Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Droid Focus (Interplanetary Survey): Information, discussion and bug-reporting (04/16/04)
LanFisher wrote:No one wants to buy these from me. Why? Because they have to buy a frigging survey tool for each droid use. What a pain in the arse to have to go buy a survey tool every time you want to do an interplanetary survey. The alternative is buying a crate of survey tools to go with the droid (if you plan on doing the same type of survey all the time), or clogging up your inventory with a bunch of different survey tools. It's a survey droid, and it should be built right in! If all it takes is just giving your droid the survey tool and saying, "Here, go use this tool to survey," then why couldn't you just make bounty hunter droids and do the same thing? Whoever came up with this idea is a dumbass. A great big Shatner-loving dumbass. It would be far easier (and cheaper) just to buy a shuttle ticket to the other planet and look yourself.MY SUGGESTION: Fix this in the next mini-publish! Survey droids should automatically include a cluster of all the various survey tools built in.
If you're customers are so lazy that they can't make a survey tool then they need some seriuos help and they aren't going to go hop a shuttle to find out what the current resources are.
I started selling these for 5k a stack 25k for crate of 5 but they were selling out too fast, so I bumped them up to 15k a stack and 70k for a crate of 5 and they still sell really well. I wont bump them up any higher than that. I also put crates of survey tools on my vendors but they havent been selling like I thought they would, I think that when people first buy the survey droids they dont realize they need tools as well, they will figure it out soon enough.
Fahd Krath Master Bounty Hunter/Master Jedi StalkerGoing to put on my DE daydreaming hat for this, but if these things at least had the functionality of seekers they would at least give stats.
Anyway, here is my vision of IPS droids where crafters would buy, and actually seek out, these things.
1) Send out an IPS droid, which will do exactly what it does now, return a list of a resouce type depending on the tool equipped. It will return a list of the resource names on a given planet. Rather than an e-mail; however, the list would be sent to your datapad. Or it would send you an attachment that could be saved to your datapad.
2) You could look at the list and decide that you would like more information on a certain resouce shown as available. You select another IPS droid and direct it to 'read' the list from your datapad. You select the resource that you want the droid to go after, arm it will a survey tool and off it goes.
3) Here's where it would be fun; the droid goes out and gets a sample of the selected resources (size depending on the qual. of the droid) - and not only that, you get a wp for a concentration on the planet that is directly proportional to the droid quality. Lets say its a 95% droid, and the planet max % for the resource that you sent it after is 88% - you get a wp for a concentration of 95% of 88 or 84%. Now its just a spot and could lead to a higher conc, or that could be the highest in the area of the wp - that part would be random.
The process would be expensive, but worth it - if there's something that your after in particular. The conc % wp would be the most valuable piece of info. It would be fun to do, and totally within the idea of the Star Wars Universe. But let me know wake up from my dream and go back to being a DE.
usmc222 wrote:
The survey droids can be made in factories and they come 5 to a crate.
on a side note, i was hoping that the survey droids would be regular modules like the medical or structure maint. and all you had to do was give it a tool and tell it what resource to find. It would then go throughout the galaxy looking for the highest concentration of each type... lets say carbonite ore. It would then send you waypoints and stats of all the different types of carb ore in the galaxy. Of course the ability for this droid to do all that would require a Master DE. Lets say a lvl 1 survey droid could only search on the planet you are on and can only find the general type and not specific types with stats. kind of like the survey droids do now.
but i guess that would be too much to ask.
YAY Brilyn!!! FIGHT THE MALCONTENTS....BRING ORDER TO THE GALAXY! 
I know this has already been mentioned, but I would like to add that it is also not faster unless you are just checking one or two planets. Since you can send these droids out back to back without waiting for one to return before launching your next one, you can get a list of resources of every planet in 30 minutes or less.
I have been selling these droids pretty well, but there has been a drop-off of late.I think they are useful and that people will buy them as they currently are, but I'm not totally against making them somewhat more useful. I think you should either be able to get the stats of single resource of your choice OR maybe a general high-medium-low rating for one statistic on every resource. So if I choose conductivity, it returns a list of all the resources with a high, medium, or low rating in conductivity, or "NA" if there is not conductivity, like with ore.