4:02 Only disruptor rounds reduce shield strength I know a lot of people aren't fans of the current state of shield projectors, but you're also using them at relatively high range settings which increases their power consumption significantly. You can run them almost "skintight" and that will save a lot of power for an average of 30% of shells reflected at strength 10. Obviously, they're better on things that have the armour to survive a few hits, but would you rather add 30% more armour to your vehicle or a few shields? Also, let's not forget they reduce incoming laser AP by a whopping 70% at strength 10. That's a lot given storage now also counts againt laser AP. The other thing is, as you mentioned, you can use them in specific locations. The way I see it, it gives you about 30% chance to reflect a hit that would've otherwise been dead-on target and may have been massive overkill and wiped out a turret/turret cap/AI/subobject. It gives you a chance to survive that. Nothing else gives you something like that, not LAMS, not ring shields. To be fair, ring shields affect pretty much everything, including PACs and missiles AND they update after each layer has been destroyed, but they require far more planning than standard shields and it becomes a fairly significant commitment above 10 AC, which is, by comparison, a 25% AC increase on metal, aka less than the 30% average against shells that planars get and only about a third of the effectiveness against lasers (assuming you're not stacking smoke on top, in which case ring shields become monstrously good against lasers).
Everything you have said is true. 👍 That doesn't change the fact that shield projectors are generally defensive slot machines (aside from laser defense) that don't FEEL worth it. Like I said in the video, if you crunch the numbers they are technically worth using. But from a game design standpoint, they still don't feel worth the effort of using them. 🤷♂
@@BorderWise12 If you are going up against LH/TGish it sure the hell does. I've had good success so far with having the shields turn on only when they detect stuff, kinda like laser warners and smoke dispensers. The biggest drawback about shields is power/resource consumption so the more efficient you can make them the more they become worth it. A shield projector is only a 100 + resource draw for a 30% deflection.
@@coffeezombie244 Pretty sure it's linear, 20% on a perfectly flat hit, 30% on 45 degrees, 40% if you're basically flying perpendicular, but don't quote me on that.
Another thing worth noting is that Ring Shields require significantly more room in your hull, and the planning to accompany it. If you have even a basic grasp of Steam Engines (making 2 or 3 stage engines), you will almost certainly have situations where you have more engine power than you need, and so you can slap a planar shield in an unoccupied 1x1x1 space and fit it to the necessary dimensions. It's not always the most efficient protection, but in concert with other layered defenses, they can be worth the power you end up spending on them, especially since disruption shells are so rare (or nonexistent?) in faction craft
Bit of a math mistake at 3:45 - power consumption goes with the square of the power so at power 1 its whatever the baseline is, power 2 is 4x baseline, 3 is 9x baseline and 10 is 100x baseline (10^2 being 100) This is also why you can't go below 1 as the formula breaks down and the power consumption becomes miniscule. As an example, .1 strength would correspond to a power consumption of just .46 in the shied you're showing there
I felt that shields had a proper place in the meta when they were extremely good at countering high-velocity rapid-fire cannon fire. Big shells and missiles could be zapped by LAMS, and lasers could be stuffed by smoke, but shields were the only reasonable answer to the machine gun style of the White Flayers when they weren't ramming you. The nerfs hit shields so hard that even the Singularity's designer had to shrug and say "hope they don't spam sand blasters too much" when redesigning it for those updates. I think shields would serve much better if they acted like what people expect, with a pool of hitpoints worth of damage that it can absorb before failing and allowing further attacks to pass through. That would make them better at countering the dreaded alpha strike, but not able to just permanently deny a means of attack for the entire duration of a fight, or disappoint you with its unreliable RNG even at max power. Being anti-alphastrike would be a good niche for shield projectors in the meta.
i recall at one point the shileds had a mechanic where they could either disrupt OR deflect and the block had some sort of "heat buildup" and would break if it did too much too fast, i think thought it was pretty good, but it didnt use that much power. and at the time power was harder to come by as even the current fuel engine wasnt implemented iirc.
Probably the old fuel engine. I only caught the last few weeks of it existing, but it had much lower peak power than modern ones as was built slightly differently.
@@CreeperDude-cm1wv it was fuel or rtg from what i remember. i think its part of the current fuel engine scheme as legacy code or something like that. the balance was very different and crystal was a still a resource maybe. it was almost a decade ago now...
I'm definitely with you on that. Shields currently are underwhelming. Making them effective in proportion to the cannon's velocity would give them a real role, and would cut down somewhat on the currently balance-breaking effectiveness of railguns.
Personally I prefer the reliability of ring shields over shield projectors. SPs take a ton of power for an average decrease of 30% of the enemy firepower, but their RNG focus just puts me off, I don't like fights that are decided by the roll of a dice The fact that SPs are also required to be close to the surface of the armor (unless your engines are way too big) is also annoying the requirment for SPs to recharge as well is weird, cause it means that there's a cap to how many shots can be stopped, but not a cap to how many can go through As for use on frontsiders, they just seem quite underwhelming. Sure, they are much better used there than on a broadsider which needs to protect 2 very long sides, but you could get just a ton of ring shields safely tucked inside the armor, that cause the AP at the small frontal surface of the craft to go really high. RSs also have a unique way of causing collateral damage, dealing a lot of damage but in the form of what's essentially a laser of doom, which is honestly not that scary so long as the right shield pipes don't aim at something vital (if you go with a square shaped RS, you only have to worry about the blocks adjacent to the corners and those that follow them, everything else is safe) I personally put RS around things like engines and other non-explosive but delicate systems, since they won't get blown up by the system they surround and won't damage it either. RSs also have an advantage due to not being used so much, aka. most shells are designed to have just enough AP to deal full damage to metal/HA and no more, which means that having smth like +15 armor can significantly reduce damage (especially when coupled with some good old wedges so kinetic shells to lose their bite). I think that SPs should have a 100% chance of blocking things, but take into account the speed of the shell along with the angle it hit the shield at to determine how much shield energy is needed, if not enough is present simply letting the shell through, so things like railgun shells or CRAM shots going directly perpendicular to the shield should take a ton of energy to deflect (CRAM shells are huge so why not make them into a cheap SP counter due to the sheer energy the shield projector would need to deflect a shell THAT big)
I don't agree that fights would be decided by a roll of the dice. Your ship should not be defeated by a single shot. If it can survive many, and it should, then effectively it's a matter of statistical damage reduction rather than a game of chance. I dislike ring shields for their size and fragility. A penetrating shot has a high chance of hitting and destroying part of your shield, and then the whole shield is down. Shield projectors are small and you will use many of them, so the loss of one does not take down the whole array, but only a small part of it.
i needed EXACTLY this. thanks BorderWise, could you make one on ring shields? im still a beginner and im sure some people would like that too, anyways great vid!
I feel like shield projector should utilise their strength and strength regeneration more. For example they deflection chance is based on their current charge percentage so strength 1 shield would have 100% to deflect very first projectile and pretty much 0% for any of the following shots as strength 1 has such abysmally low recharge rate it would never be able to recover to meaningful amount before next shot. Stronger shields would have more max power charge and faster recharge so they could still hold up for a while but constant stream of bullets would eventually bleed them dry. Also bigger shells could just consume more power per bit so high gauge cannon still have chance to pierce it, just the very first round would miss
don't quote me on this but i believe this is similar to how they worked before, with disruption shells disabling shields for a bit. the issue is then that you could stack enough shields so at least 1 layer is almost alwats at 100% deflection chance
@@comet.x4359Make them roll only once (which is already in game) so that after hitting that first shield, second shield that have 100% deflection got bypassed anyway.
Shields: keep them small, keep them close, and keep them max power. Wish they were less random, but even an off chance to deflect that 500mm rail shell that would've gutted your craft is valuable. Definitely get more value out of them on smaller craft, big ones can afford to feed a ringshield or have improbably thick armour instead.
Personally I'm really happy that these are basically optional in the current build of the game. When I first started playing they were basically the META in making sure your craft survived a fight and I have always HATED setting them up with a passion
I had to do a double-take when you stacked the shields; last time I tried using them they would turn others off whose center would pass through a closer shield.
I just tested how shield stacking works, and as far as I can tell it doesn't. :( I started with testing 9 strength 10 shields at 10° offsets against the Pilferer, Plunderer, and Tyr at range. I only observed deflections on the first layer hit, and ricochets always occurred when a deflection bounced a shell into another shield. I then tried a more controlled testbed with 46 shields at 1° offsets with a ~900 rpm 1002mps CWIS firing through them on the same fortress >20 blocks away from the first shield. This time I did observe deflections occuring across multiple layers; however, trying to eyeball a rough count of total deflections in 1 minute indicated no better odds than one strength 10 shield should theoretically be doing. At a minimum, I suspect there's either shell clipping occuring, or the deflection rolls have extreme diminishing chances on consecutive layers when they are presumably still being calculated. Otherwise I would expect 45 consecutive rolls of 80% passing to result in less than 5 in a thousand rounds fully penetrating.
It would be interesting if they made shields use energy instead of engine power and have them constantly drain them with a scaling metric like particle cannons. Call them "energy shields"^^
I do like a nicely slotted decorative shields... but in optimal positioning they are either quite ugly, or unsatisfyingly invisible. So I keep them tight and small and either gate off my spinal mounted or above deck guns just on the front... or a fun layer just under the outer skin of my ship that doesn't even activate til there's damage.
With ships I usually stick them on turrets inside the hull so you only need one. No point in using 2 when the enemy is only on one side. The megalodon is a great example of how to use them as inefficiently as possible.
I feel like these went in the wrong direction. It'd be more interesting if the reflection chance was higher, but diminished every time a shell was reflected with the power usage acting as a "recharge" to get back to full strength. I miss the old "disrupt" function as well, I found that to be fairly useful at max projection distance.
@@whwhwhhwhhhwhdldkjdsnsjsks6544 I didn't mean about Disruptor rounds directly damaging the projector, I meant the Disrupt setting in the shields. Rather than bouncing shells off at a chance, it had a 100% chance to alter the angle of shells that passed through, with that angle increasing in the same way reflect chance scaled with angle. It was a niche but fun use for them
I like to use them on either my heavies to add to durability or on light vehicles to increase survivability. Mediums i usually leave because they can handle themselves fine and disadvantage to lights is they usually aren't large enough for an effective point defense system so I try to armor them as much as I can practically.
Long time listener, first time caller. Thanks for making these videos, I love FTD and it's difficult to find good information about the game outside of your channel.
Decided to do little test after watching your video. Here is the numbers how effective shields compare to smoke vs low ap lasers: Simple laser (15 ap) against metal beam (1680 hp 40 armor class). -No shield. 1800 damage per shot. -Shield strength 1. 1630 damage per shot. -Shield strength 2. 1000 damage per shot. -Shield strength 3. 800 damage per shot. -Shield strength 5 (cap for this test stand). 600 damage per shot. -No shield 0.1 smoke. 805 damage per shot. -No shield 1 (default) smoke. 407 damage per shot. -No shield 10 smoke. 208 damage per shot. -Shield 5 + 10 smoke. 204 damage per shot. -Shield 5 + 1 smoke. 401 damage. -Shield 5 + 0.1 smoke. 600 damage.
I'm guessing the calculation uses the effect strength to modify the shield's refractive index (higher effect strength = higher refractive index), but beyond that Idk. Would be nice to know the upper and lower limits of the shield's refractive index, and what effects the projectile's characteristics (besides the incidence angle) have on the outcome. Stuff like length-to-caliber ratio, velocity, density-to-surface-area ratios and so on.
It would be cool if shields functioned almost like blocks: all shells damaged them but they required power to regenerate and not materials; they still had that deflection chance; and you could change the armor, health, deflection, and regen rate separately; with increasing any of them requiring more power. The way I'd see armor working would be the shield taking damage, but not affecting the shell if the shell's AP beat the shield's armor, though there'd still be a deflection chance meaning that they wouldn't be useless against Super High AP rounds. Disruptor shells could do more damage to shields; and also decrease their armor value and deflection chance. Edit: They'd also work against PACs now; though they wouldn't be able to deflect those, just tank damage.
APS got buffed recently so not sure where that’s from. Neither shield protects exclusively vs APS and they can both improve survivability of a craft massively so not sure why a buff’s needed.
@@whwhwhhwhhhwhdldkjdsnsjsks6544 2 Years ago when i last played APS was so much better. SO ye they been nurfed since then. Shields have been nurfed to the point of being useless. Why build the craft 30% bigger & add massive engines for some useless shields. Pointless
Is it feasible to make forcefield CIWS turrets? For example, taking a very small but powerful forcefield surface, extending it out to a far range, then mounting it on a turret that aims and activates the shields at incoming projectiles as needed.
Problem with that is that CIWS controllers can't aim at APS shells or laser beams, so it'll just be an anti-CRAM measure. And there's simpler and better anti-CRAM measures, e.g moving fast.
Theoretically, yes, but there's not much practical use for a turreted shield, because shields consume much more power when you project the plane farther out from the projector block. This means you want your shield projectors as close to the edge of your vehicle as possible to maximize coverage at a minimum power cost. A turret attempting to point a shield in various directions is likely to be close to the centerline of the vehicle, if not the whole center of mass, so to reach out beyond the hull, the shield would have to project very far out. The much more practical method of conserving shields is to either use a frontsiding vehicle with less area to cover, or to name the projectors on each side of the vehicle, so that you can use the vehicle's AI to only turn on some shields when there are enemies detected on that side.
@@daviddavidson505 unless of course you use a lil subobject magic and have the projector on a beam going through the whole craft and being *incredibly* cheesy
Is it possible to toggle the shields on and off? If so they would be a lot better because you could have them off and not wasting power when not needed
Hey could you mess with ERA? I remember it being bad, but recently I found that it will delete what ever projectile hits it. Even 500mm 8m hollow-point sabot will get deleted when it hits ERA.
I swear to god shields are so overpowered that I swear the megalodon only has lvl1 shields and feels like a level 10 shield but then you have a perforator with a damn monster layers of shields that never seen to bounce shells
The Megalodon also has a really good LAMS that just shoots down most shells anyway. When you see the remaining shells. Bounce off shields, it makes them look so powerful.
It definitely is kinda stupid that you can't mix the shield types. They could easily have their own niches, yet everyone I know just ignores ring shields instead.
There is zero overlap between their functions. I think the exclusion is a relic of previous versions, as shields have changed a great deal since their introduction.
Subvehicles. 😏 Just have the ringshields on the main craft and the planar shields on subvehicles. Either embedded in the main craft or pods suspended around it.
You can already make craft that feel basically impossible to destroy for anything other than uncounterable attacks. Ring shields + planars at the same time would be so hard to hurt.
@@whwhwhhwhhhwhdldkjdsnsjsks6544 sand, pacs, rams, spinal mounts railguns, megalasers, orbital cram, thumper huge missile... i have yet to find a craft that becomes hard to hit with all of these, except orbital crams because they're absolutely inaccurate memes
imo the rng component of them is irrelevant. Over the course of a battle enough shots would have been reflected for the outcome to, in virtually all cases, be identical to if they reduced damage by a consistent amount from each shot.
ftd is ruled by the alpha strike meta. it is absolutely relevent. solid alpha strikes that chunks off a quarter of your craft at the beginning of a fight exist, and can and will decide whether you win or lose. this becomes a 60% chance for the shields to not do anything, and the big spinal mount to go 'haha i win' at the most optimal placement. even after the alpha strike it sometimes takes one well placed shot to take out either shield or the power to keep all the shields running. And that drops the true chance over a battle significantly
@@comet.x4359 hmmm… I disagree with that statement simply because most of the most experienced players don’t seem to care much about alpha strikes. Unless you have paper thin armour alpha strikes are never really gonna disable a large craft.
4:02 Only disruptor rounds reduce shield strength
I know a lot of people aren't fans of the current state of shield projectors, but you're also using them at relatively high range settings which increases their power consumption significantly. You can run them almost "skintight" and that will save a lot of power for an average of 30% of shells reflected at strength 10. Obviously, they're better on things that have the armour to survive a few hits, but would you rather add 30% more armour to your vehicle or a few shields? Also, let's not forget they reduce incoming laser AP by a whopping 70% at strength 10. That's a lot given storage now also counts againt laser AP.
The other thing is, as you mentioned, you can use them in specific locations. The way I see it, it gives you about 30% chance to reflect a hit that would've otherwise been dead-on target and may have been massive overkill and wiped out a turret/turret cap/AI/subobject. It gives you a chance to survive that. Nothing else gives you something like that, not LAMS, not ring shields.
To be fair, ring shields affect pretty much everything, including PACs and missiles AND they update after each layer has been destroyed, but they require far more planning than standard shields and it becomes a fairly significant commitment above 10 AC, which is, by comparison, a 25% AC increase on metal, aka less than the 30% average against shells that planars get and only about a third of the effectiveness against lasers (assuming you're not stacking smoke on top, in which case ring shields become monstrously good against lasers).
Everything you have said is true. 👍
That doesn't change the fact that shield projectors are generally defensive slot machines (aside from laser defense) that don't FEEL worth it. Like I said in the video, if you crunch the numbers they are technically worth using. But from a game design standpoint, they still don't feel worth the effort of using them. 🤷♂
@@BorderWise12 If you are going up against LH/TGish it sure the hell does. I've had good success so far with having the shields turn on only when they detect stuff, kinda like laser warners and smoke dispensers. The biggest drawback about shields is power/resource consumption so the more efficient you can make them the more they become worth it. A shield projector is only a 100 + resource draw for a 30% deflection.
@ohm is futile the 30% on 10 deflection rate do you know if that's linear or more of a diminishing return?
@@coffeezombie244 Pretty sure it's linear, 20% on a perfectly flat hit, 30% on 45 degrees, 40% if you're basically flying perpendicular, but don't quote me on that.
Another thing worth noting is that Ring Shields require significantly more room in your hull, and the planning to accompany it. If you have even a basic grasp of Steam Engines (making 2 or 3 stage engines), you will almost certainly have situations where you have more engine power than you need, and so you can slap a planar shield in an unoccupied 1x1x1 space and fit it to the necessary dimensions. It's not always the most efficient protection, but in concert with other layered defenses, they can be worth the power you end up spending on them, especially since disruption shells are so rare (or nonexistent?) in faction craft
Bit of a math mistake at 3:45 - power consumption goes with the square of the power so at power 1 its whatever the baseline is, power 2 is 4x baseline, 3 is 9x baseline and 10 is 100x baseline (10^2 being 100)
This is also why you can't go below 1 as the formula breaks down and the power consumption becomes miniscule. As an example, .1 strength would correspond to a power consumption of just .46 in the shied you're showing there
I felt that shields had a proper place in the meta when they were extremely good at countering high-velocity rapid-fire cannon fire. Big shells and missiles could be zapped by LAMS, and lasers could be stuffed by smoke, but shields were the only reasonable answer to the machine gun style of the White Flayers when they weren't ramming you. The nerfs hit shields so hard that even the Singularity's designer had to shrug and say "hope they don't spam sand blasters too much" when redesigning it for those updates.
I think shields would serve much better if they acted like what people expect, with a pool of hitpoints worth of damage that it can absorb before failing and allowing further attacks to pass through. That would make them better at countering the dreaded alpha strike, but not able to just permanently deny a means of attack for the entire duration of a fight, or disappoint you with its unreliable RNG even at max power. Being anti-alphastrike would be a good niche for shield projectors in the meta.
i recall at one point the shileds had a mechanic where they could either disrupt OR deflect and the block had some sort of "heat buildup" and would break if it did too much too fast, i think thought it was pretty good, but it didnt use that much power. and at the time power was harder to come by as even the current fuel engine wasnt implemented iirc.
@@ethandye8764
Huh, what was the engine at the time?
Probably the old fuel engine. I only caught the last few weeks of it existing, but it had much lower peak power than modern ones as was built slightly differently.
@@CreeperDude-cm1wv it was fuel or rtg from what i remember. i think its part of the current fuel engine scheme as legacy code or something like that. the balance was very different and crystal was a still a resource maybe. it was almost a decade ago now...
I'm definitely with you on that. Shields currently are underwhelming. Making them effective in proportion to the cannon's velocity would give them a real role, and would cut down somewhat on the currently balance-breaking effectiveness of railguns.
They're extremely handy on fast-moving craft where their Achilles heel is lasers, and the hull doesn't allow for decent armour thickness.
Personally I prefer the reliability of ring shields over shield projectors.
SPs take a ton of power for an average decrease of 30% of the enemy firepower, but their RNG focus just puts me off, I don't like fights that are decided by the roll of a dice
The fact that SPs are also required to be close to the surface of the armor (unless your engines are way too big) is also annoying
the requirment for SPs to recharge as well is weird, cause it means that there's a cap to how many shots can be stopped, but not a cap to how many can go through
As for use on frontsiders, they just seem quite underwhelming. Sure, they are much better used there than on a broadsider which needs to protect 2 very long sides, but you could get just a ton of ring shields safely tucked inside the armor, that cause the AP at the small frontal surface of the craft to go really high.
RSs also have a unique way of causing collateral damage, dealing a lot of damage but in the form of what's essentially a laser of doom, which is honestly not that scary so long as the right shield pipes don't aim at something vital (if you go with a square shaped RS, you only have to worry about the blocks adjacent to the corners and those that follow them, everything else is safe)
I personally put RS around things like engines and other non-explosive but delicate systems, since they won't get blown up by the system they surround and won't damage it either.
RSs also have an advantage due to not being used so much, aka. most shells are designed to have just enough AP to deal full damage to metal/HA and no more, which means that having smth like +15 armor can significantly reduce damage (especially when coupled with some good old wedges so kinetic shells to lose their bite).
I think that SPs should have a 100% chance of blocking things, but take into account the speed of the shell along with the angle it hit the shield at to determine how much shield energy is needed,
if not enough is present simply letting the shell through, so things like railgun shells or CRAM shots going directly perpendicular to the shield should take a ton of energy to deflect
(CRAM shells are huge so why not make them into a cheap SP counter due to the sheer energy the shield projector would need to deflect a shell THAT big)
I don't agree that fights would be decided by a roll of the dice. Your ship should not be defeated by a single shot. If it can survive many, and it should, then effectively it's a matter of statistical damage reduction rather than a game of chance. I dislike ring shields for their size and fragility. A penetrating shot has a high chance of hitting and destroying part of your shield, and then the whole shield is down. Shield projectors are small and you will use many of them, so the loss of one does not take down the whole array, but only a small part of it.
i needed EXACTLY this. thanks BorderWise, could you make one on ring shields? im still a beginner and im sure some people would like that too, anyways great vid!
You're welcome! Already recorded it, and it should be up within a week. 😉
@@BorderWise12 thank you!
I feel like shield projector should utilise their strength and strength regeneration more. For example they deflection chance is based on their current charge percentage so strength 1 shield would have 100% to deflect very first projectile and pretty much 0% for any of the following shots as strength 1 has such abysmally low recharge rate it would never be able to recover to meaningful amount before next shot.
Stronger shields would have more max power charge and faster recharge so they could still hold up for a while but constant stream of bullets would eventually bleed them dry. Also bigger shells could just consume more power per bit so high gauge cannon still have chance to pierce it, just the very first round would miss
don't quote me on this but i believe this is similar to how they worked before, with disruption shells disabling shields for a bit.
the issue is then that you could stack enough shields so at least 1 layer is almost alwats at 100% deflection chance
@@comet.x4359Make them roll only once (which is already in game) so that after hitting that first shield, second shield that have 100% deflection got bypassed anyway.
Shields: keep them small, keep them close, and keep them max power.
Wish they were less random, but even an off chance to deflect that 500mm rail shell that would've gutted your craft is valuable.
Definitely get more value out of them on smaller craft, big ones can afford to feed a ringshield or have improbably thick armour instead.
Personally I'm really happy that these are basically optional in the current build of the game. When I first started playing they were basically the META in making sure your craft survived a fight and I have always HATED setting them up with a passion
I had to do a double-take when you stacked the shields; last time I tried using them they would turn others off whose center would pass through a closer shield.
Yup, the devs changed that. XD
I just tested how shield stacking works, and as far as I can tell it doesn't. :(
I started with testing 9 strength 10 shields at 10° offsets against the Pilferer, Plunderer, and Tyr at range. I only observed deflections on the first layer hit, and ricochets always occurred when a deflection bounced a shell into another shield.
I then tried a more controlled testbed with 46 shields at 1° offsets with a ~900 rpm 1002mps CWIS firing through them on the same fortress >20 blocks away from the first shield. This time I did observe deflections occuring across multiple layers; however, trying to eyeball a rough count of total deflections in 1 minute indicated no better odds than one strength 10 shield should theoretically be doing.
At a minimum, I suspect there's either shell clipping occuring, or the deflection rolls have extreme diminishing chances on consecutive layers when they are presumably still being calculated. Otherwise I would expect 45 consecutive rolls of 80% passing to result in less than 5 in a thousand rounds fully penetrating.
It would be interesting if they made shields use energy instead of engine power and have them constantly drain them with a scaling metric like particle cannons. Call them "energy shields"^^
I do like a nicely slotted decorative shields... but in optimal positioning they are either quite ugly, or unsatisfyingly invisible. So I keep them tight and small and either gate off my spinal mounted or above deck guns just on the front... or a fun layer just under the outer skin of my ship that doesn't even activate til there's damage.
i'd use deco shields more if deco glass with lights didn't exist
I remember before they were nerfed... Triple 10 power stacked shields stopped almost anything
With ships I usually stick them on turrets inside the hull so you only need one. No point in using 2 when the enemy is only on one side.
The megalodon is a great example of how to use them as inefficiently as possible.
I feel like these went in the wrong direction. It'd be more interesting if the reflection chance was higher, but diminished every time a shell was reflected with the power usage acting as a "recharge" to get back to full strength. I miss the old "disrupt" function as well, I found that to be fairly useful at max projection distance.
That just made them too easy to counter though. They can still be disrupted but it just isn’t worth it generally.
@@whwhwhhwhhhwhdldkjdsnsjsks6544 I didn't mean about Disruptor rounds directly damaging the projector, I meant the Disrupt setting in the shields. Rather than bouncing shells off at a chance, it had a 100% chance to alter the angle of shells that passed through, with that angle increasing in the same way reflect chance scaled with angle. It was a niche but fun use for them
Here's a dumb/genius thought: tune your lams to only fire at shells *closer* than your shield layer.
Usually your shields should be basically touching against your hull so that doesn’t make sense
I like to use them on either my heavies to add to durability or on light vehicles to increase survivability. Mediums i usually leave because they can handle themselves fine and disadvantage to lights is they usually aren't large enough for an effective point defense system so I try to armor them as much as I can practically.
Long time listener, first time caller. Thanks for making these videos, I love FTD and it's difficult to find good information about the game outside of your channel.
You're welcome! 😁
This was very needed cause I’m planning on making relatively meta futuristic builds thanks borderwise!
Decided to do little test after watching your video. Here is the numbers how effective shields compare to smoke vs low ap lasers:
Simple laser (15 ap) against metal beam (1680 hp 40 armor class).
-No shield. 1800 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 1. 1630 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 2. 1000 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 3. 800 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 5 (cap for this test stand). 600 damage per shot.
-No shield 0.1 smoke. 805 damage per shot.
-No shield 1 (default) smoke. 407 damage per shot.
-No shield 10 smoke. 208 damage per shot.
-Shield 5 + 10 smoke. 204 damage per shot.
-Shield 5 + 1 smoke. 401 damage.
-Shield 5 + 0.1 smoke. 600 damage.
So smoke is better on its own, but they work best together? Makes sense.
62 AP 1Q laser against metal beam (1680 hp 40 AC)
-No shield. 1120 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 1. 1120 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 2. 887 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 3. 775 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 4. 715 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 5. 653 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 6. 615 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 7. 584 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 8. 559 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 9. 537 damage per shot.
-Shield strength 10. 519 damage per shot.
-No shield 0.1 smoke. 820 damage per shot.
-No shield 1 (default) smoke. 380 damage per shot.
-No shield 10 smoke. 170 damage per shot.
-Shield 5 + 10 smoke. 170 damage per shot.
-Shield 5 + 1 smoke. 357 damage.
-Shield 5 + 0.1 smoke. 567 damage.
I like the low prevalence of shields, I prefer no shields on crafts tbh
I'm guessing the calculation uses the effect strength to modify the shield's refractive index (higher effect strength = higher refractive index), but beyond that Idk.
Would be nice to know the upper and lower limits of the shield's refractive index, and what effects the projectile's characteristics (besides the incidence angle) have on the outcome.
Stuff like length-to-caliber ratio, velocity, density-to-surface-area ratios and so on.
FULL POWER TO FORWARD DEFLECTORS
It would be cool if shields functioned almost like blocks: all shells damaged them but they required power to regenerate and not materials; they still had that deflection chance; and you could change the armor, health, deflection, and regen rate separately; with increasing any of them requiring more power.
The way I'd see armor working would be the shield taking damage, but not affecting the shell if the shell's AP beat the shield's armor, though there'd still be a deflection chance meaning that they wouldn't be useless against Super High AP rounds.
Disruptor shells could do more damage to shields; and also decrease their armor value and deflection chance.
Edit: They'd also work against PACs now; though they wouldn't be able to deflect those, just tank damage.
I prefer to mount shield projectors on my turrets to they're always facing the enemy.
Both shields need a big buff to be even usable. Since Adv Cannons got nurfed Shields are not really needed as much.
APS got buffed recently so not sure where that’s from. Neither shield protects exclusively vs APS and they can both improve survivability of a craft massively so not sure why a buff’s needed.
@@whwhwhhwhhhwhdldkjdsnsjsks6544 2 Years ago when i last played APS was so much better. SO ye they been nurfed since then. Shields have been nurfed to the point of being useless. Why build the craft 30% bigger & add massive engines for some useless shields. Pointless
Is it feasible to make forcefield CIWS turrets?
For example, taking a very small but powerful forcefield surface, extending it out to a far range, then mounting it on a turret that aims and activates the shields at incoming projectiles as needed.
Problem with that is that CIWS controllers can't aim at APS shells or laser beams, so it'll just be an anti-CRAM measure. And there's simpler and better anti-CRAM measures, e.g moving fast.
can they be placed a turret inside the hull so they constantly face the enemy?
Yes
Yes they can. I use them to protect my turret caps. Every little helps when it comes to turret caps!
Theoretically, yes, but there's not much practical use for a turreted shield, because shields consume much more power when you project the plane farther out from the projector block. This means you want your shield projectors as close to the edge of your vehicle as possible to maximize coverage at a minimum power cost. A turret attempting to point a shield in various directions is likely to be close to the centerline of the vehicle, if not the whole center of mass, so to reach out beyond the hull, the shield would have to project very far out.
The much more practical method of conserving shields is to either use a frontsiding vehicle with less area to cover, or to name the projectors on each side of the vehicle, so that you can use the vehicle's AI to only turn on some shields when there are enemies detected on that side.
@@daviddavidson505 unless of course you use a lil subobject magic and have the projector on a beam going through the whole craft and being *incredibly* cheesy
Is it possible to toggle the shields on and off? If so they would be a lot better because you could have them off and not wasting power when not needed
Yes! You can do that with ACBs.
... did I not mention them in this video? 🤔
Hey could you mess with ERA? I remember it being bad, but recently I found that it will delete what ever projectile hits it. Even 500mm 8m hollow-point sabot will get deleted when it hits ERA.
Look up the update video on ERA I did. It's extremely good now. 😁
The issue is it runs out almost immediately in most cases. A chemical shell that hits it will clear a large area of ERA in one shot.
Thank you borderwise. You are the best :)
My life is now complete
Have you ever tried melee pcs for Cwis
If you mean PACs, then yes I have tried. PACs can't damage projectiles, so they're impossible to use as any kind of CIWS.
I swear to god shields are so overpowered that I swear the megalodon only has lvl1 shields and feels like a level 10 shield but then you have a perforator with a damn monster layers of shields that never seen to bounce shells
The Megalodon also has a really good LAMS that just shoots down most shells anyway. When you see the remaining shells. Bounce off shields, it makes them look so powerful.
It definitely is kinda stupid that you can't mix the shield types. They could easily have their own niches, yet everyone I know just ignores ring shields instead.
There is zero overlap between their functions. I think the exclusion is a relic of previous versions, as shields have changed a great deal since their introduction.
Subvehicles. 😏
Just have the ringshields on the main craft and the planar shields on subvehicles. Either embedded in the main craft or pods suspended around it.
@@jannikheidemann3805 yeah but this feels like a cheese 🧀
You can already make craft that feel basically impossible to destroy for anything other than uncounterable attacks. Ring shields + planars at the same time would be so hard to hurt.
@@whwhwhhwhhhwhdldkjdsnsjsks6544
sand, pacs, rams, spinal mounts railguns, megalasers, orbital cram, thumper huge missile...
i have yet to find a craft that becomes hard to hit with all of these, except orbital crams because they're absolutely inaccurate memes
imo the rng component of them is irrelevant. Over the course of a battle enough shots would have been reflected for the outcome to, in virtually all cases, be identical to if they reduced damage by a consistent amount from each shot.
ftd is ruled by the alpha strike meta.
it is absolutely relevent. solid alpha strikes that chunks off a quarter of your craft at the beginning of a fight exist, and can and will decide whether you win or lose.
this becomes a 60% chance for the shields to not do anything, and the big spinal mount to go 'haha i win' at the most optimal placement.
even after the alpha strike it sometimes takes one well placed shot to take out either shield or the power to keep all the shields running. And that drops the true chance over a battle significantly
@@comet.x4359 hmmm… I disagree with that statement simply because most of the most experienced players don’t seem to care much about alpha strikes. Unless you have paper thin armour alpha strikes are never really gonna disable a large craft.
8:58
Maybe try slower or smaller projectiles?
That doesn't matter. Reflection chance isn't affected by shell size or speed these days.
The sheild projector's cheif strength is . . . as a decoration.
They're also good as fast vehicle smoke and lazer boat smoke.
If you think of them as a smoke alternative they're not bad.
Why use shields if the same power could be used to power a Jet engine and warp drive?
GOTTA GO FAST!
Cause they reduce the dmg from lasers that like to shoot fast things.
I haven't actually played the game in a while, but a shame they nerfed shield with that maximum deflection rate
They didn’t, shields have no limit to how fast they can reflect bullets
2.