Bubble shield being attached to the personal shield is a giant mistake. Both have different functionalities and different use cases and having to pay double to reach the bubble shield makes it immediately terrible. Currently it costs like 6k mass and around 600k e to get the upgrade and it gives you a shield large enough to put 2 maybe 3 percies under when the e income you need for the upgrade makes it a pretty late t3 upgrade since it’s about 10% more e intensive than laser.
What would be interesting is to have bubble shield operate as an alternative option to the personal shield in the sense of working as some sort of OC resistant shield for early t3 units. I’m not really sure if it would work best as an upgrade for the back or the gun arm. The back would make the sense since it’s already there, just don’t tie it to the personal shield. If it was on the gun/ras arm then it makes the ACU a passive frontline unit rather than an OC machine. It would allow both a personal shield and a bubble shield which I’m not even sure if the game can support. Being able to put that much HP on an ACU does make me feel like it’ll be broken even without a gun upgrade, though.
But if bubble shield had a nerf in cost to then be around the same tier in expense of the personal shield or slightly more expensive to firmly put it in the t3 stage upgrade phase, I think it would make percies way more viable especially in a com v com situation. The bubble shield already carries drawbacks that a personal shield doesn’t in the form of a large hitbox as well as being able to get under the shield and even the potential pathfinding issues by trying to abuse shift + g under the shield so I don’t think there’s any reason to consider it intrinsically superior to personal shield. One is for when your ACU is expected to output decent damage alongside the push, one is when your ACU is more of a retreat point for your units.
Currently you pay:
2300 + 3600 = 5900 mass
112,000 + 450,000 = 567,000 e
For a 36,000 hp bubble shield.
I’d rather just do something like halve the energy cost alongside dividing the upgrades but give the bubble shield something like 20,000-24,000 hp instead. Given the current size of the bubble shield I don’t think this is that broken but it would at least make the upgrade a viable option rather than the 0% used tool it currently is.
