After the new shield effect was done, a request regarding damage handling popped back in my mind. I had been asked to distinguish between shield and hull hits, as it would be illogical to use tight hitboxes around objects, yet have the shield take damage by hits. My first thought was to assume the hull was armored and to split the damage at some ratio between shield and hull, but that would have required a lot of work and I somehow didn't like the idea anyway: The original game code treated every object like it was having a shield that needed to be worn down, and any hit after it was to zero destroyed the object; so it was pretty clear that objects didn't have hardened hulls, and that the shield made up their entire armor.

So I kept thinking about it, and after I while I found a solution to the dilemma: A critical hit system would make both use of the shield and allow hits at the hull to have an effect besides destroying the target. So you will find a new damage model entry in the physics options menu allowing you to enable an enhanced damage system applying critical damage depending on where a target was hit and how good its shield was. Critical hit chance rises as the shield diminishs, and critical hits can affect aim, drives and guns of the target:

• Aim: Worse aim means shots and dumb missiles fan out more. Robots may also attack other robots instead of the player.
• Drives: The more the drives get damaged, the slower the target gets.
• Guns: Damaged guns may fail to fire - the higher the damage, the more frequent the failures.

Every critical hit wears the damaged ship facility down by a constant rate. Critical hit probability is determined by a ships shield strength, both relative to the maximum shield and to a standard shield strength of 100 units. Critical hit damage is scaled depending on the maximum shield strength of the target to compensate for the increase of shots required to take down stronger targets (in other words: You need way more shots to take out a boss robot than a humble drone, which means you can score way more critical hits; so to keep a good damage balance critical hits will do less damage to stronger robots. Otherwise they would be completely disabled when their shield is still at 75%).

Hits at an objects fuselage will affect its aim. Hits on secondary parts (arms, guns, etc.) will affect drives or guns, depending on whether the object was hit from the rear, side or front. Since critial damage is a very important factor and can easily be overlooked in battle, it is displayed right below the reticle, showing a ship icon with differently colored parts:

Green denotes full health, yellow means minor damage, red indicates significant damage, and purple parts are severely damaged.

Critical damage will automatically repaired: Each damaged sub system gets the effect of one critical hit reversed every three seconds. That means that if a subsystem has been hit three times, it will be back to full health after nine seconds - provided the player doesn't get hit in between (critically or not doesn't matter - no repair under fire). Alternatively all systems can be brought to full function by increasing the ship's shield strength (a tiny bit is enough). If you want to know how in all the earth the ship can repair its subsystems: The answer are nano machines.

The new system may need some more tweaking (particularly for the player), but it should add a new level of fun to the game. Good luck, materiel defender!