Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: How Droids should be used in SWG
Sorry, I haven't completely followed the DH discussion and I may have also posted this before AND I am SURE you DEs have posted this stuff before too but . . .
I personally don't agree with having combat droids during this time in SWG. My understanding is that combat droids are illegal in this time period. This seems to be a consistant result with what happens in the "Prequels".
That being said THERE ARE ways to make droids useful in the game. I was talking to a RL friend of mine who is a droid engineer the other day about what droids could do. I came up with a couple of suggestions a that follow:
Binary Load Lifters - Should be able to go to harvesters and retreive resources for you. Not do any maint on the harvesters but simply retreive the resources.
Mouse Droids - Should be able to go check status of harvesters
R2-3-4 Units - Should be able to do limited maint on harvesters. For example, deposit power or money.
Probots - Should, well, probe. Go get some form of surveying for you. There is a large context that this could fit in from getting all information on all resources on a Planet and all percentages to getting the highest percentage of a single resources withing a limited range. The devs could balance accordingly.
These are just SOME of the possibilities to make droids VERY useful and fit in the continuity. I imagine that the reasons that the devs are not implementing ideas like this is that they require NEW systems. It is much easier from a coding point of view to fit droids into an existing system (pet combat) to make them useful. It takes less time to develop, debug and deploy.
HOWEVER, I personally think that ideas like those that I suggested above would be much better. Don't get me wrong. I'm not adimately against combat droids. In fact, combat droids are the ONLY solution to make droids useful in the short term. All other solutions could take months to develop. DEs simply don't have that much time.
I guess what I would like to see is uses like those described above EVENTUALLY make it into the system (and I mean eventually like vehicles and Player cities, not eventually like player missions).
Are you a DE who frequents the forums?
I see you have tons of post and registered a long time ago... but I think all your ideas have been stated a LOT and the official responce from the Devs (through inaction) is "no".
JellybeanWanderhome wrote:
Are you a DE who frequents the forums?
I see you have tons of post and registered a long time ago... but I think all your ideas have been stated a LOT and the official responce from the Devs (through inaction) is "no".
Lately to get info for my friend, yes (as in the last couple of months).
And I agree with both that they have been stated a lot and the implied response from the devs.
I agree a lot with the original post, I recently wrote a similar post that has most of these ideas and a whole lot more located here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=51910
Would love to see your thoughts on that.
As far as combat droids go, you are correct in that they are restricted in their use, however, The empire does still use some combat droids in this era, and Balmorran arms continues to produce huge mecha sized combat droids, and there are some mechanics who could arguably go to a planet like geonosis and cobble together combat droids. Illegal or not. Perhaps as a balancing issue, you should accumulate some negative faction points from a law enforcement on that planet or the empire every time you pull out your combat modeldroid.
Niklut wrote:
Actually there were combat droids at this time period. They just wern't mass produced into armies like they were during and before the clone wars. Wait, I take that back the Empire did start mass producing combat droids at this exact time in the timeline of SW, they were the Dark trooopers. Dark troopers were droids. Phase three of the Dark trooper project would have allowed given the possiblity for the dark troopers to act as independant droids or as battle armor for a human, but Kyle Katarn destroyed the Dark trooper project at the very begining of phase three but that hasn't happened yet. You see droid armies became illiegalin the REPUBLIC not combat droids,and nowthe Republic no longer exists, the Empire is in control now so what was illiegal in the Republic doesn't matter anyway.There were also severalfamous and successfulDroid Bounty hunters around at this time.
That's true. I was using the WEG RPG EU and forgot about the Dark Forces EU.
Note that I'm not saying that their shouldn't be combat droids at all. In fact I agree that it's the only way to make DEs a desirable profession in the short term.
Nailliar wrote:
Zabraks don't exist either neither do Wookies frequent Tatooine, and creature handlers only exist near cages or stadiums and frequently get eaten by their own pets, so you're point was?
That with the exception of a short scene in ESB, droids in the classic trilogy did not do combat. Why can't we get droids that do non-combat tasks in SWG?
I'm not saying that DEs should NOT have combat droids and I defer to the DEs on how they want that implemented as far as DH, certs, part of DE or whatever.