[SA] Make small lightning rods not protecting flying robots.

[Hares]

Fulgora's gimmiks are:

1. Harnessing power of ligning to power your base by placing lighning collectors
2. Everything is a scrap, everything comes out of scrap
3. Limited territory

I see most of people completely ignore the second part of a challenge by building bot-only or mostly-bot bases, and sometimes even the 3rd if the islands are close enough. Though bots are necessary for different tasks (like supplying rockets, mall, etc.) they invalidate the challenge. So I'm making a proposal to make protection zones from Lightning collectors not protecting flying entites (robots & player in mech armor) because they fly too high. Fulgoran native lightning attractor and late-game lighning collectors provide completely-safe zones.

Pros:
This change surves multiple purposes:

1. Makes player value the existing lightning attractors, currently they serve no purposes besides the earliest game
2. Makes player use big lightning collectors, becuase in the current game they are mostly not needed. See also: 125328: Lightning Collector vs. Lightning Rod
3. Severely reduces ability to invalidate the challenges of Fulgora though leaving space for creating usage of the environment by keeping lightning attractors

Cons:

• Probably requires additional layer of implementation
• Partially breaks existing builds
• Deconstructed lightning attractors cannot be placed back once undeployed

Thus, even though I would love to see some Space Age rebalance, I don't recommend implementing this before v2.1

[CyberCider]

Genius idea, it hits two birds with one stone. Love it, +1. Honestly, I would even remove the natural collector element. Make them act like the small rods, no special effects.

[Stargateur]

well, first I was hell no, then I understand it was only for small rods so... I don't know

But in theory, robot should not even take any damage from lighting, energy would pass around them like plane IRL (if design correctly).

[eugenekay]

But in theory, robot should not even take any damage from lighting, energy would pass around them like plane IRL (if design correctly).

Commercial Airplanes are struck by lightning about once per year on average. Crashes are comparatively rare compared to “the wing fell off” type of structural failures, but it does happen. More commonly the plane will lose one of the redundant radio systems, or a set of circuit breakers will trip. A full maintenance inspection is required after each event to look for burnt spots on the aircraft structure, even if there is no damage apparent to the pilots in-flight. Further reading direct from Airbus. I personally don’t “worry” about this when I step onto a plane, there is a lot of Engineering Redundancy for this type of event, and there are two expert pilots in the front seat - so everything will be fine.

Unpiloted drone swarms randomly flying through an intense lightning storm on a distant planet? Yeah, I can totally see those lil robots getting cooked by passing lightning storms. So this suggestion makes total sense flavor wise.

Implementation wise, this is probably a non-starter. Having two separate classes of Lightning Protection would mean having to check each Entity/Tile’s protection status TWICE per lightning strike - and who know how many “protection layers” could be added in Mods? What about the surprise factor of “my expensive robots are being destroyed by lightning!? But I put up protection rods!!!” Users would hate the Nerf change.

I think it is better to keep this as a simple Safe/NotSafe system.

[SirSmuggler]

How does robots invalidate "Everything is a scrap, everything comes out of scrap"?

[Hares]

How does robots invalidate "Everything is a scrap, everything comes out of scrap"?

Because they turn this

04-28-2025, 23-38-16.png (4.23 MiB) Viewed 704 times

into that

04-28-2025, 23-40-09.png (979.09 KiB) Viewed 704 times

[Stargateur]

I would say that up to player choice, no robot on fulgora and gleba is hard mode.