weapon lifetimes

[dvlenk6]

You wouldn't HAVE to get it repaired. At least not make a special trip for the repair. You would just have to do with 90 or 85 hp instead of 100 for a while; until you get somewhere that can repair it back to full. It could be a dockservice, just like repairing armor is now.

Say you have an invincible-class shield with 90 hit points that gets slammed and loses 10. It is still an invincible-class shield, just with 80 hit points. Then your battered wolfen makes it to a shipyard, drydock, whatever, and you get it repaired, along with your half destroyed armor.

[OddBob]

Evilbob, at least when I was talking about it, a few Ares ships aren't going to cut your shield's max by half. If you use a fairly high percentage of total damage (say 75%) for shield damage, you'll only take a few points off when you take 75% damage or more in a short time. You can only take 75% or more damage once and then you only have 25% left. So you'd need several battles or at least retreats and shield recharges to cause any significant damage. And in the system i proposed, which I didn't elaborate on the numbers, but it goes like this: when you take more than 50% within a very short time frame, the damage it divided by ten for temporary damage, and THAT number is divided by ten for permanent, rounded down, which I didn't do in the example because I didn't want to explain. So with a 100 HP shield, only a complete shutdown of the shield (100 HP damage) will cause any permanent loss.

Now that I've thought about it, for shields, I think a temporary-damage only system is even better than the combined temporary and permanent one. Then the only consequence to having your shields ravaged is that you'll be slightly vulnerable for a while, and it has the benefit of further differentiating shields.

[Betelgeuse]

oddbob in your system how fast would it regen the max hp? I don't really see anyone changing shields because of this they would just wait until it healed. Unless there is a different reason you wanted a damage system? (if you had one could you give it)

[Fossaman]

Quick question: Why will this be fun?

It seems to me that since Equipment is equivalent to 'levels' or 'experience' in your average RPG, decay when taking damage (or just for the heck of it) becomes a LOT more annoying.

I don't mind having the occasional weapon that can overheat and become damaged, like the advanced tritium, but having that IM90 or plasma cannon I've been saving up for DIE in the middle of my fight with the Iocrym would seriously tic me off. It would make me want to stop playing. I suspect that this could be something that puts off new players.

[Betelgeuse]

well the original point was to get people to use different devises and not the same ones over and over. If someone has a different way of doing that I would be glad to do it. (and making everything balanced isn't the answer, people would just still use the same weapons because they are more experienced with that weapon)

[OddBob]

oddbob in your system how fast would it regen the max hp? I don't really see anyone changing shields because of this they would just wait until it healed. Unless there is a different reason you wanted a damage system? (if you had one could you give it)

I don't know for sure, but a point every 30 seconds or so? Maybe even less, 30 seconds can be a long time in a game like this.

By, "further differing shields" I didn't mean they would change shields to speed up the process, but that some shields might be more or less prone to being damaged; just another way to add pros or cons to a shield. You could also have a shield buster that does a lot of 'permanent damage'.

(next part is sort of hard to explain)
Also, a reason I proposed it is that, after a big fight where the player takes a lot of damage, I'd like a way that doesn't have a huge effect on gameplay (like forcing to repair) that the player can know that they've been in a big fight.

I've rarely had the experience of limping back to safety, heavily damaged after a fight in Transcendence, mainly because after your shields are down, armor is too weak; it's just backup (most people don't fight for long with shields down). There has been difficulty with this in the past because all the ships, player and NPC alike use the same armor, so fixing this directly would require a gameplay change, harder battles with fewer ships or something.But I think this is a nice way to add a bit of extra strategy/complexity to battles, and also a way to break your ship in different ways. I admittedly don't have a real strong reason for this one, it's just an idea I had...

[FAD]

Personally, I think the best solution (as someone had previously mentioned) would be to make the enhancements be the culprits of wear and tear. It's only logical to do so, in that the enhancements do exactly that. Enhance an item which, in turn, should create a wear and tear factor simply for the fact that they modify the initial rate of an item.

You install a Nitrous kit on your engine and it boosts the power output at a cost of greatly overheating the motor. Hence; Wear and tear. Same should apply to item enhancements as well.

I think this would eliminate the "forcing the player" issue and would simply turn it into an option for the player to choose. Would it be worth it to take a chance and boost my omni blaster with an enhancement? I'll take that chance, thank you.