Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: non-Combat DE-only droids
Here is a list of ideas for potential DE-only droids that have nothing to do with combat. I present this list (garnered from many sources) to demonstrate that we have many alternatives to a superior DE-only combat droid.
1) Harvester droid. This droid can harvest any resource, extraction rate to be determined by game balance. It would probably only be usable while logged on, so it's not really getting around the 10 plot limit, but it would be useful for those times when a Droid Engineer is doing something else (making a large order or running missions) and could use just a little bit more harvesting ability. Think of it as an automatic sampler without having to do the sampling yourself.
2) Harvester tender droid. A DE would give this droid the waypoint to a harvester and it would run out to the harvester, empty the hopper, and return to the DE. The ability to give it multiple waypoints would make it even more useful.
3) Maintenance droid. Give this droid the waypoint to an installation (house, factory... or harvester) as well as some money and/or power and the droid will run to that waypoint and deposit the maintenance and power for you. Give it multiple waypoints and it will divide the maintence and power by the number of waypoints and deposit 1 share at each waypoint.
4) Vendor droid. This goes beyond just the ability to create a vendor that looks like a droid - this droid would be a portable vendor. The ability to park a vendor just outside of a starport would be huge. It would be so useful, in fact, that the contents of the vendor would probably have to be limited to Droids and Droid parts to prevent DEs from selling everyone's wares on commission.
5) Shop tender droid. This droid would simply stand wherever you park him (presumably in your shop) and send you a /tell any time someone came within speaking distance. The DE would then be able to send a /tell back to the droid, and the droid would repeat it out loud. The point of the droid is to alert you whenever someone enters your shop and to facilitate communication so that you can answer questions and/or "sell" your products without having to actually be present.
6) Equipment Factory droid. Have you ever been travelling in some far away foreign city and had someone ask you to make them a custom R3 droid on the spot? It sucks to have to say "sorry, I can't make you one of those right now, it requires factory-made parts." Well this droid is the answer. I would recommend limiting runs on this droid to no more than 6 items (the current maximum identical parts necessary to make any droid), and I would make it expensive to use, but the ability to custom craft ANY droid on the spot would be quite useful.
7) Delivery droid. Give it a waypoint and the name of a character and it will run to that waypoint and wait. Only the character named (plus the owner, of course) would be allowed to access the storage bin, and doing so would invoke a secure trade window. Hey look, the perfect use for an MSE-6! The name of the droid could even automatically change to "Delivery for XXX" when in use so that it would be easier to locate. After delivery the droid would return to the point it started from (or it could be stored to retrieve it).
8) Customization droid. Personally, I'm already getting tired of painting people's droids all the time and needing to carry around several Customization Tools in order to do so. So why not have a droid that serves as a permanent Droid Customization Tool?
Additional suggestions and comments welcome, but please do not suggest combat droids. The point of this thread is to provide ALTERNATIVES to a combat droid.
There are lots of useful sounding droids there, but, they sound like they would be just as useful for most of the other pure crafting classes as well. Why woulld you want to eliminate a potentially great market by limiting these to DE only?
I am not saying that I am against a DE only droid, but I think it should do something that only a DE would need done.
Graeme wrote:
There are lots of useful sounding droids there, but, they sound like they would be just as useful for most of the other pure crafting classes as well. Why woulld you want to eliminate a potentially great market by limiting these to DE only?
I am not saying that I am against a DE only droid, but I think it should do something that only a DE would need done.
You are correct... I really couldn't think of anything that ONLY a Droid Engineer would need. (This is true of combat droids as well.) Anything that would be useful to a Droid Engineer is probably also going to be useful to some other profession, in some cases even more useful.
I'd love to hear some ideas that would only be useful to a Droid Engineer... I just don't have any of my own.
Here is an idea....
Omni droid - Instead of hard wiring modules into a droid during its creation, the Omni droid has5 module spaces that gives a DE the ability to hot-swap the modules when ever he/she needs to. If combat modules were to be introduced, the Omni droid could even become the answer to the DE only combat droid.
The Omni droid might sound like a great droid for the open market, but consider this....If it was to be introduced to the general public, then no one would truely ever need to own another droid. All they would ever need were different modules that could be swapped out.
Kollos,
Sorry, I don't have any real good ideas for you. It is just that one of my characters is a doctor, and as I read your suggestions for DE on non combat droids, just about every one of them would give the DE an ability that Doctors are crying for like mad.
Drashk - the OmniDroid idea is wonderful, and if the Devs can figure out how to do hot-swappable modules I hope that they give us an OmniDroid as our "special" droid.
Graeme - in a perfect world (one in which Drashk's OmniDroid existed, for example) I would prefer for all of the above suggestions to be saleable. Some of those would have a huge market, and would be just the kinds of things we need to stimulate interest in droids. Your comment about Doctors made me remember another idea:
Medical Droid: this droid can carry stimpacks and woundpacks in its cargo compartment, and when programmed to "heal" can be pointed at a friendly target which it will then heal using the stored stimpacks. Stimpack/woundpack usage would be limited to its owner's capability, so only a Doctor capable of using a Woundpack E would be able to give one to a Medical Droid and have that droid use it on a patient. This droid would essentially double a healer's efficiency by allowing him or her to work on two patients at once.
The hot-swap idea was DE-only. Although.....it would be cool, since we built all the modules into the darn things, if we could use the hot-swap skill to upgrade droids by taking out old modules and putting in new modules for customers.
So you bought a combat droid with only 10% armor?I can upgrade your armor to 40% for xxxx creds.
Or you changed professions? I can take that chem station out and put an architect station in it for you.
I'd like the old modules to still be usable, and preferably not degraded becausethey were removed.
Since droids are supposed to aid players and enhance their every day tasks, I think the idea of having a droid, such as the surgical droid using the medics rating to help dispense meds an excellent idea that could be applied to other professions as well.
What other existing professions could this apply to (besides combat 
)?
Crafters already have crafting stations in droids, repair modules would be DE specific, CH and BE could sure use additional data space if they could store pets using them, BE and Architects could use additional item storage for all their compnenets.
I think we need to look at the skills of other professions and find ways that droids could be more helpful to them.
I think additional or enhanced modules are needed to make droids more useful for specific professions.
Say, if an item module was placed in a droid with a structure station (and only one station) we could increase the item capacity or add more item modules - true customization (I wish they hadn't used that term to refer to painting a droid, way too general).
It would be great if we could build droids that had specific modules adding certain benefits, and aimed at particular professions.
How about a droid that we specifically designed for architects because it had a structure station, some data space for schematics, tons of item space for resources and finished products that you could organize (folders), and slots for extra experimentation? Can't think of anything else here.
Harvester/maint droids, and some of the other ideas would be very useful, but not marketable to any specific profession.
I like the ideas here, but something I have been struggling with pertains to what one said earlier. About how there is really nothing that is just needed by a droid engineer, so anything that is usefull to a DE is useful toanyone else or in some cases more useful. This is a big prob to me because the Developers are really concerned with keeping balance in all aspects of the game. Well CH have special abilities that allow them to tame very advanced creatures. A bounty hunter or Command, or any Combat profession gives new weapons, abilities that allows them to somewhat stay up to par with the others. A DE is limited to what mse droids or crappy probot doids. An architect can create some cool structures what might not put them one up in combat but they do have an edge in the market - free resources, free structures, etc... A weapon and armorsmith similarly have there own weapons/armor and a good market to sell their stuff. DE has really what purpose? what do the droids do just for them? It came to me that to give the DE sort of an edge in the droid profession the developers could do a few things to help us out. Like making droids that only we can use, but you have to think in real Star Wars what droid is there that someone else can't use? Then it came to me why not give the DE special abilities with all the droids. I mean since they are the creators they can theoretically do thinks to boost power, hack the system to do extra things, etc... So it makes since that droid might proform better for us, or we have and extra module space on all droids, or added abilities that soley we can use that would give us that edge that teh droids can still serve a very good purpose like the ideas presented already, but for use they preform that and a little more. I think something of this sort would help our profession become a little more balanced, and could allow everyone to use droids without rendering us worthless once the droids are sold to others. Maybe non DE could have an equivalent of a level 15 droid in all aspects crafting, combat, vending, whatever....and we can have like a level 30 or whatever. I don't know how it would be divied up, but just an idea to sort of seperate us from the herd without eliminated droids to others. Like creatures now a non-CH can handle a level 15 which is a good help when attacking a small crowd, but not very special to give a huge advantage. The CH can pretty much take on whatever when at master status, well I think you can apply this across the board not just combat to where droid preform functions in whatever they are made to do, but for DE they do that and more.
Ok, I'll stop rambling now.
4) Vendor droid. This goes beyond just the ability to create a vendor that looks like a droid - this droid would be a portable vendor. The ability to park a vendor just outside of a starport would be huge. It would be so useful, in fact, that the contents of the vendor would probably have to be limited to Droids and Droid parts to prevent DEs from selling everyone's wares on commission.
I dislike the idea of every starport being cluttered full of droids hawking wares. Its bad enough already with the ForSale pets on patrol so thick you can barely move.
~Das-Ree
4) Vendor droid. This goes beyond just the ability to create a vendor that looks like a droid - this droid would be a portable vendor. The ability to park a vendor just outside of a starport would be huge. It would be so useful, in fact, that the contents of the vendor would probably have to be limited to Droids and Droid parts to prevent DEs from selling everyone's wares on commission.
5) Shop tender droid. This droid would simply stand wherever you park him (presumably in your shop) and send you a /tell any time someone came within speaking distance. The DE would then be able to send a /tell back to the droid, and the droid would repeat it out loud. The point of the droid is to alert you whenever someone enters your shop and to facilitate communication so that you can answer questions and/or "sell" your products without having to actually be present.
these both would be merchant skills i am sure 