Droid Engineer Archive

Here are some things I've seen people bring up over the last couple of weeks and my opinion about them, just as a form of input.

1. Droids - It's clear that a large and growing number of people recognize the droid engineers problems and want a fix. It's also clear that there is an almost unanimous consensus that droids permeate all facets of the Star Wars fiction, be it the movies, television shows and books, and would therefore be completely true to the brand if they permeated every level of society in Galaxies.

The first and most obvious fix is to make better combat droids. This is barely worth discussing because it is so patently obvious and so easily remedied. The less obvious second fix is just an idea, but one that I think could work, especially taken with #2 and #3 on this list.

I have seen talk of a new skill or profession called software engineering, which would allow programming of special abilities into droids. Taking from that idea, my suggestion is to add in power packs or whatever you want to call them. This would not be dependent on the software engineer idea seeing fruition, nor would it negate the possibility. Power packs would be crafted items that you can "charge" a droid with, that are like temporary programs. For example, a droid could be charged with a PA Hall Efficiency Repair power pack, giving that droid the ability to fix efficiency decay on a PA Hall (see item 2 and 3 on this list).

There are numerous other power pack possibilites, and different types of power packs could be made by different professions. Another example would be a stim power pack. Imagine that you do not have novice medic, and therefore cannot use stim packs of any kind. You could buy a stim power pack from the same crafter that makes the stim packs. Higher quality packs would charge a higher number of uses into the droid. In combat you could issue a verbal command to your droid to have him use his stim ability on you. There could be a medical module required restriction on this pack, and the highest quality heal should be only as good as a low quality stimpack A.

There are many many other classes that could benefit from the ability to make a powerpack for a droid that is specific to their profession. I am sure anyone reading this can think of a powerpack that their profession could craft and plug in to a droid.

2. PA Halls, housing, clothing. - There have, at various times, been topics on this board addressing the following housing issues: lot use vs. storage capacity, lack of return business to architects, lack of benefits to owning housing, lack of benefits to a PA Hall, the list actually goes on. I have at least one idea that I think could in some small way mitigate many of these issues.

There is also a noticeable lack of special abilities from clothing, although theoretically this is a feature of clothing produced by master tailors and enhanced by bioengineers. The first step in this process would be, of course, to fix the functionality already designed for this purpose.

The idea I have that addresses both of these issues is a sort of value-added item. There could be special abilities added to housing just like there are special abilities added clothing. Let me explain. Your PA Hall could have the special added feature of a storage droid. This droid would be completely stationary, in a fixed predetermined position in the hall. It would not look like any other droid. Rather than being included at the time of crafting, the Hall could come with sockets, a minimum possible number of sockets and a maximum possible number of sockets. The skill of the crafter and quality of materials would determine the number of sockets. After the building has been built, you could add one special ability per socket. Lets use the storage droid example. This droid would come to you in the form of an item in your inventory. It would be crafted by droid engineers. Once you add the droid socket to your PA, the storage droid appears in the designated location. You could store an additional 50-150 items inside this droid, depending on the skill of the DE that crafted it. There would be a different droid storage component for other housing, with a minimum of 15 items and maximum of 100. That would apply to all other housing sizes. Items stored in the droids would, obviously, not count toward the total number of items.

Other potential powerups would be, for instance, a droid leash. This might be too complicated to program but I have no way of knowing that. A droid leash would be crafted by a Droid Engineer. It would be added to the building on a socket, and when accessed, have the same graphic appearance of a datapad, but one with only enough capacity for 4 items. On this datapad you can place 1 to 4 droids depending on the quality of the item as determined by the normal means, ie skill of the DE, quality of materials. Droids stored on this pad can be called by any building administrator. Leashed droids can have power packs added to them just like any droid. These droids can be set on a permanent roam from within the leash control panel, to perform repetively the task for which they have the power pack. The best use would be as a repair droid to perform the repair of efficiency as outlined in #3 below. Other potential power pack tasks would be maintenance and upkeep on harvesters, item delivery to specified customers for merchants using a merchant power pack, and for factioned PAs, a PA settlement "civil patrol".

I mention clothing in here for two reasons. The socket concept is based off of tailoring, and if tailoring were fixed so that sockets worked, and then sockets were added to housing, then, in conjunction with item #1 above, and #3 below, I think we'd have a fix for several broken professions in one blow.

3. Item Decay on all items - Ok, making every single thing that can be held or owned that was made by another player decay would have the advantage of repeat business. However, the con that people keep overlooking is that this could quite realistically and easily put people in a situation where they are repairing or replacing several times an hour infinitely. Hardly a good solution. I am all for providing business flow for professions that aren't getting it, such as tailors and architects. The question is how to do that without creating such an overwhelming time absorption. It would be ridiculous to have 200+ things decaying at all times. A

My solution is to have an extra efficiency factor on every crafted item that does not currently have a decay. This efficiency factor would essentially reproduce the effect of a lower quality of item, such as the difference between something made by a master and something made by a novice. As the efficiency drops, just like decay, the only way to repair it's efficiency is through a power pack program charged into a droid. There will be a bottom efficiency rating that, when reached, severely impacts how well your item works without destroying it. This is dependent on items #1 and #2 above obviously. Power packs will be manufactured by the profession that creates the object being repaired. So clothing efficiency power packs would come from tailors, housing efficiency power packs from architects, etc.

Effiency would affect different things depending on what the item is. For housing, efficieny directly affects maintenance rate. The higher the efficiency, the lower the maintenance rate, and vice versa. For clothing, it would directly affect the beneficial effect of any powerups added to that clothing. Thus it would be in each players best interest to keep efficiency at a maximum, without driving us crazy with constant decay. The key would be that a it is possible to use the repair droid from item #2 above to handle these efficiency repairs. Your only task then would be to keep the droid charged with the appropriate power pack created by the appropriate artisan professional.

Anyway, this came out way more complicated than it seemed in my head, but it's just an idea.