Right, so here we have a brand new module I think I’ll just add to the game. I was thinking about shoe-horning it into the campaign, but that is a bit awkward to do. It’s the first module that affects a ship on your side that isn’t the owning ship. Its….. (drumroll)…
The Shield Support Beam!
Or ‘Remote shield energy projector’ or whatever I finally call it…
Basically it lets a frigate beam-over shield energy to reinforce a failing ship on a nearby friendly cruiser. It’s a frigate-only module, only working to reinforce cruisers, with a max range of 450. Crew use is 8, power use is 18 (high!).
screenshot (its the blue beam thing): I may well tart-up the graphics for it a bit more. Click to enlarge.
The beam looks for nearby friendly ships whose shields are below 80%, and then triggers this beam which empties it’s ‘capacitor’ into the target ship, over a short burst of time. That then reinforces the target shield, back up to it’s normal strength. This is basically a way to temporarily gvie a nearby ship a really fast shield recharge, and is a defence againts those fleets that hurl 100 plasma or 100 missiles at your cruisers and crush them instantly.
I’ve tested it lots, but obviously it remains to be seen how people use this. Obviously you could stick 3 frigates behind every cruiser, in formation and have super-reinforced shields, but that ties up 3 frigates that have to stick by their cruiser, and also chews up 3 sockets and a ton of power. It’s a weapon socket, so that matters. So far, I’ve found it handy to combat plasma spam, but not a totally killer-app.
I’ve also set it to be an empire-only module, initially locked (but cheap to unlock). I like the idea of making any future modules race-specific, to give the races more flavour.
Thoughts?
back to the campaign tomorrow…