Rotating Sheild Frequency or focus from a part of the ship to another part of a ship will break the game.
You have to take eve as an example, They persuit was to make the game as complex as they could, the end result was the loss of a lot of potential clients/players.
Keep the game simple, but make it customizable.
For example, Give players slots on ships, and different ships with different amounts of slots, in passive or active slots, Make them customizable, but balanced.
Concepts in this game like passive tanking (via shield regen) is a great idea, and it will really help develope the combat of the game into something unique.
passive tanking here however shouldent beable to perma tank 3-4 ships, it should be enuff to make 1v1 hard to defeat him (but not impossible).
The trick of defense balancing effective tanking.
This can be done through three process’es for defensive capabilities for the game.
the first is armor tanking, or tanking via raw armor, and large bursts of armor repair every 25 seconds or so, but for large amounts say 30-40% of the armor/hull life.
The second is tanking via pure regeneration on shields (active) Via Bursts every 10 seconds for something like 150-250shielding. This way should be default, and should not require any large amount of resources (credits) or level to do it. It should also be built in a way that it can tank 2-3 people’s damage (For a ship like a cruiser) Or 1 1/2 for a frigate.
The Third should be passive tanking thats getting regen and resistance extremely high, This type of tanking should only be accessible to jerico, because of their regenerative shielding (see my other posts for this idea; basically its a new mod, that takes up an active slot, that passively regenerates a large amount of shielding a second, Something like 300-400hp).
the last is ideal for Warden race, that is a race that is specialized in using remote healing. This should be something open to all races, but that this faction/race should excel at. This healers should be putting out healing of 200-300 every 2-3 seconds to its target.
its though these types of building that you will come up with unique builds, that will diversify the games, its tactics and its clan.
There only thing that can be said beyond this is that we should create a system as state above that will not allow the game to be based on cookie cutter builds (that is a few really good builds). The best way to do this is to find a balance between all types of regeneration to be equally desirable; if this can be done, then people will play the thing they like the most. You can also balance each type of defense to support specific other Active/passive componants, and weapons.
For example, You can make it so that things like the passive regeneration mods (active slots) uses energy, that will prevent passive tanks from using massively offensive mods, making jerico tanks all about damaging and taking damage, then moving around etc. This is a huge change to the faction because it will cause their tactics to be more camping / defensive. This will excellent as it will cause the empires cloaking exccell at hit and run attacks on them, this is because the will be stationary so such attacks will be merrited and valid, and since the federation are fast, they will fit right into the mix with stationary, and hit and run tactics (sort of the middle ground between the two).
sorry guys for going offtopic.