Integrity fields make your ships worse?

[SageThe13th]

I recall someone mentioning this somewhere.  But never heard what they meant by it exactly.  IFGs seem like pretty good deal.  Though, maybe if you took the space and power you were spending on them and put it into better shields you'd be better off?

[GrimJahk]

Interesting thought... never considered what the actual operational cost was... or tested it once had shields. However once the shields fail...that slight extra survivability may prevent a pop.

[Tiberiumkyle]

Shields do nothing for collisions, while integrity fields can help, so long as the collision is survivable in the first place. Fewer bits lost. Plus, weapons can generate with % to pen shields.  Run around without integrity fields, you're gonna run into such a foe sooner or later, and you may find yourself desiring them, when that big alien ship is punching entire cannon volleys through your shields. I speak from experience there, but I already had integrity fields. Still hurt, just fewer bits missing once the battle was over.

[Ohm is Futile]

They basically work by pooling the HP of every block within their reach and preventing any of those blocks from breaking until that pool of HP is depleted. I also find that they can cover a fair amount of your ship for relatively low power. I find it hard to imagine anything bad coming out from using them, but I can certainly picture something bad happening from not using them, such as what the person above described.

 

The only thing that sometimes bugs me is placing them in both aesthetically pleasing and functional designs because its not always crystal clear what their coverage is and how they deal with incomplete but overlapping coverage and so on.

[Michigo]

They basically work by pooling the HP of every block within their reach and preventing any of those blocks from breaking until that pool of HP is depleted.

 

Not anymore, now they only allow for 10 times the HP per individual block.

A block behaves at maximum like it has 1000% HP, 900% are borrowed from nearby blocks.

 

Ofc if your ship is made out of 10 equal blocks the benefits will be the same as before, but ships made out of hundreds or thousends of tiny surface parts feel the change. ;)

 

But for most it's no big deal, cause this just means the integrity field fails to protect some of the low HP surface level parts in case of collisions.