Droid Engineer Archive

In the past few months, I've read these forums and the Dev Tracker religiously, trying to ascertain the future of our profession. Everything from the Combat Droid issue to the planned "fixes" to existing droids. Now something's been bugging me about conflicting news pertaining to droids.

Such as:

In Thunderheart's "DE Plan", he states that droids will be much more specialized, and not the current state where they are all the same generic droid chassis with different skins slapped on them. For example, the Surgical Droid being able to be called anywhere in the game, not just in towns, camps, or near declared residences and having the innate ability to auto-revive you if you get incapped during combat (assuming your droid is called at the time). He also alluded to Protocol Droids playing a much bigger role in the game soon.

But at the same time, I've also read that the devs are now planning to allow droids to accept every module we can possible build. That's great. We'll now be able to build MSE droids with weapon/droid/generic crafting module, clothing/armor module, food/chem module, structure module, medical module, item storage module, data storage module, and droid repair module. Wonderful.

In my opinion, this is the exact opposite of specialization. If anything, its further watering down an item that hardly anyone wants anyway. Does anyone else see my point here? It's hard enough to sell droids now...so we'll have to install pretty much everything but the kitchen sink into them to get anyone interested in this new breed of "Every-Droid". Making droids capable of accepting all crafting modules at the same time is further undercutting an already feeble droid market. Why come back to a DE anytime soon if you have every known function built into your one little MSE droid...and it only cost you 3k?

It just sounds like the devs have sort of contradicted themselves on some of these issues or they've decided to go a totally different direction than what Thunderheart stated in his DE Plan.

I don't know where you got that idea... The first bit makes sense, but the second bit seems to go against what I've seen.

But at the same time, I've also read that the devs are now planning to allow droids to accept every module we can possible build. That's great. We'll now be able to build MSE droids with weapon/droid/generic crafting module, clothing/armor module, food/chem module, structure module, medical module, item storage module, data storage module, and droid repair module. Wonderful.

The cluster-module thing is gonna be fixed, it's finally been acknowledged as a bug, and you just KNOW they won't be adding more module slots to MSEs, so... what's up?

Note that right now there is no definitive DE Plan. There are a basically a set of discussion points, but no "this is the way it will be". A lot of this is still feeling out the community, tossing ideas out to see which sink or swim. A good portion of it is also a re-education campaign to the devs to tell them just where the bugs are in explicit detail. So, yes, expect there to be changes of mind etc, with more to come until we end up with something concrete appearing on TC.

Random question related to the differentiation between droids:

I just hit 0/0/0/1 in DE. Is there any difference at all between my R5 and my Mouse droid other than the fact that the R5 requires a bunch of components that don't seem to have any function and is more expensive (he doesn't seem to use his manipulator arms or his sensor package so far as I can tell).

They both have only 1 module slot. What IS the difference other than the skin?

There is no effective difference, aside from the cosmetic. Oh, yes, the R5 has more HAM than the mouse, but that's not meaningful, as far as I can tell.

/shake

little things like this should be at the top of the to-do list in my opinion.

I'd love to see a decked out combat droid (that maybe can only take armor and combat related modules to offset his combat potential) wipe the floor with a CH pet. but in all honesty, for there to be no meaningful differentiation between two droids that differ in size and cost by almost 5X is just short-sighted and silly.

If he requires a manipulator arm package, then give him something to manipulate with it.

If he requires a sensor package then give him the ability to sense something that the droid which doesn't have the sensor package can't sense. e.g., increase the range at which he can hear the commands you give him (or decrease the range for the MSE-6), or something.

they really should sit down at the drawing board, look at all the required components and make it so that they have some in-game function (however trivial that may be). otherwise its all a lot of silly nonsense.

We use the MSE droids as footballs, the R5's (When charged) make for great drink servers.