(01-22-2022, 08:10 AM)Deantwo Wrote: Also, calling it a shield generator also seems to suggest that an attacker have to maintain fire on the shield for prolonged period of time. This seems pretty unnecessary, especially if the weapon's strength doesn't matter. Veteran players will just start designing all their warships with an additional smallest possible energy weapon and only use that against the shield until it drops, then switch to their powerful weapons.
I consider this to be a bad faith interpretation of the suggestion.
Most likely there would indeed be a long term bombardment weapon on any given ship, in fact there would probably need to be for fuel reasons, however one option to enforce a minimum size on this weapon would be to have the siege shields act much like current city shields. If you wish to push them into siege mode, you have to bomb them until the conventional shield drops. After that point you would have to keep up with the recharge rate until the shield is finally overloaded and shuts down. If the shield is allowed to fully recharge then it resets itself.
In general if these shields became a thing it might be preferable if they existed as a modified version of city shields we have now, rather than existing side by side with them.
I'm not in any case sure why you are suggesting that solar systems would necessarily fall as one. I tend to build colonies so that they are at the very least independent in terms of air and food power and so forth, mainly to avoid huge failure cascades due to supply chain issues. You say few people do it, but I am fairly sure its nearly standard practice. It seems like at best the system-wide siege idea would make it easier to conquer large swathes of space in a reasonable time frame, but it seems like thats an annoyance you have never personally been subjected to so its weird to me that you are so determined to make the case for that.
(01-22-2022, 08:10 AM)Deantwo Wrote: Which is why I think we are both suggesting a system that would let the defender destroy the attacker's sieging ship while they are offline.
Regarding attacker ships being destroyed while offline, yeah, thats likely. That would be part of the aforementioned notion of placing the advantage firmly in the hands of the defender. I think in general its probably fine for it to be far harder to attack than defend. In my opinion by far the biggest obstacle to changing cities into something that take a while to build up is the fact that they are so easy to quickly destroy. A way to defend them has to come first, as a pre-requisite to them being harder to build up.