Personal Shield Generators

Personal Shield Generators (Full Version)

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ParadoxSong -> Personal Shield Generators (9/17/2021 8:23:18 PM)
Personal Shield Generators can only combined with Padded Envirosuit, which gives 500 armor strength. My question is, is a reduction of 500 armor strength (From the, IMO, cheaper Advanced Battle Dress) worth it? Do they even get classified as being a Shield in the calibre matrix? (Maybe making them at least good vs lower tech units which take a large % penalty to firing at them - though mostly 50% or less just making them comparable?) Do they restore hit points every combat round like a real shield generator does?

Clux -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (9/17/2021 9:17:31 PM)
The personal shield generators aren't worth it, since an infantry with battledress (plus personal armor optimization) will have higher HP stats. Yes, they get classified as shield in the caliber matrix, but they don't recover (or at least not 100%) of their hit points as shield generators. At the end, they are weaker than infantry with regular armor and are more expensive.

ParadoxSong -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (9/17/2021 10:38:09 PM)
That's what I figured. At least if Jetpack Infantry could use it, it'd have some value.

Elver -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (9/23/2021 4:31:03 PM)
Since Jetpack Infantry can wear armor heavier than PES, my first thought was actually that it should be usable by bikes, which can never have more than PES and thus become impractically fragile very early and never stop being so. Given that they have a vehicle to mount the shield equipment on, it'd actually feel more reasonable than some of the other options.

Elver -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (10/5/2021 7:16:49 PM)
Having actually played a game long enough to develop some units with this, they're actually significantly stronger than infantry with Battledress. They get the same amount of bonus armor strength from Personal Armor Optimization, but they also get about twice as much per level of optimization from Shielding Optimization. The result was that my significantly-worse-as-a-model Shielded infantry model (85 Structural Design, 76 Armor Design) had 200 more HP than my state-of-the-art Battledress infantry (105 SD, 99 AD) despite having only very slightly better PA Optimization (78 vs. 65): [image]local://upfiles/72531/B9485F504F14408D9159FEA71A8230F8.jpg[/image] [Edit: for a more 1-to-1 comparison, quad-MG infantry with all stats the same between the old and new designs except +13 Base Design goes from 986 (Battledress) to 1567 (Personal Shielding). (Optimization tech is the same as above) ]

Clux -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (10/5/2021 9:11:31 PM)
You have to remember than shield hp gets depleted, so the unit gets weaker the more it gets attacked, while regular infantry doesn't suffer from this.

Elver -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (10/5/2021 9:15:55 PM)
That may be true, but having ~150% the HP of a Battledressed unit (plus increased resistance to non-plasma attacks) can make a rather large difference even if you don't have the same endurance over multiple attacks. [Edit: d'oh, I was looking at regular Battledress numbers, not advanced, so it'd be at best equal HP. Still, it does seem like the bonuses would be situationally useful against non-plasma opponents, even if it does make the units painfully more expensive.]

Elver -> RE: Personal Shield Generators (10/6/2021 8:53:44 PM)
I've come around to your way of thinking after a few more experiments and digging through combat details, but not for the reasons you give. If all things were equal and it worked as you outlined, shields would be more reliable at the start of combat than other armor, but would inevitably grow less reliable as the battle wears on. Raider Militia can (but probably won't) one-shot infantry in Heavy Battledress, but it's literally impossible for them to one-shot Personal Shielded infantry. Attacks hit traditional armor if their roll of (0 to modified-attack-score) exceeds the defender's roll of (0 to modified-defense-score), and then the type of hit (kill, retreat, pin) is determined and resolved. Attacks against shields appear to be simply a roll of (0 to modified-attack-score) subtracted from the remaining shield absorption, which starts combat as their unmodified HP, and if there's no absorption left it's always a kill. Notably, there does not appear to be any modification to HP in shielded combat resolution, which means all bonuses - from XP to commanders to cover to anything else - would play no role. It's just the shielded unit's HP. That's... not good. Taking a veteran unit with experienced leadership, this might be a difference of 100% vs. 200%+ - at that point, there's no comparison between even basic battledress + modifiers and shields. Again, this is based on reading the manual and looking at combat details, but it appears to be what's going on, and if it's accurate, personal shields are "pure trash" rather than merely "expensive yet slightly inferior in most cases".

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