Regenerating Shields

From Stars!wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Stars! race design concepts
PRTs HE · SS · WM · CA · IS · SD · PP · IT · AR · JOAT
LRTs IFE · TT · ARM · ISB · GR · UR · MA · NRSE · CE · OBRM · NAS · LSP · BET · RS
Other HG · HP · -f · QS · 1WW / OWW · Immunities · Habitability · Economics · Technology · Abbreviations

A lesser racial trait, Regenerating Shields boosts shield strength at the expense of additional armor.

The appeal of RS

The appeal of RS is really hard to grasp for a green player. After all, all this LRT do is take away half of the ships fire taking capacity while giving you only 40% more shields (which is usually perceived as a 10% loss exchange) while giving out a ridiculous amount of points in return in the race builder, right? The answer of a seasoned player will of course be "wrong!", and for good reasons. To be able to understand why this LRT is not only appealing but even sought for in many cases, one need to study and understand the various mechanics of combat in Stars! as well as the finer points of the LRT.

The good part

The first crucial point of this LRT is that it will only affect the armor components that you will add to designs, not the armor points already attributed in the default hulls. A frigate will still have 45 hull points, a destroyer 200, a cruiser 700, etc. It is thus not that much of a drawback as far as hull points are concerned, as long as you do not add additional armor components.

The second point in favor of this LRT refer to the advantages of not adding additional armor components to ship designs. There is actually several: improved battle speed, mass which affect both gatability and who fire first in battles, cost of additional armor in resource and minerals, etc. A player may wish to specialize in never or hardly ever adding armor components on his ship designs, which mean that this LRT is a gift sent by the heaven for such a player since it adds advantage without really penalizing him.

The third point which finalize everything is shield stacking. Whenever you add more than one shield to the same design, those shields add up to create a bigger single shield protecting the ship. If the first attack does not drain the shields completely, it will regenerate 10% of what is left. This alone, with the 40% extra shield, could potentially already win you close battles... There is however an extra catch, called fleet stacking. Whenever you team up several ships of the same design in a single fleet, those ships will band together in a single stack on the battle board and will combine their shields in the same manner than two shields components combining together on a single ship. A player who wish to take advantage of this LRT thus need to build bigger numbers to exploit this feature and fight by the numbers instead of fighting by power. A early FF design sporting good shields and a decent weapon can become an invincible fleet until the age of missiles (in which you can add chaff to counter them) for the simple fact that FFs are cheap to build and thus easy to produce in great numbers. And like a tidal wave effect, the more you add to the shield stack, the bigger the 10% regeneration returns will be.

Drawbacks

One must still be wary about the drawbacks of this LRT before deciding to go with it. The first and most easily noticed drawback in the course of a game would be sappers. Sappers are dedicated beam weapons which attack first and do nothing else than draining shields. The first sapper appear relatively early at Weapon9/Energy5 and greatly outperform the Colloidal Phaser, its closest relative at Weapon10, for 82 range 3 damage against shield versus 26 range 3 damage against everything. There is no need to say that a dedicated FF sapper design can easily counter mass amount of shields, reducing the RS advantage considerably. SBs using sappers in an all out beamer attack can also easily stand their own depending of the number of the attacking fleet, forcing the attacking player to switch to other methods to guarantee victory.

The second most obvious drawback would be weakened Star Bases. A fully shielded SB without armor components is a stronghold against a beamer attack... But won't fare long against a torpedo or missile attack since those weapons still apply half of their damage directly to armor when they hit. While this is much less of a problem for ships since you will still be working on equal grounds with the ship hulls, your SBs will undoubtedly become 50% weaker in the missile era than an enemy SB without the RS LRT. This make attacks by enemies on your worlds easier and force you to rely on a ship defense earlier than otherwise.

In resume

Because of all this, this LRT is best suited for players who like to be on the offensive early. While any player can be seen using this LRT, War Mongers are often the best suited for it since they have access to decent weapons right off the bat and are usually played by aggressive players willing to remain on the offensive for most of the game. CCs and more importantly their unique Battle Cruiser hull also benefit greatly from RS as there is only a single Armor/Shield spot on the whole design, forcing the player to either choose between shields or armor, or to use the general purpose slot to add the second which result in weakening the attack power of the ship. In the same train of thought, this LRT also weaken the DD and BB hulls since they both have dedicated armor slots which become pretty much useless for a LRT player. The WM unique Dreadnought hull is however less affected by the dedicated armor slot since this hull sports extra armor/shield slots which does not appear on the BB hull.

Please refer to dedicated articles in the article library concerning detailed descriptions of the battle engine and for essays on ship design.

In a nutshell

Shield strength

The total shield strength of each ship design is increased by 40% (this includes the extra shielding from Fielded Kelarium and Mega Poly Shell.)

Regeneration

After each round of battle, the shields of surviving ships regenerate by 10% of their original strength, as long as they have not been completely drained. Once the shields on a stack are reduced to zero, they remain at zero for the remainder of the battle.

Armor strength

Armor components have their armor strength halved. Built-in hull armor strength is not affected. "Bonus" armor built into non-armor components (Croby Sharmor, Langston Shell and Multi-Cargo Pod) is also unaffected.

Important extra information

There is a minor bug in the battle viewer that causes an opponent's ships' stats to be displayed incorrectly if you have RS and your opponent does not, or vice-versa.

Specifications

Base cost: -10AP

Advantages

  • All shielding is 40% higher than rated strength
  • After each round of battle, the shields on each ship regenerate by 10%.

Disadvantages

  • Armor components are 50% lower than rated strength

References

  • HWF thread on regenerating shields [1] [2]