Droid Engineer Archive

TK,

My original idea for that rather long post was the fact that none of the current droids reallyhave any individuality or real purpose in life.

Combat droids aside, since I believe that combat droids should fight and not heal or craft.

If you can place any module into any chassis, there's no use for any particular chassis except for the 'coolness' factor. Just one selling factor, when we could have multiple selling factors.

There was obviously some kind of attempt at this with giving certain chassis inherent abilities, but since most all of these inherent abilities currently DON'T WORKit kind of makes that attempt moot.

As I stated, certain chassis should be intended, and limited, to specific functions.

We are severly limiting our markets by advocating this free-for-all with installing any module into any chassis.

Despite what the customer "wants", there need to be limiting factors to make droids worth purchasing. The customer would obviously like to stick everything they need into one chassis. This doesn't help our profession much.

Imagine one kitchen appliance that does everything you could possibly want to do in the kitchen with equal efficiency and ability. Cool for the customer, yes, but it wouldn't sell very many kitchen appliances would it?

There's no reason that a customer would not purchase a repair droid, a medical droid, and a crafting droid, except that you can cram all this garbage into one chassis and customers will only purchase one droid to do all their work.

It doesn't make good business sense, and it's hurts the profession. Because where people might purchase 2 or 3 droids, there is no need when they can purchase only one droid if it does everything. And you won't see as many droids being used in the game.

We currently have one medical droid chassis, 2 repair type chassis, 1 power chassis, 2 combat chassis, 4 chassis that could be considered general purpose (the R series), and 3 chassis that currently have no purpose in life, not counting the profession (BH) specific models.

If function were limited to chassis type, instead of mere module level or DE skill level, we could see a drastic increase in sales while providing specific functions to customers rather than 1 grab-all function for all chassis.

As far as generic, general purpose chassis, this could be filled quite naturally by the R series. These could hold crafting stations, and lower level med (55) and repair module as well as some other new modules that fit their purpose - such as slicing, etc.

The other specific function chassis would provide their intended purpose with ancillary functions available, such as a surgical droid with inherent med (perhaps with added meds for 100+) with chem station, or a repair type droid with a specific crafting station.

Most chassis should perform their intended function and be limited to that function, allowing general purpose chassis to fill multiple reduced functions.

This would add unique individuality to each chassis and, I think, add more of that Star Wars feel everyone likes to talk about.

Progman (and others),


Keep 'em coming!

/boing


/bow

Respectfully,

I like a lot of the suggestions, but I have a more general and simple suggestion that I think can be applied accross the board to produce quick and easy differentiation between the chassis. Most of what I'm about to say isn't all new either. Others have suggested some of it here.

First, I think it's useful just to define the problem and the end goal here:

Two different droids chassis that have the same number of module slots but different base components for the chassis should have game play functions that are NOT identical even when the have the same modules installed within them. period.

If any two chassis exist for which this is not true, they are broken and need to be fixed, IMO.

Irregardless of and dissagreements about what sort of function a given chassis should have, I think we all agree that the goal is differentiation as I just defined it.

So one to my reduction of how to address the problem. The simplest and most straight forward thing to do, in my opinion, is to simply associate module bonuses with the chassis. E.g., maybe those R-series droids that require a manipulator arm package could get a free low-quality (by which I mean holds 1 item) level 1 storage module built into the chassis? The medical chassis could get a free level 1 medical module built into the chassis (or something equivalent to a 1/2 level module if level 1 is too much). Etc. It shouldn't be hard to come up with module bonuses for each chassis that yield set of chassis that provide differentiation between all of them.

There are definitely other options that could be applied in lieu of or in conjunction with that. But the reason I just suggest module bonuses is because we know that this should be relatively straight forward to implement with the existing system (because there are already module stacking rules in place that seem to sort of work).

So long as the stacking bonuses for modules of the same type are well balanced, consistent, and understood by all, a chassis differentiation scheme that uses module bonuses as the differentiating factor should work well, be fairly simple, and could easily combine with any of the more complex proposals that people put forward, and would thus be a solid starting point.

This is all coming from a 0/0/0/1 DE who only started playing the came 3 weeks ago. So take it with it's appropriate grain of salt.

Too much to read! I agree with most common threaads in peopls replies (treadwell combat drds?), just had my own (short) suggestions:

Inherrent abilities:- Yep, but this links with the stacking problem? Why not make medical modules stack only in surgical droids, datapad stack in protocol droids, items stack in service droids, defensive stack in combat droids, repair only in repair drd (and servcei drd?), power only in power drd (why can't it power itself?). A auto 'self repair' module would be very popular (esp combat droids) and take up one valuable slot - but I'm going off thread here...

I know this approach may be harder to code (crafting screens would need to be very clear as to what you could do), but would generally make droids better at their expected role (Surgical with 110 medical rating, even by a low level DE, but MSE prolly around the 65 mark), while allowing DE's of higher level to produce the higher quality components to build chassis without the need to stack but charging more for the adv components.

I don't quite know if this is on topic..but here's some chassis that we SHOULD be able to make:

The dome droids from Ep4 (the one the jawa is shooing away)

Roger Roger droids

Droidekas

IG Assassin droids

bug-headed protocol droid (4-LOM from ESB- gray, in the bounty hunter scene)

Death star protocol droids (faction schematic, same as a protocol, but silver with the big black bug eyes and snout)

Antique protocol droid (had a odd looking smiley face, dull gray, in Sandcrawler during the R2/3P0 capture scene. Not sure if that what this thing was..but it'd be something cool to have sitting around, hehe)

EV series droid (the taskmaster droid in Jabbas skiff, the one that sorts out droids and assigns tasks)

Pit Droid (maybe 3 or 4 variant chassis, similar to architects with different houses. No different stats, only meshes)

I'm sure there's tons more..these are just a few I happened to like/notice. Most of them I got the action figures still floating about, hehe