Droid Engineer Archive

These are all ideas that have hashed and rehashed dozens of times before. That's not to say they aren't good ideas. I happen to love the idea of droid automated harvester service. I doubt this will ever happen though. The reason being, and this has been stated many times before by the devs, is that harvesters (like anything else) do not actually exist until you go to them and force them to load. At that point, the harvester runs a quick "catch-up" to appropraitely adjust power, maintenance and hopper levels. This is the same reason why we can't remotely access our harvesters from data terminals or the like. Droids and pets for that matter are not themselves PC and so are treated similarly. Once a droid leaves sight of another PC, it too doesn't exist. It would take what I would assume to be a major code rewrite to fix that. There would also be additional server load issues to deal with as well.

Now don't ask me why my factory can still manage to send me a dozen emails when it's finished manufacturing or runs out of resources or when it's just lonely. I haven't been able to figure that one out myself.

The last few factory runs I've done haven't sent me emails... it used to all the time too..

Anyway back on topic, the expendable droids wouldn't have to be in the world either:

Once you double clicked the droid to activate it it would go through your lots and list the harvestors and what they are mining. You would select which, and put how much you wanted to do. The server could play it's "catch-up" with that harvestor internally (not even load the harvestor), add the maint type. and then run the "probablity to lose the droid" thing I mentioned. wait a certain amount of time and then report to you whether the droid successfully returned or not. All this could be done without loading the harvestor.

Of course I forgot to mention these droid would be affordable (1k-5k), and take about as many resources as a seeker.

(Do you really think a BH's mark is "loaded" in the world whenthe seeker goes looking for it? or a probe droid? I followed the thread you refered too, Ralph even stated that he didn't know how factories did that, and has also stated that he knows little of the inner workings of the game. I'm guessing he's shooting in the dark when it comes to how harvestors and factories work.)

We need more expendable droids. They shouldn't take a lot of resources to make, and they can perform useful functions a set number of times.

A few examples of what expendable droids could do:

• Power harvestors. Could be reusable, like seekers and probes at higher levels of BH investigation. Theyalways get to the harvestor, but after getting the harvestor have expended so much power that they can't avoid as many enemies on the way back. Perhaps a 25% loss rate. Again, they always make it to the harvestor, but you may lose it after that.


• Pay harvestor maint. costs. same idea as above basically.


• Bombdroids. Basically 1 shot self destruct droids, like a grenade, can be destroyed before reaching the target if the target realizes it is coming (PvP applications)


• Harvestor retrieval. Basic Idea is that they can get to the harvestor, get a set amount (based primarily on storage capacity and DE experimentation), and get back to you. The number of uses of this droid could be set, could be chance.

I'm sure you can see where I came from on this one. The first two could be great, the last should be what the BLL does, but not be expendable.

If you don't like expendable droids, I also thought of this idea:

Droidsperforming these functions(excluding bomb droids) could have a % to get "disabled" on route (maybe based on distance to the WP and quality of droid/parts). If this occurs the droid is "disabled" at that location and sends a distress signal to you. Giving you the waypoint that it is at. You have to go to that position to reclaim the droid.

Any other ideas for usefulness/repeat buying?

-Pima U'ko