I can't believe I'm saying this, but make dome shields like the gungan shields from Star Wars. Meaning, make them gen powered at the center, and allow units to go through, but not fire through the shields. this eliminates tank and air spam, but allows them to pass through the shields if they want to take the risk. DO NOT ALLOW the defenders to shoot out of the dome shield. This would be unbalanced, as any aircraft within 500 meters of the shield would be obliterated without any means of defending itself. Or, instead of being gen powered, dome shields could be a plus of having a connected amp station. This solution has some flaws however. if an empire is warpgated, it will have an incredibly hard time repelling the attackers. This idea would probably not work until home continents, inter continental lattice, continent locking and a revamp to the resource system got put in place. Anyway, I'd like to hear your ideas on this subject, and if you can, please refrain from raging. We're trying to think of a solution here, not point out how silly Higby is.
They already said that it would be attached to Amp stations in some way. That means they are strategic objectives, not tactical objectives. One could argue that is a good thing because it adds to the strategic game, but means that the shields will only be taken away from already battered people who lack amp stations. Or one could argue that making them a tactical objective (Local generators) would mean it's better, but then you run into the issue of the placement of the gens, making the shields either easy to destroy and therefore redundant or difficult to destroy so that their destruction happens at such a time that the base has fallen anyway, so it's a worthwhile secondary objective. ...I think the strategic objective is better because the placement problem is one that I really have not gotten a counter argument that I myself have much confidence in... as the placement really is tricky, but that is me.
basements would be my solution. and the issue with passing through shields is that libs basically would dip their main cannon through and massacre everyone from safety
Two things: With the current Lattice, it's PAINSTAKINGLY HARD to cut off a link. It was also hard in the Hex system, but for different reasons. Remember that there are two ways to deny a benefit: Either you cap the facility, or cut off the link. The former is incredibly hard because the benefit is tied by definition to the most defensible place in the game, Basically, if you want to remove dome shields over a particular base, you can only rely on "cutting off links" which is currently impossible since we have no mechanic to do so without capturing. There is currently NO WAY to achieve the goal above in a reliable fashion. If the AMP station has the benefit, how do you remove the shield over the AMP station ? That's why, if anything, Biolabs should have the domeshieldand not AMPs One last thing about "cutting off stuff": This is why I insisted so much for keeping Hex over Lattice: Assigning a binary nature (on/off) on base dynamics is very hard to work around. The BIG advantage that Hex had is that Influence played as a "soft value"; I gave examples about how it could be put in use for so many uses: -Deploy times -Resource costs -No-deploy zone radius A soft value over a hard switch would be a good thing; since cutting off a territory is so hard, how about having the benefit affect the base proportionally, based on this "soft value" ? I miss influence ;_;
In regards to the Lattice vs. Hex (And as we are in fear of derailing this to talk this over can we just let this be point (yours) counterpoint (mine) and move on. I have no problem debating this with you, it's just that we're on Dome shields, and this could RAPIDLY derail the subject at hand. Influence was okay, but the potential of the lattice is greater IMO. Despite all these decent advantages of the Hex, it's fundamental problem: People avoiding combat by just going around, and holding out until they had overwhelming numbers, this meaning that fights were either nonexistent or zergy, just couldn't be solved in a way that wouldn't have not lead to obscene rewards to people who defended. The scale of which would have likely screwed the game over in an entirely different way. The solution to the lattices problems: Addition and subtraction of lattice links. It's even easier to manage the idea of letting people take territory behind the line in the lattice, because it means that you aren't going to get an exponentially expanding point of territory control via ghost capping. You could never have opened up all bases in the hex, because if you had, no one would have played against anyone, it would have been a constant stream of ghost caps and back caps that undermined any kind of line. The second you get one territory behind the line, your opponent would need to dump 3 platoons minumum worth of people on the surrounding territories to prevent loosing upwards of 9 territories in the next 5 minutes. This isn't tactically deflecting people... it's cheesy nonsense. As to the Amp stations and dome shields... To be honest, I mulled this over for a while, and what I have figured, is that straight: "Hold an amp station get dome shields" as you say, makes little sense. Because, as you say, taking the dome shields away would mean somehow isolating a territory from all amp stations is more trouble than it's worth. ...But what if instead of the dome shields being a bonus to amp station ownership... ...it's a matter of energy produced by the amp station? So... we could not be talking about bonuses, it could be talking about a resource system? Yeah this is speculation, but what your saying is correct; and again, this is the only way what everything we are hearing, makes sense. So... are we talking about cutting connection to the amp station, or are we talking draining a silo, which needs to be resupplied from the amp station?
I didn't want to derail the thing, just wanted to state that Hex introduced a "soft value" mechanic which otherwise we would not have thought about, and which could solve a lot of problems concerning base dynamics. At best, we get this back in the form of a (shady and yet to be elaborated) resource system. PS1's NTU was still a hard switch, since getting a 10% silo was the same as 100%
Not saying you -did- derail things, just saying we should likely limit it to a single point/counterpoint to prevent that from Happening. And yeah, at best, just what makes sense. No idea for sure.