This has been bugging me for a bit now but I haven't been bothered to actually test it out properly yet.
Anyway, as soon as your ship takes some shield damage it starts recharging immediately. This is good. However the behaviour is not the same when you take armor damage - there is a delay before the shields start recharging again. It seems to be somehow related to the amount of armor damage you took during the battle. So I'm curious as to what (if any) the logical explanation for this behaviour is or whether it's a bug resulting from the separation of shields and armor in EV/O.

I know it has something to do with shield recharge rate at least. When you buy the Sigma electrical outfit and take armor damage your shields will come back faster than before you bought the outfit...

Yeah, it's as if it keeps track of another armor value beneath the shield value which must be recharged before the shield, just like in EV/O.

Could the shields be going negative?

Ragashingo, on Jul 22 2005, 08:56 PM, said:

Could the shields be going negative?View Post

Yes, it does appear that shields can go negative. I'm doing a few tests involving a ship with 100 shields, 200 armor, and identical shield and armor recharge rates, against a planet with a weapon that does 100 damage to both shields and armor.
When the first shot from the planet hits, my shields vanish and my armor goes down to half. Both start recharging immediately, and both reach full at the same time.
Oddly, after the first shot, subsequent shots only knock out my shields, without damaging my armor. This leads me to suspect that shields can recharge to more than full strength, at least if the recharge rate is fairly fast. And yes, if I get hit again before my shields recharge fully, my armor goes down to half, and recharges before the shields do.

I'm afraid that the good ship Interplanetary Wombat is going to be rather badly damaged before this thread is finished...

Edwards

So your test shows shields can go both negative and overly positive? Man thats got to have an effect on gameplay...

So are shields taking damage even when they are down? Or do they just take full damage until they go below 0 and then stop taking damage?

Ragashingo, on Jul 22 2005, 10:17 PM, said:

So your test shows shields can go both negative and overly positive? Man thats got to have an effect on gameplay... View Post

I think that the overly positive is only by a single shield point, and we already know about the effect of negative shields.

Ragashingo, on Jul 22 2005, 10:17 PM, said:

So are shields taking damage even when they are down? Or do they just take full damage until they go below 0 and then stop taking damage?View Post

Shields do continue taking damage after they reach zero, even if the damage comes in small packages.
Shield damage seems to go down to a little over 10% below 0.

Edwards

Weird. Especially the overly positive thing. Well at least it doesn't keep going down indefinitely. Thanks for testing this Edwards, I feel a little better just for knowing what's going on now.

Edwards, on Jul 23 2005, 12:55 AM, said:

I think that the overly positive is only by a single shield point...
View Post

I think that what it is is that the damage is done over a small (single frame) period of time, not instantly, so if the shields happen to recharge a single point during that time, they do not die.

Edwards, on Jul 23 2005, 01:55 AM, said:

I think that the overly positive is only by a single shield point, and we already know about the effect of negative shields.
View Post

Don't forget what happens when you switch ships in mid-flight. Particularly when you go from something with lots of shields which are fully charged at the time to something with less maximum shielding.