Flat Ground Defense BonusA planetary shield is an exceptional defensive benefit for a small colony, restricting the available avenues of attack and allowing existing planetary defenses to be far more effective. This benefit tapers off for a large colony, however; it's still useful, certainly, but when your ground batteries already have comprehensive coverage patterns, the addition of a shield is less dramatic.
- Game Mechanics: Provides +300 ground defense strength, with an additional +100 for improvement or installing an alpha core, instead of the vanilla multipliers. Note that the flat bonus is multiplied by the normal bonuses from, say, Heavy Batteries; if you want a high planetary defense strength, build both rather than relying solely on either.
- Gameplay Justification: This change makes the shield generator actually useful for defense on a size three colony, while being less overpowering for a size six colony. This is, admittedly, less of an issue now than it was when colonies could get up to size 10... but I personally still like this better.
Reduced Terrorist Risk For Non-Freeport ColoniesRestricting surface access to specific places and times makes it difficult to avoid cargo inspections - at least, if your colony bothers to employ customs officials in the first place. The upshot is that - as long as your planet isn't a free port - it is much more difficult for Pather terrorists to establish or maintain a presence on the ground. ...Of course, give them enough motivation, and they'll find ways around even these restrictions.
- Game Mechanics: The shield generator reduces "pather interest" values by -4 for the base installation, an additional -8 for story-point improvement, and installing an alpha-grade AI core or having defeated the Pather Crisis are each an extra -12.
- Gameplay Justification: While not quite as effective at keeping Pathers off your worlds as giving them a PK is, this should be enough for all but the most extensive deployments of domain technology, at least once you've cleared their crisis. Filling your planet with AI cores will still get their attention, but there's room for judicious deployment of AI technology - and it's not like filling your planet with alpha cores is a situation that really needs buffs. Additionally, since the pather interest reduction only applies if freeport is off, this provides some reason to consider that - which the vanilla game really doesn't anymore, with 0.97's removal of Hegemony and Luddic Church expeditions that used to be triggered by using freeport.
- Known Issues: Negative pather interest values won't be displayed in the tooltips for pather cells. The shield generator's effects still apply, however - and are shown in its own tooltip. It's also worth noting that Pather cells may take some in-game time to dissolve once their interest has been reduced; this is not a bug, just how it works. Additionally, the exact value of interest needed to cause cell formation can vary with installed mods.