[Brainstorm] Shield Tweaks... of.. some kind or another
Long explanation short, it dawned on me just how badly Shields are either outmoded or out of touch with current long standing player wants. Never really put much thought into this kind of gameplay fix before, but given how hard it is to improve defence gameplay, this could be an easier 'stopgap' measure to improve things. Players have long felt it necessary to hijack the Shield system for purposes that Supercell never originally intended, and hasn't yet been modified since then, so now it has been turned into acceptable use as a defence mechanism.
That said, I'm wondering what would be a good set of tweaks that both attackers and defender could live with, while improving people's game experience.
Given how important loot is for the first 7 to 9 Town Hall levels are (out of currently 10 Town Hall levels! :saywhat:), I think it is safe to say that lost resources should be taken into account for once. This system needs to be simple, but better, than the current Shield rules.
First off, need some guidelines on how this likely should be done.
- The new system should not, on average, or during key points, substantially increase shield times than what is given now. That would block more lootable resources from attackers, and make the whole purpose of a raiding game kind of less meaningful.
- The new system should not, on average, or during key points, substantially decrease shield times than what is given now. This would outrage much of the playerbase as they feel like they would be more exposed and liable to losing more loot, which translates into more loss in progress in building thier village/base.
- It has to be simple, and easy to understand. Current system is 40% damage or Town Hall destruction gives 12 hours of shield, and 90% destruction is 16 hours of shield. So if it requires math formulas, charts, graphics, or large tables to explain, then likely it will not be used.
- It should follow, or come close to following, what has been established already. So for example, no odd Shield times of 2 hours, or 9 hours, unless there is a good reason for it. But this is one example out of many that can be made, and not about to list them all.
OK, now that is out of the way, I can post what (little :rolleyes:) I came up with.
I have several ideas, but the simplest one is basicly treat loot loss percentages as if they were base damage percentages. But I keep running into problems of what to base it on. Should it be a percentage of storage damage, or percentage of stolen loot verse avalible loot, or some arbitrary loot value, like the lootable cap limit non storages, as the base percentage verse how much is stolen.
Each one has thier merits, but also thier exploitablity can be rather bad. Plus, how does Dark Elixir get calculated into this system? Gold and Elixir are effectively treated the same, but Dark Elixir is rather the wild card here, since so little of it is so valuable.
Obviously this idea would affect DE Zapping, since depending on what base value to use, one good DE zap could grant some Shield time. Now if that is fair or not, I'm not sure off hand. I still haven't checked out as many angles to this as I would have liked, since this is fairly brand new to me.
Just realized I didn't search for previous threads on this, but last several times I did on previous occasions, I never could find many, if any, threads already talking about the idea. Sure, there likely is some thread on awarding a shield after being looted, but I kind of doubt there is one asking for others to help brainstorm possible ideas as well.
I'll see about keeping this updated, with new viable ideas being posted here, but no promises :(