massive shield depleter

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
"THe Neural Combat Net is not effective, Unless you have a dreadnought at Novice and an Escort at 50% Legendary or something like it."

If you're using large fleets and taking losses all the time, it can make your fleets more effective, faster- you don't need to spend time at training facilities, and ALL ships get the bonuses of any ship over 20%. Well, as long as you don't loose the experienced ship(s)

IMO it really should be a standard tech tree item.

Phoenix-D

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Yeah, I think it makes sense for the Psychic tech tree. The problem is, the two 'racial' tech fields most in need of a boost are Deeply Religious and Temporal. The others - Crystalline, Organic, Psychic -- have plenty of cool toys.

Temporal needs a defense, not necessarily armor like Crystalline and Organic, but something to improve their defenses. I was thinking there ought to be a 'displacement device' that makes the ship 'shift around' and causes a fixed chance for a weapon to miss no matter what the true percentage to hit it. A fixed 30 percent chance to miss, even for missiles, would go a long way towards negating technological or even numeric advantages. An interesting question would be how this would interact with the Talisman!

Religious needs something more to help it on the 'offensive'. The shrines are all very nice but only work in your own systems. Figuring out exactly what would make sense is a real tough question. You can see that the effects of the shrines are supposed to come from their ability to rally the population to do various things that improve the society and environment. Even the 'death shrine' and 'war shrine' could represent excellent training rather than some 'magical' power. I've been trying to think of a 'pseudo-science' (erm, 'pseudo-religious'?) explanation that would make the neural combat net usable in the religious techs...

[ 29 April 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[travislp]

As far as the massive shield generator just do what I did. I modded it to generate phased shielding instead of normal shielding and bumped up the shield strength from 5000 to 50000. Makes it a much more useful facility. Added a bit more cost. Still takes between 1.2 and 1.7 years to build.

[thorfrog]

Why not just mod the massive shield depleter to fire 3 or 4 times in combat. That makes the most sense.

[PvK]

travislp, yes that's more or less what I did to the shield base in Proportions.

automannj, yes that would help the depleter a bit.

Baron, I don't see Religious as weak, with its shrines and above all the talisman. The talisman is about the most powerful offensive tool in the game, it seems to me.

Temporal also don't seem weak to me - their weapons can be devastating to anyone who uses shields, and those who don't use shields are in trouble at some point, unless they are organically armored.

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

"Religious needs something more to help it on the 'offensive'."

*cough* TALISMAN *cough*

Phoenix-D

[capnq]

Sure, the Talisman is great, but can you survive long enough to research it? I've yet to manage that in multi-player. (Although the fact that I was fighting Askan in two of those three games had a lot to do with it.)

[Baron Munchausen]

The Talisman just means that whatever direct fire weapons you carry will always hit if within range. The default weapon for the Norak is the Meson BLaster, which has a range 2 less than the APB and many other direct fire weapons in the game, not to mention various seekers. This is not such a big advantage as you might think, though it can be nice in certain situations. Popping through a WP to find a bunch of Talisman-equipped ships waiting for you is NOT fun! But they can still be easily out-ranged and they still have to break down any shield/armor in order to do serious damage to an enemy. I've changed them to research the PPB and that does make them more dangerous.

[ 29 April 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]