Shield link/unlink ability

Or better yet! There should be aegis/aspis turn off button that turns off the shield cutting down the energy sink.

This behaviour is intentional.

Shield link is not a UI enhancement or unit behaviour improvement. It is simply a mechanic which exists, it is neutral. It is a feature of shielded units which you have to manipulate in order to use it to your advantage. A smart opponent could use features of link to their advantage as well.

Shield link is not 'on your side' in the sense that tactical AI is on your side. If tactical AI does something stupid then I would consider that a problem. Even overdrive is more on your side than shield link because gridding mexes should not decrease income. Sometimes shield link benefits you and sometimes it does not, you have to steer the game towards situations where it benefits you.

I think a widget that attempts to manage shields against tacnukes in a non-insane way would be doable (if unreliable).
[Spoiler]

Your trollscience deserves more upvotes Sprung

You can also do this by morphing the shield, which is a single command (Does Wait work on morph? That would remove the resource drain. Low priority at least should work though?).

So as long as you have a way to cheaply turn shields off, this can be widgeted. That sounds like the sort of thing we should impliment...

There is no easy 'smart' behaviour other than 'turn on tacnuke protection', which would make the shields very vulnerable as you'd only have to get them all below the tacnuke threshold with, say, a Tremor or Catapault for them all to turn off... so it's still a tradeoff, but an increasingly esoteric one. Tacnukes are at this point actually designed to penetrate shields for an increased cost. They're MEANT to be designed such that if you can get one in range of a 'point of failure' structure like a Singu, Mohogeo or Antinuke, and defend the silo on the front line, you can win that way. You can at least use EMP missiles on anti's, but the stun time is short enough that it's actually not a trivial window to hit.

I actually won my last game, a FFA, by tacnuking a Starlight and then some antis through shields. It took a LOT of tacnukes, but if it had taken any more, I'd probably have lost.

You can also use a builder to reclaim ~0% of the shield. Now the question, which actions reset shield charge back to 0 leading to a loss of energy and which wont?

Well at least EMPing a unit does not reset it's shield. (much to my surprise a few months/years ago)

I always found it strange that a weakened shield can't stop a tacnuke.

How does the shield barrier know the payload of the warhead in that particular missile?

And why does it decide "meh, this will blow up real big so I'll let it through for some reason instead of causing it to detonate safely far away from the base."

quote: I always found it strange that a paper wall can't stop bullets but a concrete wall can. How does the wall know the force of that particular bullet? And why does it decide "meh, this is going to destroy something so I'll let it through for some reason instead of intercepting it safely far away from things."