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also, this LP made me remember just how much the game can punish a player who wastes resources - and some moments (shooting empty eggs with anti-pers ammo) really made me cringe. genuinely funny bits are present though.
You could always destroy the shields by just shooting them in vanilla, hacking isn't required. It was just poorly communicated, as the shields didn't smoothly rotate nor clearly indicate their damage state (I think they might have transluced by damage, but they don't change color or have health bars).
I've had the liberty of watching a few people play my mods and it's been pretty eye-opening to see the skill/knowledge/understanding bifurcations among players and how drastically they can change the experience. I've seen several players get endlessly bonked to death by pipe hybrids; I've seen players shoot every single enemy and then complain when their pistols jam and run dry in Engineering; I've seen players dismiss the value of hacking and ignore every security crate only to run out of the resources that they would have gotten from them. I don't think I ever personally had trouble with the combat, and I quickly picked up on optimal strategies (wrench every enemy if tactically permissible, use the right ammo type for the job, invest into a spread of skills principally to meet minimum requirements, etc.) so I never encountered just how hardcore SS2 can be to someone not playing with the right mindset. It's especially easy to overlook when you're doing your n'th run of the game and find yourself not dying a single time even on Hard difficulty.
[...]the sheer perseverance was a sight to behold - guess you can get though just by mindlessly throwing yourself at everything. eventually.but here's something I didn't know - when you just damage the brain stars, they screech and twitch.