Yup, both of these are blatantly owerpowered. Sim Camp really should be made a unique building. 

Sim Camp tech - maybe bit OP, but it just a RNG. I like it just for flavor.

Impregnable Shielding  - I have it in my latest playthrough, I don't bother to install it because the upgrade cost is way too expensive.

Obliterator can clear everything.

I'm not sure about the ship modules; I've never experienced them in-game. Impregnable Shielding is very expensive, industry-wise, compared to the final tier researchable module though - perhaps that's balance enough?

About the Sim Camp building, I don't think it's too powerful at all. My view is essentially identical with that of Astasia; it opens up a new strategy while making manpower buildings not economically useless. I would find changing the building into a wonder (that is, unique) to be extremely obnoxious. If anything, it should be put somewhere in a tech quadrant so as to remove the RNG factor that is apparently so unbalancing in multiplayer.

IMHO:

It's more of a flavor module than something OP.

Critical damage always ignores defenses. Nobody else uses EMP in their fleets? They shutdown enemy shields, so free damage again (even if they use reduced crit dmg modules).

If you build a fleet based on energy weapons and put a specialized energy weapon boosting hero on it, it doesn't matter what shields the enemy will have, the damage will always be higher than what you can absorb (pretty much because your absorb and shield capacity is a flat value for each phase irrelevant of recharge, while weapon modules fire several times per phase).

The only time Impregnable shielding isn't OP is in multiplayer when people actually know the mechanics of the game. In which case you'll very cleverly stack flat HP in your ships if you put any defense at all. And the moment you see anyone with any defenses you'll just stack crit to ignore them.

That being said the way combat mechanics work completely throws any balance out the window. Crits ignore defenses *and you canspecialize to crit nearly 100%*, defenses are horribly imbalanced with RNG rewarding players with modules which would be unbeatable if it weren't for the fact that crit and hero skills invalidate the modules entirely. The biggest most awesome hulls in the game have specialization in the weakest modules.

Ships and ship modules need acomplete overhaul and design pass.

I believe the problem with the current combat system is that there are too many hard counters and too few soft counters.

When your fleet can ignore enemy shields / hull due to a combination of hero skills and critical modules there is no point to consider anything else but HP as a good defense.

Kinetics have insane dps but they only shine at short range and to get there you need large hulls that can carry tons of HP boosts to survive first phase (if you start at medium).

Missiles are completely useless due to how flak works. 1 Flak module should be able to only target a single missile and only shoot at missiles that target said ship, not neighbours.

Beams should have base debuffs (and upgraded debuffs or a 2nd debuff for strategic beams to make them a viable alternative to white versions).

Lasers are good all around.

Autochthon has it spot on.

Hero powers easiy bring penetration to close to 100%, crit damage can be brought to 0% extra damage, and it is quite abusable if you know what your doing.  When facing the AI, the tricks up its design sleeve are somewhat lacking to a human counterpart.

So this shield, against a hero'd fleet with 90% penetration, will reduce damage by 10% roughly.  With the line of damage getting so out of control witht he + damage + laser damage + hero damage + battle card + penetration values make items like these not worth the investment.

plutar wrote:

So this shield, against a hero'd fleet with 90% penetration, will reduce damage by 10% roughly.  With the line of damage getting so out of control witht he + damage + laser damage + hero damage + battle card + penetration values make items like these not worth the investment.

It's even worse, because you can stack more than one hero (that penetration skill is a Senate skill) so you can reach 100% penetration with energy weapons, and THEN, even if you don't reach 100%, there's still that wondeful thing called Hull weakness.

Critical hits desperately need not to ignore all defenses. It ruins all semblence of balance and strategy of ship design.

Yeah, thinking on it now, I have to wonder if allowing full shield penetration at all was a good idea.  Allowing the massive values we can get even without much effort kinda marginalizes shields and forces the need for incredibly ones like the above, then allowing full bypassing just kinda makes the whole thing pointless.

I'm not a fan of things that make other game features pointless, honestly.  Doesn't matter if they're random rewards; they still stand to completely negate an entire design layer.  I'm not too keen on that idea.

The only mechanics that should have ful;l shield bypass are ones with significant downsides. For instance Squadrons (which can be destroyed) or missiles (which are countered by flak and useless after basically one phase of combat).