Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: No Combat Focus Other feasible droid fixes
Glad as we are to be getting attention, I was under the impression that we'd been stating all along that the broken probe droid was only one of many issues. Flooding us with new combat droids and making us 'more combat focused' is not the proper solution to the droid situation.
The profession, such as it is, is imperfect for a few reasons, but the biggest issue is 'Nothing that can be done with droids CAN'T be done elsewhere, better.' For combat, you can get stronger creature pets. Crafting modules, you can get one at your house. Same with hospitals, same with the handful of other abilities of droids. The only extra benefit, not counting the fact that Star Wars fans like having droids around, is that they're portable. That effect is hampered severly by the limitations on where the droid can be brought forth.
In the Star Wars universe, droids can do a great many things, but their purpose in all cases is to assist their creators and owners. They never do the job as well as a living being could, but they can often handle it. R2 couldn't fly that X-Wing in a heated dogfight, but he can take the controls if Luke needs a nap. Leia could find the time to learn all sorts of languages, but 3PO makes that unnecessary. Dash Rendar could have taken care of the repairs for the Outrider, but he may have to liase with someone and not have time. His LE could handle it.
After a lot of thinking, I believe that's the whole problem here. The devs are looking at droids to assist with a player's profession, as opposed to the player's everyday life. Of course the combat players need combat droids, and of course merchants need vendors, and of course the crafters need crafting stations. But that's about as far as it goes. As it happens, I have the Essential Guide to Droids here, and I've found a number of them that can expand that field considerably, letting DEs create droids that offer real and useful assistance to players, without that assistance being limited to professional boundaries. Some of them do assist specific professions, but it stretches the range of which professions have this assistance.
3D-4X Administrative Droid. This could be exceptionally useful to merchants. The droids have built in communications relays, so a player could use one to check on his vendor stock around the galaxy. Perhaps he could move goods from one vendor to another (at the same location) remotely. Perhaps this could also allow remote administration of a factory.
11-17 Miner Droid. Why shouldn't there be a droid that can assist with the oh-so tedious job of surveying? It has broadband antennae, so my idea is that one could set it to look for the highest concentration of a material and start extracting (at a very, very slow rate, BER 1 or 2). That saves the player the time of running all over looking for a high concentration, and lets them get on with their lives. The same could be done with the Agricultural droids.
Police/Security droids. There are lots of them we know of, and are often used to police cities. Player cities could use extra security without having to choose sides in the GCW and place a base. Wandering security droids that could attack anything that's actively attacking a citizen (or wandering creatures that get too close).
Slicer droids/Slicing modules. R2, and many other astromechs, could slice through a computer like a hot knife through a small child. Having a slicing droid handy could eliminate the constant need for molecular clamps or FANs, which incidentally would free up a great many individual items from the databases. A bonus to the output of the slice would also be useful.
Who else can come up with something?
Cool idea. It would be awesome if you could add droidekas and other combat droids to cities with the label of "Stronghold" that would help protect it from unwanted visitors or members of another faction. Perhaps a new building called the Barracks could be created where you could add new droids to the defense.
TyeDyeBoy wrote:
Police/Security droids. There are lots of them we know of, and are often used to police cities. Player cities could use extra security without having to choose sides in the GCW and place a base. Wandering security droids that could attack anything that's actively attacking a citizen (or wandering creatures that get too close).
I think that providing modules that allow the droid to perform a specalist funtion at a lower level than the basic level for that profession (Such as artisan survaying or ranger tracking) so that if you have someone at the novice level, they'll do better, but if you don't the droid will do the job.
Also, a wish of mine, bring back droid personalities ( and by this I mean R series and similar droids making comments not just a different set of prompts on conversation menus). It'll add to immersion and will make droids more interesting to other non DE players
Before whenever you gave the droid a command (like follow or attack, it really was that simple) it would say something related to the command. I reached DE too late to see it but I've heard of people who have extremely old probots simply because they say amusing things when they're told to attack.
It'd be fun to have that sort of thing back in the game again. personally I think that they could just do away with the conversation interface for programming droids, and then let the personalities come out as the droid is used
interesting. it would be nice if the personality chips did something. I don't care if probots and R-series droidshave them or not, but it'd be nice if the droids that do have the chips would talk every once and a while.
and yes, the definitely need get rid of the conversational training interface. I mean it serves no purpose whatsoever. It just makes it so it takes longer to train the droid. I don't mind advanced features having negatives if they also have benefits which out weight those negatives, but the conversational traininginterface has no benefits whatsoever. it is just one big negative.
Arcid wrote:
I think that providing modules that allow the droid to perform a specalist funtion at a lower level than the basic level for that profession (Such as artisan survaying or ranger tracking) so that if you have someone at the novice level, they'll do better, but if you don't the droid will do the job.
That's a good idea right there, add skills to, say, survey 4 that lets them use a droid remotely. Sort of like a BH using a seeker droid, except this one comes back with some sample minerals and a waypoint to the highest concentration.
Having just hit Blueprints 3 and building my first LE, I have to say that the personality chip strikes me as unimportant. I almost never converse with him past teaching him the commands I prefer, and only got a chuckle the first time he threatened something that aggro'd me. After that it was annoying. Still, I couldn't imagine a protocol droid that wasn't talking.
I've gotta say, these are all great ideas, and I hope that there is still time for the Dev's to read this and implement them into plans 