Mechanically, it's very hard, verging on impossible, to balance large shieldless Starsector ships for the player; they tend to be very binary (you either have enough armor and hull to tank long enough to kill your target or you don't) and either boring (nothing to do) or overpowered (nothing competing with weapons for flux) or both.
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I see your point about the difficulty in balancing shieldless ships, and I agree a 1:1 translation of mechanics isn't a good idea, maybe a compromise would be like you and the 2 suggestions by @ChaseBears and @Gotcha!, which is to have a shield module hullmod since as they pointed out, the Hiigarans are quick to research and adapt new tech (maybe an omni version of the "Makeshift Shield Generator" hullmod, but reduces ship speed only when active).
Nice looking mod btw, hope to see a release soon!
Thanks darling! Might take yet another hand to the scout, as for the scales in general, there ain't a winning option.
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No need to sweat exact accuracy haha, just ballpark and visually relative-ish as far as feasible.
I think your fighter scale in general compared to vanilla is pretty good, HW fighters are enormous. Just the scout looks a tad too large, the others aren't really that noticeable.
The carrier looks about right (about the size of a Conquest), and as you mentioned fighters are smaller as implied by the exit animation.
Not sure how's factored into HW2's health bars, but there's a "shield" defined for any ship larger than a Scout.
May be only against EMP damage but'm drawing a blank on any concrete info.
addShield(NewShipType, "EMP", 10000, 20)
You mean in SS? I know there's a couple of ships in SS that don't have built-in shields, like the salvage rig, not sure how that's handled code-wise though.
On the topic of EMP, HW ships are likely hardened to normal EMP attacks, as they did not have ubiquitous shield tech.
Planning some kinda armour repair system for the Shipyard, preferably where the ships came in to dock. Could extend that to the resource collectors and carrier subsystems as a shield replacement mechanic, with some CoH2 style internal crew-repair that disables the ship as a last alternative. But heck even as'm writing this it feels taken too far and doesn't really introduce a new engagement mechanic, just an infuriating back off n' heal one. Particularly if hyperspace systems get introduced, can just hop away from any danger and come back fresh as a brass flannigan.
Guess the only way to know is to test it, but shields can still be a module option, since its not really clear how some production modules can be translated into SS, if you even want to do so that is.
Anyway just tossing out some thoughts and ideas, I agree with prioritizing the sprites done and ingame above balance.
