Planetary Shields in Balance Mod

Shields don't stop invasions, only boarding parties. Go figure...

Did the enemy ships happen to be armed with any sort of shield-piercing weapons (phased polaron beams, nullspace projectors, etc.)?

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

The ruin Massive Planetary Shields are phased.

With respect to ground invasions, I'd imagine the shields only protect the immediate vicinity of the colony or something like that.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

No, I know they don't actually do that - but I was saying that for the fact that they don't prevent ground invasions in the first place.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Sort of like The Empire Strikes Back in that the empire had to land their troops outside of the colony's shield and attack via ground.

Did you have WPs with shields? Becose their shield are displayed as added to planetary, but they are individual (so if remaining shileds are from WP, you can have damaged WPs and planet can still say it has shields).

Btw. If i have phased shields on WP and planetary shileds (normal), does those phased shieldss work as phased? (Imo they should).

There's a longstanding issue (dating back to SE:IV!) with a combination of normal and phased shield points being counted only as normal shield points. I have reminded MM a number of times that damage is not being applied as indicated by the data file ShieldAndArmorLevels.txt for either shields or armor, which would fix this problem and eliminate damage being applied to armor in the sequence it was placed, but no changes/fixes yet.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

You would have thought it wouldn't be that hard to fix... surely?

It might help if a couple more people sent in reports of armor and shields not behaving as described in the ShieldsAndArmorLevels data file...

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I don't see a problem with being able to land troops against a planetary shield.

I agree that there are issues with the semantics, component names (eg "planetary" vs. "colony" shield), and such, but as long as I'm aware of the functionality, I'm fine with it.

If the shield's description claimed it prevented landings, then it would be an issue for me. It does not, so no biggie. Inconsistency with boarding parties' need for dropped shields is documented, so it bothers me not.

There's also gameplay considerations. If such a shield prevented landings, it would be a step in the "invinceable colony" direction, and I'd rather keep landings possible and force defenders to account for it (build defensive troops, defensive strategy considerations, attack enemy fleets in space rather than wait for them to come to your colony to fight, etc.).

This is an interesting topic.
I can't say much for stock as far as invasions, since planetary shields are only from ruins in stock iirc, and I never had the AI get ships full of troops to one of my planets before.

As for the topic at hand...

On one side of the field, there are things like the Planetary Barrier Shield from MOO2, or the 'shields' from Dune.
Sure, they can stop a lot, but they have their weaknesses.
The MOO2 Barrier shield can stop stuff like troop landings, bioweapons, and weaker weapons, but more powerful weapons/bombs can still get through to damage structures and even take out ground troops and structures, meaning the Barrier shield can be taken out via orbital bombardment.
For the Dune shields, it was possible for something with constant force behind it and a slow speed to get 'pushed' through the shield.

Also to be considered is that boarrding pods are akin to small shuttles, while a troop planding pod is akin to a really big thing with potent engines to move around a lot of mass and be able to land said mass on a planetary body without going splat, which requires even more power...
Toss in a ship's shields are 'small', only needing to protect a ship, while a planet's shields are 'huge' because they have to offer protection to the entire planet which is going to need a lot of energy.

On the flip side, if a planetary shield can do stop like stopping shots from massive mount weapons or mobs of CSMs (nuke warheads in description iirc), then holding out even small ships would be child's play, meaning that landing troops is not possible.

In this case, one easy fix would be to allow ship mounted bombs to penetrate shields, being a long slender mass that the pic portrays them ass, it would be easy to assume that is made to survive an encounter with a planetary shield (reinforced nose/shell) and to use a planet's own gravity to allow it to 'fall' through the shield (slows down to the point the shield no longer sees it as a 'threat', and lets it through thinking it will burn up in the atmoshere), allowing it to still be able to attack shielded planets.
It would also give bombs a useful role, making it useful for situations where there is no 'safe' bombard distance for ships (large WP with massive mount wave motion guns in stock...) meaning they have to go in and take out a planet's defenses/shields ASAP, meaning time to drag out a lot of really big bombs.