After a bit of work we now have shields in the game. Shields add 2X your max HP as a damage absorber which makes a tremendous difference in combat. Shields and similar sci-fi tech are things that will only spawn in Gentian-owned territories. For now that means they only spawn within the Gentian faction home zone. This will be expanded to include territories that have majority Gentian claim.

Unfortunately this means temporarily, the Gentian faction is outright more powerful than the other two factions, but other abilities will be coming soon which will help balance things out. In the interim, players in other factions can raid the Gentian home zone to pick up a shield generator, but it's not easy, as there are guards!

With this update there's also a change to the NPC spawners, such that when a spawn point/beacon in contested territories spawns a Faction-aligned NPC, they will now spawn with equipment representative of their faction. For Crimson this currently includes cannons (which will be replaced with rocket launchers), and for Gentian this means shields.