Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: How to solve the Droid Invasion problem simply and fix a couple of other things as well.
The biggest stumbling block to this whole argument appears to be the Combat Droids, specifically the high level Combat Droids.
Well if you begin by asking yourself in SWG context who should have access to these Droids I believe the problem goes away. High level Combat Droids should be limited to Military or official use, except of course by those folks who are by nature less then law abiding, (Bounty Hunters and Smugglers). So you approach this in a couple of ways.
First you make it so any member of a city militia or faction member with enough rank can summon any level combat droid, but only within the limits of their city or faction base. This would solve two problems first you could bring back /citywarn. It would remove the pvp element and the Droids could also be set up so that it would be difficult to grief with them, (they could give warnings so that innocent passerbys would have plenty of time to get away etc….) And the Base defenders Droids would make it far easier to defend hard earned faction bases.
Second you make the DH class a base class instead of an advanced one. The catch is that it basically gets you nothing until you advance up into the BH or smuggler skill Trees, the big problem here is that BHs are already pretty competent in combat, but they are so skill point intensive I think it is possible to rearrange the class so that in order to have the Droids they would have to give up some other combat ability.
To me this solves the advanced combat Droid problem with very little muss or fuss.
The next problem is the lower level combat droids. I believe you can fix this problem very simply as well. You allow anyone access to a Droid up to CL 20. The catch is that you can only command a Droid to attack or defend when in a group and the number of Droids with combat modules in any group will be limited, so basically combat Droids will be limited to soloing, UNLESS you have a Squad leader in your group. The presence of a Squad leader will allow more droids in a group, dependant on the level of the Squad leader this will make the Squad leader a much more desirable class.