Forcefields [Alternate Iron Curtain Tutorial]

Atomic_Noodles · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Oct 2011

This tutorial will show you how to rework the Iron Curtain into a slightly different approach. Namely a Forcefield Style where the Barrier will eventually dissipate under focus fire. This Tutorial assumes your basing the changes on a Vanilla Set of Yuri's Revenge

Modify IronCurtainDuration to your choosing (I will be replacing it with 1350 - Thats 1 minute 30 seconds)

On every Warhead that you want to be able to chip off Iron Curtain duration. Add a negative number in IronCurtain.Duration=XXX (Up to the modder to define how much they should be able to shave off)

For me:
Small Arms Fire -5
High Explosive -15
Energy Weapons (I.E: Lasers,Electric Bolts) -30 SUPER EFFECTIVE

Once done you can now kill off Barriers on the Units by focusing your attacks on individual units.

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WoRmINaToR · Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2013 4:25 pm Post subject:

I've been using a system exactly like this in my mod since the iron curtain logic was first added to Ares, and while it's pretty much the closest thing to forcefields/shields that exists in the game currently, there are enough issues with it that I do believe a proper shield/forcefield logic is still necessary some time in Ares' future.

Firstly, the obvious: units under the iron curtain effect are ignored entirely by the AI, regardless of whether or not its attacking units can damage the IC duration of your units. This sort of nullifies the entire purpose of this system when playing versus AIs (versus players it works as intended)

Secondly, as each game frame ticks down (and more importantly, the IC effect's duration), so does the effective health of the IC-based forcefield. This can be a desired effect for certain units, but it completely restricts the relationship of a shield's effective health and duration to be one and the same, rather than allowing the modder to create a long-lasting shield with low health, or a short-burst shield with very high health.

In general, mostly for the reasons stated above, it's rather difficult to balance. you want to give the units a meaningful amount of shield HP without being too OP, but all too often I end up in situations where I IC 9 of my units, one of them gets attacked heavily while the shield is up and eventually gets bursted down, but while all that is happening, the shield on my other 8 units expires or is so close to expiring that one more unit might get shot with the shield up, but that's about it.

Sidenote: 1350 frames comes out to 45 seconds. If I recall correctly, game time is based on 30 FPS.

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Zero18 · Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2013 11:20 pm Post subject:

Interesting idea, Atomic.

You can technically put it on units and it acts like a shield. However, I'm concerned about balancing. Because having the shield on the affected targets grants them "immunity" to the hostile attacks. But as you suggestes in the post about such a warheads that is super effective against these shields, that could work that way as well too.

Perhaps there should be some downside for this like reduced speed while shield is active?

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Krow · Commander **Joined**: 30 Jan 2010 **Location**: Malaysia

Zero18 wrote:

Perhaps there should be some downside for this like reduced speed while shield is active?

AE can do that, needs tweaking though. Haven't been on IRC for quite a while, but I'm sure Graion is still fixing some of AE's quirk.

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Atomic_Noodles · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Oct 2011

Probably can do it by just using a GenericWH Superweapon which has IronCurtain Tags on its Warhead as well as sufficient CellSpread than using the Actual IronCurtain one to give it the ability to provide AE Effects.

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~ Excelsior ~