Shields
Shield management is an important skill in PVP. You can read the mod creators guide here: [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=715757295]. It explains amongst other things how the shield icon works. It is quite good.
Below are provided only some notes and hints for:
Blocks
Shunt
Fortify
Modulate
Heatsink
Controls
Hitpoints
Enemy Icon
Let’s start with the blocks.
Blocks
Controller: auto or manual shields / fortify / shunt / size
Emitter: emits..
Enhancer: it enhances something
Modulator: modulate / structural integrity / entities passthrough
Auto shields are slow to adapt to different damage types, and heatsink too early. All manual functions are disabled such as modulating. Most PVP players use manual shields.
Structural integrity seems to only work in PVE.
Entities passthrough is important for roaching. It lets the enemy grid through your shield. It can also be used to avoid shield collapse when being rammed.
Shunt
Shunting is essential in PVP 1v1 combat. Shunt puts all your hitpoints in the sides you put on ‘pull’, and the sides on ‘push’ are drained.
Your shield has 6 sides. The hitpoints are distributed among all sides equally. When one side runs out, the whole shield collapses.
If your opponent shunts and you do not, you will fight all of his hitpoints, while he will only have to deplete 1/6th of yours.
Shunting has a drawback. When dogfighting, missiles tend to get around the shunt and damage the sides of your ship.
Fortify
Fortify gives you x times the amount of hitpoints when moving slower than 15m/s. So essentially when you sit. X is usually 2 or more. It depends on how well your ship fits within a sphere.
The charge rate of the shield is between 2x - 3x.
Fortified shields can be shunted.
A grid build for optimized shields can have 71.5M shields, and fortified almost 200M.
The fortified function is slightly bugged.
- You break fortify when you move faster than 15m/s. This can lead to your shield icon visually flashing red. Fortify again, and then unfortify to fix this.
- When you unhangar a ship, click the fortify/unfortify button a few times before every battle. This should prevent your shields from turning purple and letting damage through at the fist hit.
Modulate
You can modulate your shield versus energy or kinetic damage.
Modulating against energy fully, reduces incoming laser damage to ⅓.
However, it enhances incoming kinetic damage x3. And vice versa.
Suppose the enemy has 2 guns, energy and kinetic, doing 100 DPS.
Without modulation you would receive:
- 200 damage
Fully modulated vs energy, you would receive:
- 33 energy damage
- 300 kinetic damage
Modulation is important and also hard to do in combat. Try to assess what guns the opponent is using, and how likely those will hit.
Keep an eye on your shield icon to see what type of damage you receive. Play with the +/- buttons for kinetic and energy to minimize damage taken.
Keep an eye on the target icon to see what type of damage the enemy is modulating to.
Read the workshop guide.
Heatsink
Heatsink gets rid of heat in the shield.
The more heat, the higher the penetration chance of incoming fire (on full health T3 shields, it can take a while before anything goes through).
The lower your shield hitpoints, the more effect heat has.
The more heat, the lower the charge rate of your shield.
Each heatsink reduces your shield's hitpoints maximum or CAP by 5%. That is the hitpoints when it is fully charged. You can heatsink down to 5% of the original CAP. Where you are is indicated by the percentage icon which appears only once you are receiving damage. This proces will reverse when your shields are at rest. They will charge to the maximum hitpoints of your currenty CAP, and then the CAP will increase by ?5%?, and another charge cycle will begin, all the way back to the original CAP maximum your shields have from your blueprint. Your CAP is important in combat. The more you heatsink, the less hitpoints you can have. Your shield fails when it runs out of hitpoints. When it comes back it will only charge to the current CAP. Not what you started with. Furthermore, when your shield comes back, it will start with a hitpoint pool based on the current CAP. I believe this is 20%.
Suppose your shields have a 100 hitpoints and are fully charged. You are receiving 30 hitpoints in damage. You are left with 70 hitpoints, while your CAP is still for a 100 hitpoints.
If you do nothing:
Heat will build up and an increasing percentage of enemy fire will go through.
The shield fails when all 70 hit points are gone.
The shield restarts in a minute or so, and begins charging towards a 100 hitpoints.
If you continually heatsink all the way to 5%:
No enemy fire will get through.
To your enemy, it will seem your shields are not affected by his fire (see enemy icon section) as he sees different information in the weaponcore lockon-icon.
The shield fails when all 70 hit points are gone.
The shield restarts in a few minutes, and begins charging towards whatever the current CAP is. In this example, 5% of 100 is 5. The shield will charge towards 5, starting with 20% of that which is 1. If your enemy stopped heatsinking at 50%, he will charge towards 50 hitpoints, starting with 10.
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| image made by Gem Squared |
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| In this image we have a CAP of 65, with almost 90% hitpoints relative to the CAP. Modulation is 300% energy and heat is at maximum. |
Do not heatsink too early. Watch the penetration chance to determine the right moment.
Controls
So what controls should you have within easy reach?
Hotbar setup
Shield controller: shunt on/off.
Shield controller: heatsink.
Shield controller: fortify.
Modulator: decrease shield projection (+20 mod vs energy).
Modulator: increase shield projection (+20 mod vs kinetic).
Modulator: (for miners) structural integrity on/off.
Hitpoints
How are your shields hitpoint determined?
There is a complex formula and a bunch of variables that we will not bother with. Instead a few basic rules of the thumb and a few tips.
Shield hitpoints
26x26x26 dimensions is the ideal grid size for optimal shields, which translates into 27x27x27 for a centerline-ship.
the closer to a perfect sphere-type shape (sphere, disc, cylinder), the more hitpoints in the shield.
the less open space the shield has to cover, the more hitpoints in the shield.
adding more and more blocks to your ship will not increase the shield after a certain optimum is reached. Experiment adding blocks until the hitpoints no longer increase.
the amount of open space a block takes away affects the shield. Not the weight. Adding a cargobox of 3x3x3 dimensions will increase the shield as much as 27 heavy armor blocks.
The hitpoints on the server are lower than in your personal creative by 10%
10 reactors, 20 batteries and 10 H2 generators are needed at T3 to get maximum shields.
H2 generators only add 1-3 M shields depending on how optimized your ship is for shields. They add a lot of lag.
In the shield controller you can select Shield Fit. This determines how close to your hull the shield will attempt to fit. At 0 you get the most hitpoints. It can leave blocks unshielded.
Max hitpoints are roughly 20M for T0 with 45 fortified, 25 for T1 with no idea fortified, 45 for T2 with 90 fortified and 71 for T3 with 200 fortified.
Ganymede Forcefield Hangar blocks can be used to extend the shield in the direction needed to cover unshielded blocks, though often at the expense of hitpoints. Simply place the block on the side of the ship with exposed blocks. Experiment with 2x-10x variants and placement location until your blocks are covered.
Shields are only a factor in determining victory or defeat. How well your ship is built, and how well you fly it are more important.
Only a crazy person uses T4/T5 power in PVP. One prosonic reactor is worth 32.000 T3, which means either one super T3 battleship, or 6 regular T3 ships. The likelyhood of losing your T4/T5 ship in PvP eventually, is high, if only due to klang.
- PowerDensity is ratio of non power producing blocks to grid power output. Paradoxically, this means that the fewer regular blocks your ship has, the lower the shields. It also means that for maximum shields, T0 ships can be smaller than T1, etc.
- BlockDensity is ratio of blocks to empty space.
- Density total is caculated using the 2 variables above, and capped at 1.0. If you are below 1, then your shields will be suboptimal.
- For a T3 ship you need a volume of about 7000 1x1 blocks to reach maximum shields. Remember, it is about volume, you do not need that many actual blocks. A large cargo container fills 3x3x3 = 27 block volume.
- Lower tier power requires less blocks and thus smaller ships to reach the maximum.
- 25 x 3 T3: 71623180
- 26 x 3 T3: 71692960 (top)
- 27 x 3 T3: 71641660 (decline)
- 29 x 3 T3: 71263010
Enemy Icon
When you target an enemy you will see the image below.
So what are we looking? For detailed information look up the weaponcore mod on the workshop. We won’t explain the obvious here. The important variables are:
Shield HP
A deceptive variable, as it indicates the amount of hitpoints in the shield as a percentage of the current CAP on the enemy shield. So if the enemy uses heatsink, the CAP lowers, and as a result the amount of hitpoints left are a higher percentage of the new CAP. It thus might seem that the enemy shield is less affected by your fire than yours is by the enemy fire.
Shunt
Below shield hp you see nothing if the enemy has not shunted, and FR:BR etc. if he has.
Modulation
Another deceptive variable. This is not what the enemy has modulated to, but what his shield is vulnerable to. In the picture the modulation is for 300% kinetic. [NOT SURE, seems to be fixed]
Charge rate
The more heat a shield has, the lower the charge rate.
