Shields

Hello, I’d like to propose the use of “shields” as the main damage mechanism in Star Control instead of “crew”. These would be long term shields and function exactly like crew, not to be confused with the Yehat short-term shield. It should help in a few ways.

 

Firstly, it doesn’t make sense for a ship to remain fully combat effective while direct damage to the hull kills crew in a linear manner. Shields would allow this problem to be rectified. It may even be “canon”, as in Star Control 2, the Spathi refer to ships with shields up in one conversation branch. There are also, of course, the slave shields, the Sa-Matra shields, and the Zot-Fot-Pik planetary shields. Of course, these aliens aren’t present, but I assume that the technology is supposed to approximately line up...

 

Second, shields could be an interesting mechanic in combination with hull strength. Some ships may have fixed shields, while others could potentially repair their shields over time (either automatically, or like the mycon regrowth special). It would also allow damage to individual ship components to become important after shields go down. Perhaps then weapons or engines could be disabled, with say... 2-3 hull components requiring destruction to ensure that the ship is destroyed (or just a total amount of hull damage distributed over any components - the idea would be to keep things generally simple with more rewording the recoding). Some Ships could have strong shields and weak hull, while others could have no shields (for example, very tough ships, but more vulnerable to component damage than shielded vessels).

 

 

Third, the campaign scenario would probably be a little better and more sensible with shields. Instead of buying crew that have a questionable ability to man alien ships and a questionable “resource cost”, shields of ships could be “charged up” with energy in a more sensible way. Of course, one would need specialized facilities to charge up alien ships, which could lead to some interesting dynamics (certain ships only useful for a limited time until their shields are depleted. It could also allow alien “starbases” to serve as satisfactory far outposts while keeping their alien crew and environments.