Droid Engineer Archive

This morning, I logged in early, as I usually do, to try and replace last night's sales. So I had a few surgicals and a couple of protocols to make, no big deal, something I do all the time.

However, since experimentation has changed, I paid a little attention to it:

I noticed that on the protocol droid, a base model with a personality chip but no functional modules, I can experiment only on 'Quality'. There are also 'Effectiveness' and 'Durability' bars, but those are locked at 0%, though the system lets me waste experiment points on it.

However, on the surgicals, I can experiment both on Effectiveness AND Quality. I recall that probots also allow for this, and experimenting on effectiveness adds to the listed HAM.

So I'm wondering if the intent behind 'effectiveness' is to grant a boost (or a penalty?) to the function of the modules? I had one surgical crit fail on the experiment and wind up with 0% effectiveness. I destroyed the droid rather than chance a non-functional crafting station or something.

And what on earth does 'quality' do? Or rather, what is it supposed to do?

I've noticed that some of my droids seem to have a lot better battery life than others. I've only had to recharge my Advanced R3 once, and I know I've used it longer than the charge on my Probot lasts. This may be the result of experimental attributes, or it may be a false perception. I don't really know which.

I've given a little thought to coming up with a good experiment to see if Quality affects battery life, but I haven't come up with one that isn't going to cost me a huge amount of time and resources on throwaway droids.

Truth be told, I've run a few experiments on this one and haven't really been able to notice a difference in function to experimentaion. Probots, in general, tend to last about 30 minutes per charge. I've tested out a few differently built Probots and no matter what I have done, they always seem to last 30 minutes.

As to a droid losing its functions if a failure is achieved on the final build; I have not noticed this to be the case. I have purposefully built a few droids as test models using really horrid Malleablity so that I could fail on the final build. Each time the installed modules were working just fine. The only thing that has been noted is that Advanced Probots that have theirEffectivenessexperimented on and a failure was recieved, making the HAM 819 in the crafting window, have resulted in lower than 820 HAM when a mouse over is performed.

*sigh*

I guess it was too much to hope that the 'effectiveness' rating might say, increase the radius around the droid in which it's medical module functioned... Or better yet that the medical module could receive a boost to it's 110% base value depending on the effectiveness.

Oh well.