if I think someone's mod isn't balanced, I don't use their mod, simple as that.

The thing you keep refusing to acknowledge and are being stubborn about is that "just mod it in" and "but muh balance" can be applied to everything in the game that exists now, and anything that could exist in the future. it could also be used to demand removal of already existing features. Every block and every feature can be said to be unbalanced if one reaches hard enough and is almost completely subjective in a game like SE. If someone wants water, instead of Keen doing it and making it vanilla people can just mod it. If someone wants radar, they can mod it in. If they want more cockpits or doors, they can just mod them in. Since we can just "mod it in" there's no need for Keen to add anything else beyond what they've given us now. You're also missing this very big factor, what happens if someone "just mods it in" and said mod breaks and there is no other like it? Then what? Guess that person is just screwed aren't they. Then for balance arguments, you and I as prime examples have different ideas on what balance is and is why "muh balance" on its own is not a valid argument. "Just mod (thing) in" and "(thing) isn't balanced and shouldn't be added" are circular infinitely recyclable arguments that are not valid on their own. For that matter "muh balance" can be used to demand SE be hardcoded so no one can mod it.

-"I just want a balanced default." "Give me a good balanced default."

You keep saying stuff about what you consider balanced or unbalanced yet you never define what those are. So define balance for us. What does that look like? Because you keep using the words balanced and unbalanced yet never define them. If you're going to sit here and say shields are unbalanced, then you clearly have a standard for what you consider to be balanced but for some reason have thus far refused to define what that standard is. If you can't or won't define the words, then you would again demonstrate you have no argument. I also find it funny how we've gone from "no shields" to wanting a "balanced default" to no shields, back to balanced default, back to no shields yet again all in the same post. Make up your mind dude.

-Is "you can mod it in" any more or less applicable than "you can turn it off"...

-People change the rules in their servers as they want, I just want a balanced default. Having multiple options is far better than having one unbeatable monolithic meta.

I'm so glad you acknowledged that different servers will have and can have different rule sets including settings they use because you just obliterated your own argument. If you truly believe what you just said about different servers being free to change their rules and having multiple options, then you've also acknowledged they have a right to use settings you personally find unbalanced. This includes options such as nigh invincible shields or armor if that's what they want, or weapons that tag you from the other side of the solar system. Every single box you tick or don't tick, every single slider you move in the settings, ALL change the shape of the meta for that server. And what you really need to get through your head is you are not the only person who plays this game nor are you the only server out there. If you truly believe people should have options as you say, then I shouldn't need to tell you why saying "just turn it off if you don't like it" is 100% valid, yet here we are. Saying "turn it off" means people have options. Those who don't want to use it don't have to, and those who want to use it are free to do so. Both sides can enjoy the game how they like and both win. So if you really believe what you said there, what's the issue?

Because unless you intend to play on a server using settings you don't like, you're only effected if you choose to be. If you don't like shields, why would you play on a server that uses them?

-I am apparently the guy speaking for the millions that don't want shields, and for those of you that don't get it, you'll probably have to scroll up a bit. My apologies.

Nah you're speaking for your small handful of anti-shielders who claim people should have options for their servers yet are whining about people potentially having an option you don't like. Plenty of people in this game do not use mods, yet would like to see some of the functions they provide become vanilla. Be it a radar mod, shield mod, food system or aerodynamic mod or so on. Simply because someone isn't subbed to a mod doesn't automatically mean they're opposed to what that mod does. That's not how that works.

-"I don't believe I've commented on my skills in pvp but if you think of me as talented at it then I accept the compliment. Thank you."

It's only a compliment if you have the skill to back it up and so far I've yet to be convinced of that. Regardless the point stands. If you or anyone else are really as good at pvp as they like to believe, why are you so terrified of your opponent having shields? If you're as good as you think you are then it won't matter as you'll find a way around them, even if it's not on the first attempt. If you never find your way around the shields or constantly keep losing, then you're not as good as you think you are and are projecting your failure onto the shields to avoid acknowledging your own failures.

-"I don't recall any of those games doing that, though its been a while since I played or paid attention to any of them. That said, having the stats of more than just shields change when server-shield settings are toggled would be a decent idea. I still don't think shields in the default vanilla are a good idea, but if they get implemented then I do hope Keen follows your idea and has stats adjust when a server toggles them on or off."

Well guess what, they do. One only needs to go into WoW, Star Trek Online, SWTOR, or similar and you will see plenty of tooltips that say "it deals X damage against NPCs and Y against players" or something to that effect. See once again as said above, you would have the option to turn shields off like you would anything else or to adjust their stats. It's as simple as an SBC edit if you go that route, using sliders, or ticking a box. If you truly believe people should have options, then that also means having the ability to use settings and options you don't like. And if a server uses options you don't like, your solution is to not play on it and find one that caters more to you, or make your own.

-"You are literally the first person to respond to my first post in this thread, have you already forgotten that the first full paragraph amounts to "I'd like them so I could spend less time on repairs, but don't think their balanced"?"

This is the dumbest argument you've made yet. Saying "you only want shields so you don't have to repair as much" is like saying that an Abrams tank only puts armor around critical components because the military doesn't want to have to pay someone to repair it. Or that a riot cop only wears his kevlar vest and carries his bulletproof riot shield because he doesn't want to have to heal as much after a riot. No one with a brain goes into battle in real life or in game WANTING to have to repair or wanting to get injured, yet those are potential realities of battle. If you go into battle WANTING to get injured or wanting to have to repair things, then you've got no business on that battlefield as you're a danger to yourself and your team. The entire point of the riot shield, the kevlar vest, armor on an Abrams, and energy shields are to prevent damage to what's behind them. I know shocking right. If the riot cop is uninjured, the critical tank components are in one piece, and the ship under the energy shields is undamaged then they did what they're designed to do.

Otherwise do you seriously expect people to just hold still and let you shoot at them in game? Because that's what you're essentially demanding. You're essentially saying you're entitled to tag someone at least once and if they don't have to repair or heal up they're doing it wrong.

-Give me a good balanced default, something that doesn't invalidate as many builds and strategies as it creates and I will support them. Until that happens, they are a bad idea.

Once again default "good balanced default". Your problem again is that any potential feature they could add to the game has the potential to invalidate builds and strategies. By your logic we never should've been given the autocannons, assault turrets, artillery guns, and railguns in warfare 2 because they invalidated a bunch of builds that were purely just gatlings and rockets before. Even changing the PCU limit of servers or disabling PCU outright invalidates builds and strategies while creating new ones. You previously said you didn't want just one meta, yet here you arguing about how you don't want things to change. So which is it?

Anytime a game like Magic the Gathering creates new cards, it invalidates old strategies and creates new ones. Anytime WoW or SWTOR make changes to classes, it can invalidate various strategies and create new ones. Anytime someone changes their server's settings and doesn't use default across the board or downloads a mod, it invalidates builds and strategies while creating new ones. If I don't like what one format of MTG is doing, I move to another one. And if the main formats are in a spot I don't like I play with friends where we agree not to use/do certain things before hand. Just like if certain servers use settings and/or mods I don't like I don't play on them. Which is why you won't see me on official servers is I don't care for several of their settings. Welcome to gaming where things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Learn to adapt and deal, Or take a break if you need or leave. Or in this case turn the shields off if you don't like them since you've said you would do that, thus invalidating your argument.

@Tael and @Captainbladej52 you are both men of honour, and you should settle your differences on the battlefield. Each with the same type of ship, looser concedes the debate.

Best out of 3, one with shields, one without shields, last one on a coin flip.

See if you can get Xocliw and Arron to host it.

@Deon Beauchamp While I'd normally have little issue myself telling people to solve it in pvp, I've seen more than enough of brilliant scientists making claims about things outside their field in the last few years to know that skill and talent in one area does not always translate to different areas. That said, if captainbladej52 wants to go 3 rounds just for the fun of it with those rules then I'd be game.

@captainbladej52 Interesting... we have some good progress here, though there is still a good deal more to be made.

-You were being plainly toxic so I called you out. Also, I am not aware of any correlation between toxicity and programing skill or history. My point was that you sound like you're competent to add in anything you want yourself in a way a lot of people aren't, but even if you don't have the time someone will very likely still add it in for you and leave you needing only to turn it on. On that note…

-Both "You can turn it off" and "You don't have to play with it" have been used to destroy plenty of games. At the same time, someone could argue that "mod it in" or "because balance" could be used to strip a game down to nothing, and I have seen it done. Both arguments to add things in and to take things out have ruined more games than I'd care to count, both arguments can be taken to absurd logical extremes, and if every argument with a logical extreme were to be invalid then nobody would be able to make a valid argument for anything. I can turn off a feature, you can turn on a mod, both are technically correct, both arguments are the opposing argument inverted, and both subsequently aren't good arguments. I made the "you can mod it in" argument to prove this point because I thought you needed reminding, and I didn't think it needed explaining.

-As I've previously stated several times now (you are perfectly welcome to scroll up and check if you so desire), the game is balanced when there are a variety of options for builds and play styles as the default setting. And before someone says something absurd (again), it isn't default if you have to change the server settings to make it happen. Shields don't allow a balanced game, they push all pvp builds to follow one singular style of build and play. Also, my whole argument has been that shields can't be balanced default, so “no shields” and “balanced default” are the same thing.

-Again, nobody cares what the rules get changed in to when someone opts to change them in their own world, no matter how many times you say otherwise this has never been an issue for anyone I've seen on this thread. The entire issue has only ever been about when playing the game with the default settings. If the game played with default settings does not provide multiple options for builds and strategies then it isn't balanced, and if it isn't balanced under the default settings then it isn't a good idea.

-You are correct in that people not subbed to shields may not be opposed to them, just as I am correct when saying people subbed to them may not want them. I explained this before, my millions is effectively as accurate as your hundreds of thousands. So, since both are plainly wrong, I will stick to what I said the first time I pulled out the millions number and let you decide between either using both, or using neither.

-Fear can push people to change, adapt, try to improve themselves, and come up with new thing. An appropriate amount of fear is a good thing. Shields don't inspire fear, they inspire boredom, they push everyone to go look up the singular unbeatable meta and replicate it exactly save choice of color.

-And again, nobody has ever cared what anyone else can change the rules to...

-What can I say, you phrased something to suggest I hate the concept of shields despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, and subsequently I pointed out the obvious evidence to the contrary. Also, we have been over this, be polite.

-And again, I don't care about change, I care about not having one monolithic meta when playing with default settings. Until someone comes up with a way to make shields not invalidate more builds and strategies than they make possible in a game with default settings, they are a bad idea.

@Deon Beauchamp: While I appreciate the sentiment, it wouldn't address the underlying issues nor does winning/losing a pvp match prove either of us right or wrong. The programming side that I have argued from remains the same regardless of the outcome of said hypothetical match.

@Tael: "You were being plainly toxic so I called you out. Also, I am not aware of any correlation between toxicity and programing skill or history. My point was that you sound like you're competent to add in anything you want yourself in a way a lot of people aren't, but even if you don't have the time someone will very likely still add it in for you and leave you needing only to turn it on. On that note…"

While I appreciate the sentiment you're missing a couple of things here as to why certain mod types aren't done very often if at all. While modders have access to great amounts of the game in SE1 and will have in SE2, there are some parts of the game that we do not have access to and certain functions we can't call on for the purposes of mods. For example if you look up the Aegis shield guy on mod io, the guy uses a script to slap a software overlay over specific jump drives to make them into defacto shields. Grid takes damage, script zaps x amount of power from the drive(s) until they're empty. When they're empty they recharge and the shield comes back up when the drives are full up. Now you might wonder why not just use a special type of battery since the only thing that's really missing is something to tell the game not to deal damage and zap a bit of power accordingly. Problem is not enough of the battery API is exposed to do that. It's possible with Jump Drives, but not a basic battery. As to why that is, ask Keen cause I have no idea. Also on this point, while some mods are easier to produce than others, ease of actual tasks involved doesn't negate the time investment. When making my era mod originally which is essentially the game's stuff set 50 years in the future (SE1), it took me a good 8 weeks to get everything made and the way I wanted it at 8 hours a day as a one man team on certain stuff. While alot of that was unavoidable time required, some of it could've been streamlined better with processes and so on. Likewise with shield mods you'll lose more time writing the initial scripts and codes to govern them than you will testing them. As for being toxic, agree to disagree as that's just going to keep us going in circles. But moving on.

"Both "You can turn it off" and "You don't have to play with it" have been used to destroy plenty of games. At the same time, someone could argue that "mod it in" or "because balance" could be used to strip a game down to nothing, and I have seen it done. Both arguments to add things in and to take things out have ruined more games than I'd care to count, both arguments can be taken to absurd logical extremes, and if every argument with a logical extreme were to be invalid then nobody would be able to make a valid argument for anything. I can turn off a feature, you can turn on a mod, both are technically correct, both arguments are the opposing argument inverted, and both subsequently aren't good arguments. I made the "you can mod it in" argument to prove this point because I thought you needed reminding, and I didn't think it needed explaining."

A few things here. Context of an argument is important as there are times when an argument is valid and times when it isn't. In a game with certain hardcoded things you can't turn off, saying "turn it off" is not valid because you in fact can't turn it off. I'm sure you've seen the gaming memes like I have where a mom tells her kid "just pause it" and the kid yells back "it's an online game it can't be paused." The mom can get mad all she wants and say the kid is lying but the kid is correct that some games can't be paused. Doesn't excuse the kid from having to listen to his mom but point still stands that the kid is right about not being able to pause.

With that said saying to "turn it off" and "don't play with it if you don't like it" are valid in SE because you can in fact turn it off or just not play with it. Thus you're only effected if you choose to be. Just like in Magic the Gathering, if you don't like certain types of cards you don't have to use them yourself. If you don't want to play against them, then you can play a format or events where those cards aren't legal, or you can play with friends that agree not to use those specific cards. I can make arguments as to why people shouldn't use those cards, and why they shouldn't be allowed in official events and maybe WotC would listen. However I don't get to outright say no one is allowed to use those cards in the entirety of the MTG community purely because I don't like them. That's not how that works.

In SE, if you do not like something such as thruster damage, economy, lightning damage, meteors, pressurization aka oxygen, or similar you can turn all of those things off. You are not forced to use those features if you don't want them so yes telling you to turn them off is a valid thing here just as it would be with shields. If you don't like them turn them off or mod them. If they were hardcoded to always be on THEN you would have an argument but you don't. Not to mention the features in the game are officially supported and in a place they can be put into the game with little to no issues or are supposed to be. You don't have that guarantee with mods.

"Just mod it in" does not work on its own for a number of reasons. For starters it assumes the mod type exists, and depending on the mod it might not. Or it may require something else in order to work that changes a bunch of extra stuff you don't want to change. Take Defense Shields as a prime example of this. While I like the idea of the mod, it forces the use of Weaponcore which nearly completely rewrites the combat system. If all I'm looking for is a basic shield and don't want to change the combat system, Defense Shields isn't an option. If I want a basic shield the other option is Cython's or Aegis. Aegis is decent enough but is tied to your Jump Drives and defeats the purpose of having the shield as you're basically having to sacrifice some of your Jump range to it. Plus it still needs some work. Then there is Cython's which while it does still work, can break at any time if game functions the scripts governing the mod change or something gets updated, and if Cython refuses to fix it and doesn't support it then you're screwed. So what is the average user to do then? Pray that someone pities them and makes them a new shield? This argument also fails because again it can be applied to ANY potential feature that could be added in the future. Instead of Keen giving us volumetric vanilla water as they plan to, folks can just mod it in. Folks want radar, just mod it it in. Hence why I pointed out we may as well stop all development because if "just mod it in" is the new standard for if a feature should be added or not, there is nothing new that can ever be added. You're also limited purely to the vision of that modder. While I generally enjoy Cython's mod, I do not like how the shields scale in some instance as they're too weak in some areas and too strong in others. If a person wants to rework a mod and upload it so they can use it for their server, they need permission from the mod's author to do so. If the modder doesn't grant permission, they're screwed.

Saying "but balance" also doesn't work on its own because outside of specific egregious examples, balance is subjective in a game like SE. What one considers balanced another may not. It can also be used to demand the removal of existing features. Someone things railguns aren't balanced, gotta remove them for everyone. It can also be used to demand the removal of the workshop because if people can download mods or BPs from the workshop then they could download something that's OP. The only way to satisfy "but balance" all the time would be to force everyone to use the exact same settings at all times across the board and only prebuilt ships, which goes against the spirit of the game. Keen allows people to customize to their hearts content to achieve the type of game they want to have. The balance of your world/server is going to be radically different from mine because we do not have the same goals or style of play in mind. Anything can be said to be balanced/unbalanced if one tries hard enough and is almost exclusively opinion based.

"As I've previously stated several times now (you are perfectly welcome to scroll up and check if you so desire), the game is balanced when there are a variety of options for builds and play styles as the default setting. And before someone says something absurd (again), it isn't default if you have to change the server settings to make it happen. Shields don't allow a balanced game, they push all pvp builds to follow one singular style of build and play. Also, my whole argument has been that shields can't be balanced default, so “no shields” and “balanced default” are the same thing."

You keep using the word balanced, yet you've so far refused to define it. So I'm going to ask you again, define what you mean by balanced. Clearly you have a standard in mind for what you consider balanced as you've been saying this whole time shields don't meet that standard. So let's cut to the chase and you tell us what you consider balanced. Because if your only standard is "a variety of options for builds and playstyles as the default setting" that already exists now and will continue to exist even if shields become part of those options. If people want to build a giant flying brick they can, if they want to build a copy of the WWII Yamato battleship and fly it around they can, if they want to build the Enterprise D from TNG they can, if they want to build a Clone Wars Venator they can. If they want to build something completely original they can. Shields don't stop you from being able to build any of those ship types, you just have one more option to use.

Also the whole "it isn't default of you have to change settings to make it happen" is wholly irrelevant as you can still have a variety of different builds even if you tick a box or move a slider, or even download a mod. You may not like some of those options, but there are still options. So let's stop pretending the only thing you care about is "a variety of options for builds and play styles as the default" because your own later comments prove that's not all you want. Your whole argument is also negated by the fact they can leave shields off by default and folks tick them on to use them. So what other excuses do you have?

"Again, nobody cares what the rules get changed in to when someone opts to change them in their own world, no matter how many times you say otherwise this has never been an issue for anyone I've seen on this thread. The entire issue has only ever been about when playing the game with the default settings. If the game played with default settings does not provide multiple options for builds and strategies then it isn't balanced, and if it isn't balanced under the default settings then it isn't a good idea."

And this right here is part of your problem that you stubbornly refuse to acknowledge so I'm going to spell it out plain as day for you. NOT EVERYONE PLAYS USING DEFAULT SETTINGS, so what about those people? Not everyone plays the same way you do or has the same ideas about balance you do. You're not wrong, but neither are they. What is however wrong is trying to dictate they shouldn't be allowed the feature because YOU have decided it's unbalanced. Your fun is not wrong, but neither is theirs. Not every feature in this game is going to be made with you in mind just like not every feature is going to be made with me in mind. I don't really do much in the way of pvp in this game because it doesn't really interest me, so the upcoming pvp revamp is not made with me in mind, yet I have no issues with the update being done. But when myself and others dare want something for us, oh noes we can't be having that now and anti-shielders throw a temper tantrum like we insulted their mother.

Every update is going to alter balance to some degree, be it big or little. Prior to Warfare 2 all we had was gatlings and rockets for weapons. When Warfare 2 hit and we got the autocannons, arty and assault cannons, and railguns, it drastically shook up the default balance of the game. Some builds that might have worked before no longer worked, while simultaneously it opened the door for other builds that weren't possible before. There were multiple default options before, and multiple default options after. So by your standard people had no right to complain as it was balanced. Likewise with shields, people have multiple options now and will have multiple options after. So what's the issue? How are you hurt by my having shields on my server when you can turn them off on yours and both of us get what we want? Specifically my using shields and you not having to.

"You are correct in that people not subbed to shields may not be opposed to them, just as I am correct when saying people subbed to them may not want them. I explained this before, my millions is effectively as accurate as your hundreds of thousands. So, since both are plainly wrong, I will stick to what I said the first time I pulled out the millions number and let you decide between either using both, or using neither."

My brother in clang, you're reaching HARD with this one and you know it. Why on earth would you subscribe to a mod or use one you don't want? That's just plain stupid and the equivalent of someone putting ketchup on pizza even though they hate it. Just like you wouldn't put ketchup on pizza if you hate it, why would you sub to a mod you don't want? If you're going to say "well people subbed to the shields might not want them" you bear the burden of proof to demonstrate how many that applies to and "trust me bro" is not proof. Because by that same logic saying "people not subbed to shields may not be opposed to them" means I can just as easily say the only reason those people don't use shields is they're not a vanilla feature and you have to take my word for it. Point being we have to go by the data we have, not the data we want. So no "your millions" are not as accurate as my hundreds of thousands here based on the available data we have. If you want to submit other data that we haven't currently seen, then by all means post it.

"Fear can push people to change, adapt, try to improve themselves, and come up with new thing. An appropriate amount of fear is a good thing. Shields don't inspire fear, they inspire boredom, they push everyone to go look up the singular unbeatable meta and replicate it exactly save choice of color."

First off, people already try to find the most optimized "meta" builds now even without shields, so let's stop pretending it's a phenomenon that's exclusive to shields.

There is no such thing as "the singular unbeatable meta" in SE as what is "meta" can change from server to server and world to world based on the settings and/or mods one uses. As a prime example on my server the strongest armor type is 11x the durability of vanilla heavy armor but with more weight. All of my weapons are 10%-33% stronger than vanilla weapons, thrusters minimum of 25% more powerful and so on because my mod assumes everything 50 years into the future of the game's timeline. What is "meta" on my server is going to be drastically different than what's "meta" on a vanilla server/world. If you were to bring your vanilla meta ship to my world/server, you're going to get rolled hard. Also the term "meta" assumes there is something to win/lose, and in SE there is no winning or losing, there is only the sandbox. You set objectives for yourself.

As for "shields inspire boredom", you're speaking for yourself on that. You do not speak for me of the hundreds of thousands of others who DO enjoy shields.

Shields alone will not win you the fight if you don't know how to use them or your build under the shields. If you put all your eggs in one basket and the shields fail, then what? If someone relies exclusively on shields that's their fault and it just makes it easier to beat them.

"-And again, nobody has ever cared what anyone else can change the rules to..."

You say that, yet are complaining about people having to tick a box or use a slider to customize their worlds. So clearly you do care to some degree. That and railing about why none should have shields. based solely on your dislike.

"-What can I say, you phrased something to suggest I hate the concept of shields despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, and subsequently I pointed out the obvious evidence to the contrary. Also, we have been over this, be polite."

You say you don't hate shields yet you make all these excuses as to why they're bad and none should be allowed to have them in vanilla. You say you don't care what people do on their servers, yet campaign against them having an option to use something you don't like when you can turn it off and be done with it. Then you get what you want and so do they. So again, what's the issue here? Who is hurt by someone having vanilla shields when you can turn them off? Do you not have enough self control to that you can't make yourself tick that box to disable them like someone who hates ketchup on pizza making themselves eat the pizza without ketchup?

As for the last part of this, let's address the elephant in the room. You're not my parent, and being polite works both was just like respect is earned and not bestowed. Disagreement, even passionate disagreement on either side doesn't automatically constitute "being impolite." And if you really want to go there, you need to stop trying to talk down to people and pretending you know more than you actually do. You're hardly a beacon of perfection here either.

"-And again, I don't care about change, I care about not having one monolithic meta when playing with default settings. Until someone comes up with a way to make shields not invalidate more builds and strategies than they make possible in a game with default settings, they are a bad idea."

We've already been over this, there is no "one monolithic meta" with default settings or even non-default settings. People who care about "meta" are always going to try to find the most optimal setup no matter what. There is no objective "best" way to build in SE either. What is "best" varies from person to person and what they want to do. Some ways of building are more efficient than others but that's where what is "best" ends.

Lastly, how are we going to define "doesn't invalidate more builds and strategies than they make possible with default settings"? How do you intend to measure this in a quantifiable way? Who gets to decide what measure we're using? See again the game is an arms race with a nigh infinite number of possible combinations that are only limited by time, imagination, and hardware to run it. There is again more to just this game than default settings just like there is more to cars than stock off the lot cars. Some people modify their cars, some people don't. I'm all for vanilla settings being as good as they can possibly be default wise. However just like what constitutes a good story, what is "good" in a game like SE is almost completely subjective. There are tons of ways to build now, and will be tons of ways to build after shields. So again what is your issue? Because to be perfectly frank, from where I'm sitting it won't matter how good of a solution someone comes up with, or that you turn shields off if you don't like them, you will find some kind of excuse as to why the solution isn't good enough because you've made up your mind to hate shields no matter what. You've said all through this you don't care what other people do yet your actions show otherwise.

You're free to dislike shields and that's perfectly fine. No one here is faulting you for that. It simply means this is not a request with you in mind just like the coming pvp update isn't made with me in mind. The game doesn't revolve around you exclusively and sometimes they're going to cater to other people.

@captainbladej52 Ah, excellent. more good progress. You still plainly don't understand my perspective there, but I think I might finally understand yours...

" I don't really do much in the way of pvp in this game because it doesn't really interest me-"

Up to this point I had assumed you were just someone that wanted shields and didn’t see how they’d break pvp, but you have no interest in pvp, so you'd have no reason to either think of or care about pvp balance, and no point of reference with which to even try. As such, arguing pvp-balance with you is pointless... I've been trying to argue a pvp perspective to a pve player, don't I feel silly X)

So, lets wrap some things up and re-focus...

-You at least in part have a good point that I neglected to consider, modding does take time, and keen likes to break mods. It requires consideration, but we’ll come back to that...

-The “you can turn it off” and “you don’t need to play with it” arguments are still invalid for balance reasons, but we’ll come back to that...

-Again, if every argument with a logical extreme were to be invalid then nobody would be able to make a valid argument for anything. The “balance is an invalid argument because the only perfectly equal thing would be for nobody to have a game at all” argument is would be like if someone were to say “nobody should be allowed to have shields because they can already just turn damage off”. Both arguments are plainly absurd. As for balance…

-You have no perspective of pvp balance, and no reason to have it, and seeing as it has been explained to you several times now it is likely that you are either unwilling or incapable of understanding it. To that end, explaining or arguing it to you seems pointless now, so we’ll come at this from a different angle later…

-Again, this is a discussion about the game under default-settings, if people want to change things from default, then their rules and changes are outside the purview of this discussion. If someone choses to play on settings other than default settings, it does not change that this discussion is only about default settings. As for warfare 2, the first amendment of the US constitution may give people the right to complain about changes, but it doesn't make their complaints correct. I'll disagree with them just as much as with you, the game was changed, but it was still balanced.

-…Are you asking for a screenshot of my subscribed mods list? They subscribe and download when you join a server with them. And because I’m sure you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “you shouldn’t be joining servers with rules you don’t like”, some of them where before I knew shields were a bad idea, some because Keen dropped the ball and I couldn’t tell what mods were running from outside the server, and some were because I followed a friend in to a server to just hang out or serve as a temporary extra hand. I didn’t delete them because it isn’t 90s anymore and worrying about a few MB of mods taking up space on a TB drive is a waste of time. On top of that, at the time of typing this you are currently 199,797 votes shy of hundreds of thousands on this topic, making your number just as much a “trust me” scenario as the absurdity I picked. So, they are just as accurate, and its up to you if we either use both, or neither.

-People always try to find a meta, in a balanced game they look and have a hard time finding one, in a shield-game it becomes quite easy, but again we’re getting back in to pvp balance here. Also, again, default settings. Also, again, apparently speaking for the millions who hate shields.

-...And again, default settings and balance...

-...And again, default settings and balance...

-I am most definitely not your parent, and I should very well hope nobody mistakenly thinks of me as a beacon of perfection, and disagreement is not being impolite. Being impolite is doing things like making baseless accusations (saying they’re gatekeeping/being elitist when they aren’t), using degrading/derogatory language to describe other’s opinions (calling someone’s opinion whining or stupid), or saying people shouldn’t enjoy a game because they don’t meet an arbitrary standard of competence. You can tell someone you think they are wrong, or that something is a bad idea, but if you aren’t polite about it then we will get the board’s moderators involved, simple as that.

-...And again, default settings and balance...

So... with that all either answered or delayed to this point... how to explain the issue to a PvE player…

-A lot of PvP players are always looking for a meta, an unbeatable advantage in combat. If they find one, then they crush everyone in pvp, and then everyone that doesn’t just quit copies them, and then the game quickly stagnates and the vast majority of pvp-players leave. Because of this, Keen tries to balance the game such that there isn’t a meta, and if someone finds one anyways Keen changes the game to get rid of it. This has already happened to floating-object-weapons, rotor-guns, piston-cannons, and nukes to name a few.

-Shields create an easy meta, they can’t be balanced because they allow defense to be boiled down to a relatively simple math-problem tied to a single game mechanic. People would quickly find it, get bored, and then most of them would leave without ever considering altering the rules because they’d think the game too simple and poorly balanced.

-Now on the other hand we have all the PvE players here that want shields. They are convenient, allow for defense on more or less anything you want be it paper kite or iron bastion, and can have a decent aesthetic to them. If they aren’t in the game then pve players will need to be more careful in their designs and with things they would use them to defend against, but the lack of them wont totally ruin the pve game by itself.

-So, shields not being in the default vanilla version of the game is annoying for PvE players, but shields being in the default vanilla version of the game would be extremely bad for PvP players.

So, if you want to find some common mods that do something hard to mod, and then get Keen to make it easy, I’ll help you with comments and votes. If you want Keen to create a whole special section of modable-code they won’t mess with so players can mod it without causing breaks every time it updates, I’ll help you with comments and votes. If you want to get Keen to write a basic easily modded shield-block and just tuck it away in to the files such that the mod to enable it is literally just changing one “false” to “true”, I’ll help you with comments and votes. But regardless of what they do, shields can’t be part of the default vanilla settings because it will kill pvp.

@Tael and @captainbladej52, I think we should acknowledge, as you both have, that there are multiple ways to enjoy SE. Some players love building beautiful ships, others enjoy PvP, some like both, and some have different preferences entirely.

Keen wants to avoid disappointing any part of the community, but at the same time, we as players should discuss potential trade-offs. The fact that this topic is even being considered means that a significant number of players want shields. As for the lack of a downvote button (@Gregory Jennings), I agree with you that it would be very useful.

What I want to emphasize is that we should focus on helping Keen make decisions that satisfy the majority of players. This can only happen if we engage in constructive discussions rather than resorting to insults or dismissive comments like "I don't like it, shut up and do what I want."

With the effort everyone has put into making their voices heard, we could have worked toward a solution that benefits most players. However, every time I try to propose a compromise, no one wants to engage in real discussion—because arguing is more entertaining. The sense of victory in insulting someone or pushing the game in your preferred direction seems to outweigh the benefits of productive brainstorming.

My proposal is just that—a proposal. I outlined mechanics that came to mind when I started this topic. I appreciate those who pointed out flaws in my reasoning, but most responses since then have been: "This is wrong because...," "You don’t understand because...," or simply "I don’t like it." (from both sides).

What I would rather hear is: "X makes the game unbalanced, so I propose Y to address the issue."

@Fedeico Peruzzo Sorry about that.

To my understanding shields as the classic no-damage bubble can't be balanced for pvp, they simply make defense too simple to not produce an easy meta. It could partially be mitigated by allowing emitters to be shot out without having to break the shield first (assuming they can't be hidden at the bottom of a chimney and need to be at least visible from the direction they are stopping shots from), and possibly with the inclusion of some anti-shield weaponry, but I ultimately think they'd be best left out of the default vanilla settings.

@Tael: "Up to this point I had assumed you were just someone that wanted shields and didn’t see how they’d break pvp, but you have no interest in pvp, so you'd have no reason to either think of or care about pvp balance, and no point of reference with which to even try."

"You have no perspective of pvp balance, and no reason to have it, and seeing as it has been explained to you several times now it is likely that you are either unwilling or incapable of understanding it. To that end, explaining or arguing it to you seems pointless now, so we’ll come at this from a different angle later…"

A couple things with this. First, pvp not being my primary mode of play does not preclude me from having an understanding of it as you're suggesting with the underlined section. To suggest otherwise as you're doing there is like saying that people who aren't mechanics by trade automatically have no understanding of how cars work. I don't need to be a mechanic to know that if I go in for new brake pads and the guy is suddenly trying to hoist my entire engine out of the car that something isn't right. Just like the car guy doesn't need to know every little thing there is to know about cars, I don't need to know every little thing there is to know about pvp to understand it. Also on this point, you've said several times I've been toxic, yet here you are suggesting that I don't understand balance purely because I disagree with you. Junk like that is why I DESPISE most pvp communities and have no interest in it in almost all games I play. If you dare disagree with someone or you're not following the "meta" to the last one or zero you get told you're doing it wrong and folks look down their nose at you. Just as you say I don't understand pvp, I can suggest you have no understanding of how balance works in game development. Now do you want to keep going there or have an actual discussion?

That said just as you say I should be looking at it from a different angle, you definitely need to by that same token. I recognize you say you want things to be "balanced". Yet so far you have refused to define what you consider balanced other than saying "multiple build options and strategies that exist with default settings". Since you're still saying that shields wouldn't be balanced, clearly that's not your only criteria because if it is that already exists now and would continue to exist even after shields. You may not like the options you would have, but you would still have options. So I'm going to ask you a final time, define balanced and what that looks like. What constitutes a state of "balance"? If you're unwilling or unable to define what balance means, you have no grounds to claim shields are unbalanced.

"Again, if every argument with a logical extreme were to be invalid then nobody would be able to make a valid argument for anything. The “balance is an invalid argument because the only perfectly equal thing would be for nobody to have a game at all” argument is would be like if someone were to say “nobody should be allowed to have shields because they can already just turn damage off”. Both arguments are plainly absurd."

Read what I said again a little slower because you missed something. I've said several times now "but pvp balance" is not valid ON ITS OWN because it can be applied to anything that could ever exist, and be used to argue for the removal of things already in game. ANYTHING can be said to be unbalanced if one tries hard enough and thus has to be removed. I could say that the Warfare 2 guns were unbalanced thus have to be removed. I could also say the ability to download mods or share blueprints means people could download something that's unbalanced, thus has to be removed. If people are allowed to use non-default settings they could use unbalanced values thus people have to be hardcoded to using defaults only. Hence why simply saying "but pvp balance" on its own is not valid. You need something other than just that because saying "but balance" on its own is just you saying you don't like the balance which is not enough. More on this in a minute.

"On top of that, at the time of typing this you are currently 199,797 votes shy of hundreds of thousands on this topic, making your number just as much a “trust me” scenario as the absurdity I picked. So, they are just as accurate, and its up to you if we either use both, or neither."

I'm fully aware of how mods work and downloading them works. I will agree with you on one thing here, Keen definitely needs to let people have more transparency on what kind of settings a server is using before you join including mods in use if any. In order to say "a bunch of those people may not actually want shields but are still subbed" you again bear the burden of proof to demonstrate that. What you've done is essentially saying "well I'm still subbed to some shield mods and I don't like shields, therefore other people who are subbed don't want them either." If you're going to make that claim you would need to demonstrate it applies to other people aside from just yourself and so far you've not done that. Most people do not stay subbed to mods they're not interested in or sub to them to start with and you are the exception, not the rule. But being generous lets assume 10% of the people who subbed are like you and either never wanted them but had to download them to join a server, or no longer like the feature. That's still hundreds of thousands of people who DO want them and do like them. So yes as much as you may dislike it, we can in fact look at the shield subscriber numbers to get an idea of how many people want them. Some will sub and use them as a mod, some won't because it's a mod but still want to see shields. You can claim that there are alot more people like you who are subbed but don't actually want them, but you've not done that. So until you do it's not a valid argument.

"A lot of PvP players are always looking for a meta, an unbeatable advantage in combat. If they find one, then they crush everyone in pvp, and then everyone that doesn’t just quit copies them, and then the game quickly stagnates and the vast majority of pvp-players leave. Because of this, Keen tries to balance the game such that there isn’t a meta, and if someone finds one anyways Keen changes the game to get rid of it. This has already happened to floating-object-weapons, rotor-guns, piston-cannons, and nukes to name a few."

My dude, meta chasing is NOT unique to pvp and if you honestly think it is then you're fooling yourself. If you go on youtube right now you can find THOUSANDS of videos talking about the "best" builds for Star Trek Online, best talent setups for World of Warcraft, best skill point distribution for Diablo, best ways to play different characters in SWTOR, best ways to complete speedruns of (game here) or so on. It even extends to card games like Magic the Gathering, Yugioh, Pokemon and similar with the best "meta" decks. Also I have to ask at this point, do you truly understand what "meta" means? Meta is the most efficient way to do something. No matter how much balancing you do, there is always going to be a mathematical most efficient way to do certain things, be it railgun DPS, most efficient way to maximize floor space, most efficient way to get the most resources when mining, most efficient way to weld up a ship, best deal for your money and so on. The difference may only be a few points, but there is still always going to be a mathematical best. Once people find out this "best" they're going to tell other people or it's going to be figured out.

Tell me if I put out a video for a game like SWTOR or Star Trek Online, or WoW explaining a meta tank build for pvp or pve and a bunch of people copy that build to great success, who is hurt by that? If you want to use a different build than the one from my hypothetical video, what's stopping you from doing so save your own unwillingness to be different? You would be free to use the build from my hypothetical video or something completely different. All I'm doing in that instance is presenting the information, what you do with it us up to you. Just like Keen giving people the option to use shields or any other potential feature. If you choose to use shields or (feature here) then you're certainly welcome to do so. If you choose not to use it, that's also your choice. Simply because something exists doesn't require you to use it. See again I've yet to use pistons or rotors in any of my major builds and I've been playing since 2016. They're certainly viable blocks and they have their uses. I just haven't found one for how I like to play. That doesn't make me wrong for not using them, nor does it make people wrong who do use them.

As far as Keen and balance goes, all Keen does is give people options, such as giving people the new Warfare 2 guns. They set the defaults for how fast they fire, how much damage they do, how much power they use if applicable, then shipped them off to players to decide how to use them. Keen doesn't directly intervene in balance matters unless there is an absolutely egregious example of something going on or an exploit happening. I've already mentioned the safe zone change and the changes to hydrogen as the only 2 balance changes they've done after the fact. If you want an exploit fix see the example of free infinite battery power that used to be a thing. People could grind down their batteries and weld them back up to get infinite power. Now it scraps the power cells by default. Yet even that can be changed back if we want. Keen may not like it when we do that but they don't stop it because outside of extremely egregious examples, they simply do not care to the degree you think they do. All they do is give people options and sometimes add new options, just like Magic the Gathering introducing new cards to give people new stuff to play with. Yet by your argument them introducing new cards is "breaking pvp". Suck it up and adapt or play with people and events that don't use those cards.

"Shields create an easy meta, they can’t be balanced because they allow defense to be boiled down to a relatively simple math-problem tied to a single game mechanic. People would quickly find it, get bored, and then most of them would leave without ever considering altering the rules because they’d think the game too simple and poorly balanced."

I hate to break it to you but combat in this game is nothing but math problems behind the scenes that trigger flashy visuals and so on when various conditions are met. My railgun fires and deals damage X to block Y. If block Y takes enough damage to be destroyed, it triggers a big kaboom on screen and explosion visual. Combat even without shields is nothing but a big math problem as is most of the engineering in this game. For thrust it's a matter of physics math. When you stomp on the gas to move your grid, do you have enough thrust pushing on the grid to overcome its weight and push it in whatever direction you're trying to go? If attacking a grid, do your weapons have enough damage to penetrate the armor of the ship? As for finding what is best and copying it, see again above examples of meta chasing in other games. You not liking the balance of something again doesn't magically make it unbalanced, and again there will always be a mathematical best way of doing certain things with or without shields, so what exactly is your point here aside from not liking the balance? Still waiting on you to define the term balance btw.

"Now on the other hand we have all the PvE players here that want shields. They are convenient, allow for defense on more or less anything you want be it paper kite or iron bastion, and can have a decent aesthetic to them. If they aren’t in the game then pve players will need to be more careful in their designs and with things they would use them to defend against, but the lack of them wont totally ruin the pve game by itself."

Okay now I'm going to be perfectly blunt here, you just proved your own hypocrisy with this bit. If you're going to sit there and say above that I as a pve guy don't understand pvp or have any concept of it, likewise you don't have any grounds to sit here and lecture me on pve because you're not a pve guy. So you have no grounds to say what will or won't ruin pve by your own logic.

"Again, this is a discussion about the game under default-settings, if people want to change things from default, then their rules and changes are outside the purview of this discussion. If someone choses to play on settings other than default settings, it does not change that this discussion is only about default settings. As for warfare 2, the first amendment of the US constitution may give people the right to complain about changes, but it doesn't make their complaints correct. I'll disagree with them just as much as with you, the game was changed, but it was still balanced."

I saved this for last because this is where your entire argument falls apart rather spectacularly. You say your concern is the default settings of the game and people are free to change the rules as they see fit for their servers. You also say if someone chooses to play on something other than default settings its their own fault. Alright, there's a simple solution here. Put shields in the vanilla game but leave them off by default. Then folks who want them have to opt into them just like folks have to opt in for lightning damage, wolves/spiders, and meteor storms now. By your logic you're not having to worry about shields because by default they're disabled and if you turn them on then you're no longer playing with default settings and it's on the people who opt in at that juncture. So tell me, would you object to shields being added to the game but being left off by default? If you're consistent with your logic then you will have no issue with them being added but turned off by default. Then if folks opt in that's on them since they opted to use non default settings.

Ultimately what you have failed to see is that not everyone plays with pure default settings. MILLIONS of people play this game and download mods, change the basic server settings or so on. Keen giving them options is just as valid as giving the default only people options. The game doesn't revolve around the default only people anymore than it revolves exclusively around the others. It's the same reason that ice cream shops don't carry just a single flavor. You and I are just 2 people in a sea of millions of players for this game. I don't care for every single update anymore than you care for every single update. Just like I am not the target audience for a purely pvp update, you wouldn't be the target audience for a pure pve update.

@captainbladej52 please read Fedeico Peruzzo's post, they make perhaps the most important point worth making here.

You think I am wrong, and that shields are a good idea, I think you are wrong and that shields are a bad idea, we have both made our case, and neither of us are likely to agree on anything at this point. Continuing our debate is not a productive use of time.

Also, perhaps you may want to carefully re-read other things, I suggested a few times that I'd help you get a shield or other common mods properly added to the game in a way that had to be enabled and so wasn't part of the default.

@Tael: I read what was said but my point stands as does my question because my entire point is there are easy solutions to everything you've named as an issue that allows you not to deal with shields, and those who do want them to still have a new feature they enjoy so both sides win. It also goes to the integrity of anti-shielder arguments and demonstrates some just want to find excuses and are not interested in any kind of compromise or discussion.

This whole time you've talked about how "Again, this is a discussion about the game under default-settings, if people want to change things from default, then their rules and changes are outside the purview of this discussion." And also how you want "balanced defaults". So I'm going to ask you this question a final time. If shields were implemented in the vanilla game but were left disabled by default and people had to opt in to use them, like they do with meteor storms, wolves/spiders and lightning damage, would you object to shields being present in the game? Because by the standard you set previously, someone turning the shields on means they're no longer using default settings and it removes them from the current discussion as you're now talking about a non-default feature. So would you object to the presence of shields in the vanilla game if they were left disabled by default? Really a simple question that you shouldn't be afraid to answer.

Hangar Bay forcefield are pretty cool stuff and would be a welcome addition for me from an aesthetic build standpoint. Those open bays with fighters flying in and out are pretty cool.

It still clashes a bit with the general aesthetic I think SE has and aims for but inthink there's enough wiggle room to allow for envisioning a static field capable of holding back a gas environment.

Wouldn't regular doors trap all your ships anyways until they were open?

Aesthetic-wise I'd think we'd be better just asking for bigger hanger-doors, and part of me wants to point out that the unified grid system is likely to make arbitrarily large airtight-subgrid doors that look good an easy thing to do, and that if you use hinges instead of pistons then you can just detach everything to make it relatively easy to push the door open, but I see where you're coming from. A force-field-hanger-door would probably cause less klang, be easier for new players to use, and it would be easier to arbitrarily scale the energy-field. If it just functions as a fancy version of any other door then I don't think think too many people will complain.

I totally agree 100%.

Also if Keen really implements shields, (which I hope they don't add shields) At least find some other creative way to add combat structural reinforcement, they better do it SMART and not as "Egg-bubbles".

The same can be said about heavy armor being an excuse for why light armor isn't enough. While you're certainly entitled to this opinion, if you're constantly losing to someone then their design isn't as poor as you believe it to be.