Currently shield logic follows armor logic - higher damage value will be more efficient. It could be argued that maybe doing the opposite would be more interesting, that's up for debate.
I wouldn't make HE fine against shields because it would make energy weapons the weakest link - either give energy weapons some specialization (like being actually good against shields) or keep it as is. My only gripe is that kinetic damage seems overall as the best, maybe lowering the damage it deals to hulls wouldn't be a bad idea.
Quick fix is to reduce kinetic damage factor. And btw I do believe in flipping damage absorbing efficiency logic. It makes any bolt natually (regardless damage type) either good/bad against shield/armor.
And yep I forgot the energy weapon stuff and just made up my mind. This might sounds impractical cuz the logic jumps far:
Lasers. First thing in mind is wave-partical duality. So frequency matters. In game, it's weapon total range (not hit distance). Longer total range means it has lower frequency Fs, shorter means higher Fs.
So the model is: Given same DPS of two different lasers, one reaches 8000m the other 1000m. Then the 1000m ones shoot many small "bolts" and the 8000m shoot less but larger "bolts". Then you can have a curve of armor/shield absorbsion, then u know how to balance giving them different DPS values.
(Modify: Clarify this is just saying shield & armor absorbsion which shouldn't change the damage decay of the laser weapon itself over range.)
Then for energy bolts, accelerated plasma? They're very chemical active kinetic mass. In fact this thing might just have similar armor model as in vanilla game which obliterates armor plates and make an area of armor less effective with more hits. Balance with soft shield hits seems fine tho. Very unsure how to reflect this thing or if Liral would implement it, cuz it sound very complicated to me having two models at the same time. Or some maths needed to reflect this fact within one model.
