## Dev Update #15: Energy Shields and More

Published on January 14, 2019 by Vas Vasinov

This past week was pretty busy running the beta but I still managed to finish an important gameplay feature: energy shield.

Energy shields are protective mechanisms that consume energy every turn once they are activated. When the enemy attacks a location with an energy shield up, some, or all, damage gets absorbed by that shield, which consumes energy. Depending on how efficient the shield is, it could quickly drain your location energy. For example, if the shield efficiency is at 70% and the location has 10 energy then the shield can absorb up to 7 damage units (equivalent to 7 population units). If the defending location has any population, then the attacker will receive the same amount of damage that they would if there was no shield.

I also added a new structure called shield generator that unlocks the energy shield action. Shield generators can be upgraded to lower energy the shield cost and to increase its efficiency.

Energy shield is a new type of game mechanic that only uses energy in order to achieve player goals. Sure, attacks and transfers consume energy but it’s just an enabling secondary resource since population still reigns supreme during direct attacks. That’s a pretty important development because it enables another high-level strategy for players—energy harvesting—that complements two other general strategies: population growth and combat focus.

There are a few more energy-based mechanics that will be coming out in the next weeks. Exciting!

### Other Changes

• [GAMEPLAY] Higher combat strength will result in more damage dealt to the defender. Now players can rationalize investing into military more.
• [GAMEPLAY] All combat strength modifiers were increased by a factor of 10.
• [GAMEPLAY] Supernovae now last only one turn. It’s more realistic since real supernovae only last up to several months, so it doesn’t make sense for them to last for several turns (one turn takes a million years in Eons of War). Another reason for the change is that players didn’t like how their locations became disabled for several turns during active supernovae.
• [GAMEPLAY] In-game event choices that change resources were changed to be based on the relative value of the resource instead of a generic value.
• [UI] I added a special location notification that lets the player know that their star is about to go supernova next turn.

Build 0.7.0 that contains all of those changes was just uploaded to Steam for beta players to try.

### Next Week

Over the next seven days I’ll be focusing on a list of improvements that’ve been long overdue. Most of them have to do with fixing certain game mechanics, improving UI, and addressing player experience issues that beta testers brought up. I’m also planning on refactoring some of the game internals to get ready for massive features that are scheduled to be added in February.