Shieldstrength

mach81

Spaceman
One question bothers me since 1994. Why did they multiply the shieldstrength by over 10 times from wc2 to wc3 ?

Average shielding wc 1: 5 cm
10 years
Average shielding wc 2: 8cm ( and phase shields )
2 years
Average shielding wc 3: 250 cm ( and phase shields )

I dont get it. I could imagine that the shielding of the new ships is 25 cm and that there was missunderstanding in where to put the comma. Or in the other way:
That a WC1 ship has 50 cm and a WC3 ship has got 250 cm.
 
My guess would be that the shields just became much stronger between wc2 and wc3. I don’t know of any rule that says technology has to increase at a steady rate.
 
It's to eliminate the phase shield concept introduced in WC2 (and thus the 'torpedo run' gameplay element that bothered people at the time) - in WC3 all the ships have "phase shields" and all the weapons are capable of battering them down.
 
That's why a combination of torpedoes and direct energy weapons isn't very efficient -- even after a torpedo hit, the shield is still up. A mace, however, will damage both shields and hull.
 
Yeah, but they aren't *required* like they are in WC2. Making the player learn to to torpedo runs frustrated a lot of people in 1991.

I like the WC2 torpedo run, it made the strike missions more intense and intimidating than on WC1. But I agree that there shouldn't be something that would frustate a lot of players, and WC3 was the right call to make.

I think they got it right with WCP, down to the unique advantage of the Devastator.

This reminds me of Mafia - it had a very difficult race mission in the middle of the game that was so hard it made a lot of players simply give up the game.
 
Well, my personal favorite is wc2 definitely, both design-vise story-vise and gameplay-wise... It's just that the caps in 4(and maybe 3, don't remember) seem too fragile to me....
 
I actually liked the frustration of the bombing missions that you actually had to escort bombers, since you could fail them if you were not on the ball, or paying attention to your bombers.

I have always liked the feeling of a cap ships strength and power when compared to a fighter, having a arrow defeating a single-handedly just seemed... well cheap (though definatly hard on the more difficult settings).
 
Actually, I liked the way WC3 and 4 did capship damage the best- I just wished the way damage was doled out was done a bit differently- I think that it should have taken concentrated fighter or fighter/capship attacks to take down enemy capships without torpedoes. I liked being able to outright destroy a capship instead of killing different components on said capship with the capship "dying" when you destroy the bridge and engines- though in an ideal world, I think I would make it so you could kill hull components with normal guns and missiles, and only outright destroy a capship with torpedoes (thereby giving a fighter the ability to defang a capship, but only a torpedo bomber could truly destroy a capship)
 
I'm a pretty big fan of the WCP/SO method of torpedo runs. The only complaint being the same one I had back when WCP came out 1997 and it being a very minor one. I'd really like it if ships didn't just sit there forever and explode without really exploding. After getting to see some cool post-explosion wrecks in WC3/4 it was a disappointment when the Nephilim ships just sat there.

Otherwise though the torpedo runs are great. The ability of turrets to shoot down your torps, I mean who has forgotten to nail that damn rear turret on a triton and wasted a torp because that bastard shot it down? The ability to destroy the shield emitters and hit the turrets while the main hull remained undamaged because of the heavier shields around the hull. Being able to target sections of the ship, although it would be great if in a future release they could make the ship reflect the damage it's taken beyond just having it stop when it's engines are destroyed. It'd be great to see a capship just start doing circles after you nail it's bridge or perhaps starting a slow turn that results in two enemies ramming.

Although I think it might be interesting if instead of being able to use the computer to target specific sections of the ship having to position your bomber in such a way that your torpedoes hit that section of the ship. An added bonus for being a good shot :) Along with that limiting phase penetrating guns to a very few was a great feature, while the devastator's plasma cannon dished out damage, it was an energy hog and slow firing so it did not totally eliminate the need for torpedoes. When I'm in a devastator I usually save torpedoes for the heavier capships and use the plasma cannon on all the tritons and other small ships that may be around.

So basically I'm a fan of the WCP/SO method of doing it but I'd just like my capships to really explode. :D
 
Eh, I just didn't like how you could swarm over the bridge and engines of a ship and not worry about the rest of the ship getting torpedoed. I mean, if you're flying defense of the Midway, you don't even have to worry about defending the front or bottom of the ship at all. I think it would be better if you could blow up things like the bridge or engines, but that it would effect the capship's performance (say movement or steerage) instead of destroy the capship outright. As I mentioned above, I would make it so torpedo bombers could hull a ship from any angle, but I would make it so only torpedos could "finish off" a ship.
 
I mean, if you're flying defense of the Midway, you don't even have to worry about defending the front or bottom of the ship at all.

Tell that to someone who just got the message that they can't land because the hangar was destroyed, and wound up losing the game because of it... :p
 
About the shield-strength stuff again:
Perhaps its just a game thing, and the ships in the original fiction have other profiles. I have to keep this things seperate.
I liked the bombing runs from WC2 very much.
 
So basically I'm a fan of the WCP/SO method of doing it but I'd just like my capships to really explode. :D

You might be able to achieve that with some fancy scripting in WCP/SO, set it up so the ship can't be destroyed until all the components are destroyed, at which point the whole ship becomes a lockable target.
 
Well, I didn't really like the way you can tag a capship with your guns in WC III & IV, but I loved the way you could get inside the carriers and hit them from within

Having said that, I like the way they did it with WCP:D
 
Having said that, I like the way they did it with WCP:D

That's nice to hear. Ten years ago there were lots of people complaining about how Prophecy did it. Taking out a ship in spacedock or doing multi-stage strikes to first take out the offensive aspects of a ship before going in for the kill were really fantastic though.
 
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