Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

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adam_bise
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Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by adam_bise »

With a power armor setup of 2 reactors, 6 MK2 batteries, night vision goggles, and 13 MK2 energy shields, you become more powerful on foot than in a tank.

These spitters destroyed my tank in about 25 seconds, but I stopped timing them attacking my player because after 2 minutes they still weren't able to out damage my shield regen and had barely dented my battery capacity.
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I don't think that a player on foot should be able to become more powerful than an armored tank, but that's just me.

Jap2.0
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by Jap2.0 »

Maybe not from a logical perspective, but when you think of it in terms of progression it makes a lot of sense. The research for a tank (not including prerequisites) costs 75 red, green, blue, and grey science. The tank itself costs 178 iron, 50 copper, 82 steel (410 iron), 10 coal, and 200 petroleum gas. The research only for power armor mk. 2, portable fusion reactors, batteries mk. 2, night vision, and energy shields mk. 2 is 950 red and green, 900 blue, 800 grey, and 600 yellow, not including prerequisites - a significant increase. Power armor with that equipment would cost 31,599 iron (177.5x the cost), 55,175 copper (1,103.5x the cost), 1,950 steel (9,750 iron - 23.8x the cost), 4,135 coal (413.5x the cost), 99,875 petroleum gas (499.4x the cost), and 40,075 water (∞x the cost).

*I did all this with only my brain, the wiki, a calculator, and sleep deprivation, so there may be some errors
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Optera
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by Optera »

Self regenerating shields by design outlast pure armor and hp as long as regen is greater than incoming dps.
PA2 can also outrun a tank with enough exoskeletons.

There are mods to fix that imbalance by adding equipment grids to vehicles.

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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by Kyralessa »

If instead of all those shields you had some Personal Roboport MK2s and a bunch of construction bots and repair packs, your tank could last quite a long time against them as well. Not infinite, but a long time.

bobucles
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by bobucles »

Tanks are good but they aren't "sitting in a pile of behemoths" good.

Power armor mk2 and fusion power vastly outrank tanks on the tech tree. It makes sense that higher tech items are better. Not really a balancing issue so much as it is natural progression.

adam_bise
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by adam_bise »

I appreciate the feedback about the big cost difference and tech hierarchical differences, but I am coming from more of a conceptual viewpoint.

If energy shields are that good at mitigating damage, and small enough to plug into a piece of armor, then why wouldn't you put hundreds of them in a tank? Furthermore, these shields only use a mere 360KW. If I were a stranded engineer with that kind of technology, I would be stringing them up all over my defensive perimeter!

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bobingabout
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by bobingabout »

Bob's mods includes vehicle equipment, and grids on vehicles. put your shields on the tank.
Creator of Bob's mods. Expanding your gameplay since version 0.9.8.
I also have a Patreon.

mrvn
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by mrvn »

adam_bise wrote:I appreciate the feedback about the big cost difference and tech hierarchical differences, but I am coming from more of a conceptual viewpoint.

If energy shields are that good at mitigating damage, and small enough to plug into a piece of armor, then why wouldn't you put hundreds of them in a tank? Furthermore, these shields only use a mere 360KW. If I were a stranded engineer with that kind of technology, I would be stringing them up all over my defensive perimeter!
Energy shields are generally thought to consume energy in proportion to their area. And as (for a sphere) the area grows with the square of the radius they quickly need too much energy. Or you need more shield emitters. So covering a tank with shields is much more difficult than a person.

But hey, you can do it with the vehicle grids. Same effect of making the aliens puny as with personal shields.

BlakeMW
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by BlakeMW »

adam_bise wrote:With a power armor setup of 2 reactors, 6 MK2 batteries, night vision goggles, and 13 MK2 energy shields, you become more powerful on foot than in a tank.
It's pretty balanced actually and IMO the Tank is favored.

Tank is intrinsically fast, about the same as having 2 exos, and doesn't slow down when firing its weapons. Furthermore, you can load up your power armor with 1 roboport and lots of personal laser defense and use it from within the Tank to add regen and large amounts of firepower. Overall the Tank should be thought of as foremost a mobile weapons platform, it's not really intended that you can plow thoughtlessly into strong enemies, you are meant to make use of the high mobility and long range as well.

Still, the Tank is no slouch if you add that personal roboport. The repair is good for 120hp/s compared with 12hp/s for each shield, though the effective regen should be modified by resists:

Tank:
Physical: 15 / 60%
Acid: 15 / 50%

Power Armor Mk2:
Physical: 10 / 40%
Acid: 10 / 40%

For example, when taking physical damage the Tank resists 60% of it, so tank repair negates 300 physical/s. PA2 resists 40% so each shield negates 20 physical/s. Thus when it comes to negating physical damage the Tank is equal to 15 Shields (actually the higher flat resists of the Tank make it a little more favorable than that but for large attacks it's close enough), for acid it's equal to 12.5 shields. If not for the fact that more biters can fit around a Tank than can fit around a dude on foot, a Tank being repaired will generally out-regen a power armor setup.

There are a bunch of other tactical differences between the Tank and being on foot. The Tank can roll slowly along at a rate which allows construction bots to keep up, this is really confusing to biters which tend to walk behind the Tank forming a wedge, all body-blocking each other and very few ever actually biting the Tank, rolling slowly is an absurdly powerful tactic and the one I usually use rather than going fast. On the other hand, on foot you can simply slip between biters which is a big advantage, the Tank has to murder its way through biters or drive around them.

Shields are limited by energy which is free after you've paid an enormous upfront cost, but you only get high regen until the batteries get flat which wont take that long. The Tank regeneration is limited by repair packs - if you use the rollin slowly technique bots almost never die and they don't need to recharge because their outing time is so short. Repair packs aren't terribly expensive and overall you can regen continuously in a Tank for a lot longer than Power Armor 2 can manage - in principle each stack of repair packs allows for 4.2 minutes of continual repair so you can easily carry an hour's worth of repair packs.

The Tank is a secondary hitpool. If you like you can be wearing a fully shielded power armor inside the Tank so if the Tank dies you pop out at full hitpoints and shields ready to fight on. More realistically you'll probably have a leggy setup with only modest shields, so if the Tank dies you can pop out and run away. Either way being a secondary hitpool is really handy if you're playing "ironman" style and treating dying as game-over. The fact of being a second hitpool is alone good enough reason for the Tank being "inferior" to Power Armor.

The Tank can also withstand hits from Trains better than Power Armor 2 mainly due to having 80% collision resist, even though PA2 shields can have a equally large hitpool it has no collision resist at all, so PA2 can only withstand hits from small trains at low speeds, wheras a train needs to be rather large indeed (maybe 8 units long) and going very fast to kill a Tank.

mrvn
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by mrvn »

With a personal roboport you simply loose bot as you drive away from damage.

adam_bise
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by adam_bise »

BlakeMW wrote:a Tank being repaired will generally out-regen a power armor setup.
Interesting. I'll def try this out. I've rarely used the personal roboport and had never really tried this before. Makes sense though.

mrvn
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by mrvn »

adam_bise wrote:
BlakeMW wrote:a Tank being repaired will generally out-regen a power armor setup.
Interesting. I'll def try this out. I've rarely used the personal roboport and had never really tried this before. Makes sense though.
With vehicle grids you can also add a vehicle roboport so the tank repairs itself.

bobucles
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by bobucles »

Bots are pretty annoying to use as the tank. When they get damaged they send other bots out to heal themselves. It snowballs into 1 bot healing your tank and 50 damaged bots healing 49 other damaged bots. So dumb!

A simple mod tweak makes the bots non repairable and it works great. One and only one bot heals your tank and when it blows up another bot does the same. Bots heal for free after they dock so there's no problem and even if they didn't, they're cheap so whatever.

mrvn
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by mrvn »

bobucles wrote:Bots are pretty annoying to use as the tank. When they get damaged they send other bots out to heal themselves. It snowballs into 1 bot healing your tank and 50 damaged bots healing 49 other damaged bots. So dumb!

A simple mod tweak makes the bots non repairable and it works great. One and only one bot heals your tank and when it blows up another bot does the same. Bots heal for free after they dock so there's no problem and even if they didn't, they're cheap so whatever.
Not to mentions that while you are driving past aliens the bots can't keep up so 50 bots get shot down and you loose them all.

But repairing for free? That's cheating. Why can't it use a repair pack when back in the roboport?

bobucles
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Re: Energy Shield MK2 vs Tank

Post by bobucles »

Don't ask me, that's just how it works. The free repair keeps stacks from splitting so you don't have an inventory overflow, which was a problem before damaged stacks melted together. And in terms of """cheating""" it is a literal argument over pennies. Repair packs are not expensive at all.

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