Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: New DE with questions on experimentation
As noted by my signature, I'm only a Novice Droid Engineer so I don't have much personal experience in the field but this is what I've seen:
There are quite a few schematics that start off with 0% experimentation, but never grow. I've tried putting the two points I have (one at a time or two at once) and they wouldn't move.
Making MSE droids, there are three stats that can be experimented on. No matter what I put the points into, or what the results are none of the droids stats seem to change. Is there some hidden stat taht I am effecting that can't be seen or is it pointless to experiment them (Yes I'm aware MSE are basically pointless except XP grinding)? Does this trend hold true with other droids (I have read posts saying that experimenting effectiveness works for probots)?
I am going to assume that experimenting modules has some purpose, feel free to enlighten me on if this is true or not. Now if I take a high quality module (110 medical module or well made crafting module) and put it in a droid that I just used junk components on and didn't even bother to experiment, will this effect the use of the module? Since droids don't have any inherent functions (save for the power droid) its all based on the modules, is it worth experimenting the droids themselves regardless, will a well experimented R2 work better than a non-experimented R2 with identical modules installed?
This may all be obvios to me once I grind through a few boxes and can make better things than a MSE droid, but I'm curios now and it looks like it will be quite a while until I can get that new Master tag. Thanks in advance for your help, and I hope you won't mind me barging into your profession (I'm not a holocron DE, I'm here because droids are fun).
There is currently discussion on experimentation in these threads:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=45715
and
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=45668
The only stat that you ever have to worry about, while experimenting, is Effectiveness. None of the other experiementation works at this time. The only real components that there is a noticable difference on, when experimenting, are the level based modules in Droid Production, however this experimentation only becomes evident when you use module stacking. This is how the stacking works
Module Level Module Rating Medical Rating Items Stored Data Stored
1 1 - 3 55 1 20
2 3 - 5 65 2 40
3 5 - 7 75 4 70
4 7 - 9 85 6 110
5 9 - 11 100 8 125
6 11 - 13 110 10 150
If you stack 2 Level 1 modules with a rating of 2 or higer, you will gain the benefit of a Level 2 module. And so on an so forth.
As to Experimenting on the product, you really won't see any improvements in Droid stats, with the exception of the Probot and the Binary Load Lifter, but even this is incorrect to an extent. Any increases in Droid HAM is only a datapad listing and not an actual increase, as verified by a mouse over on the HAM bar. The base HAM for an Advanced Probot is 820. If you get a 100% Effectiveness rating, with 1000 OQ Chemical and Master experimentation, you wind up with a Droid that lists 828 HAM in the datapad, but still only has 820 HAM. The Probot damage is the only item that is truely affected by experimentation during the final build of a droid, since you can increase the damage ever so slightly with a 100% Effectiveness rating.
No matter what result that you get on the final build of a droid, the module will still work without a failure, as they are listed. I've even tried to build droids with a crit fail, during experimentation, and have yet to find a droid that the modules did not work on.
Many will tell you that experimentation on droid components, such as the Brain or Sensor, will reduce the chance of a crit fail, with higher Mechanism Quality ratings. I disagree with this and am in the process of setting up a test situation that I hope will help to back up the conclusion. There are also some that believe that the Mechanism Quality rating on a crafting station also has an affect on the invisible Function Rating of the droid station. This I disagree with as well, sinceI believe that the FR of private stations wasn't implimented until long after the droid crafting stations were created.
Other than that, your best bet is to gain your own conclusions on the matter, after a few boxes, like you said. I hope this helps out a bit and welcome aboard.
MachineZed wrote:
But the jist of those threads say that altough we can experiment on all of our products, there is little difference betweena 100% effective module and a 0% module. As a rule I don't experiment at all. I also don't check the rescource quality on the metals that I use in my droids, and my droids seem to work fine. This may change in the upcomming months but right now I wouldn't even bother experimenting. It will just fail most of the time
Actually, that is not the case.
Higher quality materials and components lead to a less chance of a critical fail on assembly.
I always use the best materials I can get my hands on, and experiment fully.
There are a number of reasons for this:
- It reduces the chance of a critical failure.
- If the devs ever turn on attributes based upon quality of resources retroactively, as they did in the case of arch made harvestors, I am covered.
- There is no proof about whether or not an experimented module works better or not. Even if it is just 5% better, though, it is worth the few seconds it takes to experiment stuff.
Interesting, although it does give me a positive outlook on things! All the resources used just for experience won't be wasted, I'll have a good stock of things to use later on. Thanks for all the info.