Question on shielding

[Wazat]

Note: I know this is a looong post. If you don't want to read my rambling, just look for the questions in bold, since those are the most important part. The rest of the text simply explains the details behind those questions.

I've recently increased the effectiveness of a lot of the shields in Conquest. Limit shields put a lower cap on damage, Impact and Tesla block more damage, and I'm considering increasing the maximum level of Precision armor from 10 to 20.

The one major problem I encountered was... invincibility. If I equipped one layer of Impact armor and a Precision +5 or +10 or so below that (so that attacks hit the Impact and then the Precision shield), none of the monsters could hurt me at all, ever. 1-5 damage tops, for the really heavy attacks. This is because all the monsters' attacks were Solid-typed. I've since started adding energy attacks (and some new monsters), and so far this seems to be helping a great deal...

The player can still achieve temporary invulnerability by equipping Standard armor with Precision below it, but unlike Tesla/Impact, Standard takes damage, so the player won't be invulnerable for long (which is the idea behind making the shields powerful but take damage).

However, that Precision armor is still a potential source of imbalances. Its purpose is to combat rapid-fire weapons that inflict lots of weak attacks. This it does with great success, because a precision +9 shield will take 10 damage out of every attack that hits it. It's generally useless against power weapons like explosives or railguns. So far, so good. The problem is when you have two layers of Impact and a layer of Precision, for example, so that the damage is reduced very low by the first two layers, and then to 0 by the Precision.
So, I want to increase the max value of Precision to 15 or 20, but I'm worried that it will make the player too powerful. Keep in mind that Precision can be equipped on each layer (11 + 11 + 11 = 33 damage taken from every attack), but that leaves the player vulnerable to heavy-hitting attacks. Also keep in mind that when used in combination with other armors, it can often reduce the damage to 0 until one of those armors fails.

Question 1) What's a decent max for Precision armor?

The other question I have is, should I give the monsters powerful weapons to make Limit armor more valuable? Currently Limit Armor is capping damage to 65 for Green, 40 for Yellow, and 25 for Red. I probably want enemy attacks to at least make Yellow Limit useful, but giving enemies Railguns, Rocket Launchers, and other heavy weaponry is what I really want to do. The really heavy-hitters won't be all that common, but they'll be there often enough that the player should be very concerned about how to deal with them. Blink and Limit shields are his best bet.
However, if the player encounters one of these enemies when he's not in the best of shape for them, or when other enemies are rapid-fire, making such a defense less feasible, then I have a problem. I don't have a team of artists making maps for the mod and placing things perfectly as they should be -- I'm using the original Quake maps and just mixing things up a bit, so I still have to deal with a lot of unknown, and try to avoid placing the player in unfair situations, whether they come to his advantage (invulnerability) or disadvantage (instant death).

Question 2) Should I have some monsters weilding high-powered weapons that could potentially kill a normally armored player in a single hit, in order to encourage him to make use of the proper armor types and keep him on his toes?

And finally, there's the Impact/Tesla armor issue. I'm worried that they're too powerful, since they're essentially Standard armor that takes no damage, but only blocks one or the other type of damage. So, if I'm wearing Impact armor but the enemy hits me with electricity or heat, it passes right by that armor. But if I get hit with an explosion or nail, Red Impact armor could block out 75% of that damage. The real problem comes in when the player is wearing Precision under that, which often reduces the damage to 0 after it's been reduced so much by the Impact. If the player gets hit by Energy hits, he's screwed because Impact doesn't touch that, but he could wear Red Impact, Red Tesla, and Precision+10, which would give him armor that never takes damage and reduces most attacks to 0 (unless it's a railgun or something else really powerful).
So, I'm a little confused over whether this will be over-powered or not, especially after I've finished giving the monsters a variety of attacks so they're not all Solid-type.
However (and here's the question part), Tesla and Impact armor used to have penalties associated with them, so that if the player wears Impact armor and gets hit with an energy shot, it AMPLIFIES the damage instead of just ignoring it (Red Impact would amplify Energy shots by 40%, instead of reducing them by 75% or ignoring them). This was really dangerous for the player, and it made the two armors too unattractive to use when I was deciding what to equip monsters with. But.. I wonder if I should reinstate that as an added danger, but with reduced penalties (so the damage is amplified, but not by a lot).

Question 3) Should Impact and Tesla armor amplify the damage of attacks that are the wrong type?

The very balance of the universe hinges on these questions!

Thanks, all.

[Tei]

other ideas:

Warheads:

1)Explosive
- main splash damage (small area, instant)
- secondary splash damage (big area and slow: explowave, decals, etc.. )


Example:
rocket, main splash concusion, secondary fire (heat)

use:
a shield can save you againt heat, but maybe not concusion


2) Perforer

Example:
nails

use:
a "anti-perforer" shield will save you, but a anti-heat not


3) Chemical / Bio.

Example:
teamfortress medic axe

use:
the shield its a % not to be infected, and how much infected are you . A 100% save, will save you againts everything bio


A gameplay idea can be to let the player choice the shield the same way choice the weapon. this way the player may try to attack a few foes with different combinations of weapons/shields

[Supa]

[Wazat]

Tei:
Well, I already have a Resist shield that will block status effects. I'm thinking of splitting it up into several different types that have increasingly better blocking ability, or that block different status effects.

I'm thinking of having anti-explosion shielding, yes.

The perforator armor you mention is basically Precision shielding. I'd recommend you read the , it explains a lot about what's in Conquest.
The idea to have precision armor that blocks only solid or only energy hits is a good idea, though.

What I was asking about was balancing questions, i.e. what would be too powerful. I was also asking what decisions would be attractive from a player's point of view.

Supa:
You're right, it's probably going to come down to a lot of testing in-game. And yes, what I do with options 2 & 3 will definitely affect what I do here.

I'm planning on having a delay and/or inaccuracy for the power-weapons. The player needs to have some chance to dodge. For the sniper rifle, there will be a delay and a laser dot wandering around that will give the player a clue if he's watching closely. For the railgun, there will be a delay before firing and perhaps a sound, and it will be less accurate if the player is moving around. Grenades and rockets will be dodgable if the player knows they're coming.
However, being able to dodge these weapons will not guarantee the player will dodge them successfully every time, which is hopefully an incentive for the player to buy the appropriate shield.

Hmm... I really want to keep the shielding the same for players and monsters. As for building on the idea of 'use this weapon against that shield', so far Impact and Tesla are extremely vulnerable to the right kind of attack. If you attack an enforcer with Impact Shields with electricity, the impact Shield can't reduce the damage at all, so the electricity punches right through to hurt the Enforcer bad.
Adding a penalty that amplifies the damage when you get hit with the wrong attack only increases the severity of the penalty, and I'm wondering if players feel this would be too much of a downside to use the armor (or if it would make monsters too vulnerable).

Thanks for the comments!

What does everyone else think?

[Urre]

[Wazat]

[Dr. Shadowborg]

[Entar]

You could probably run Vengeance

[Dr. Shadowborg]

I dunno, I just stumbled upon this:



And yes, I'm still a MIDI minion

But I'll give 'em both a try

The real irony though is that I've gotten addicted to software again And I don't mean ToChris, Turtle or etc. I mean DOSQuake

[Miles Invictus]

I know it doesn't directly answer your questions, but maybe you could restrict stronger armor to the outer shield layers. For example, Red (or +7 to +10) armors can only go on the outer, Yellow (or +4 to +6) can go on outer or middle, and Green or (+1 to +3) can go in any shield layer. You could also try making certain shield types incompatible, for example Impact and Tesla.

[Wazat]

Miles: that's a pretty good idea. I've already made it so that Blink shields will interfere with each other and dramatically lower in performance if you have more than one. Maybe I could just have an incompadibility list for each shield, where if the player has two incompadibles then they'll have worse protection values. Having Impact and Tesla interfere with each other slightly (or heavily) is a good idea.

I also like the idea of restricting shields to different layers, but I'd like to modify that so that the shields simply do better in certain layers. What I'm thinking of especially is precision armor. On the inner layer, its max could be 5, 10 on the middle, and 20 on the outer.
I could also make Limit armor more effective on the inside, as well as Resist.

Thanks for the ideas, all!