Pilot Archive
Thread: Droid commands need a overhaul.
Firstly, all droid commands take too long to use. A prime example of this would be the sheild reinforement command, it takse 3 * droid speed to reset. This command shifts energy from front to rear and vise versa. This command should have a speed equivalent to Capacitor to sheild shunt. Since they take to long to implement most pilots ignore using them.
Any of the limitation commands (engine limit, weapon limit) are rendered obsolete as their reset times take to long. By reducing droid reset command times, the use of other not commonly used commands may gain some popularity.
Some commands run indefinately. This basically is tantamount to running a buff indefinately for a one time penalty. The tactical usage of droid commands is reduced to turning everything on upon entering space and forgetting about it. Usage of droid commands when engaged in combat is limited to bascially to capacitor to shield shunt. A 5 to 10 minute timer should be implemented to allow a more frugal use of commands. This will increase tactical usage of when to use the commands. Used in conjunction with the reduced reset times, this will add a new dimension to the space combat.
A limited number of droid commands. Old link to a few droid commands that can be added to add viarity to droid commands. Link . With the addition of extra commands, the reduction in the amount of space droid commands take make by in order.
I'm in general agreement with you, on droid commands being broken, but I'd personally pursue a different route in changing them. The orignal goalseems to have beento create a power-management system similar to what was in X-Wing, but some flaws were made in their design decisions - and I personally think reactor overload was one of the biggest of these. The X-Wing power system was something that was used frequently during mid-flight to fit the current tactical situation, and the commands were all instantaneous. Obviously we can't copy this exactly or we nullify any reason to have droid sockets in ships (since the only thing these effect is time for commands), but I think we can follow this approach to make them usef much more frequently during mid-flight.
In X-Wing you had a static pool of energy to work with that was distrubuted through the various aspects of your fighter - shields, weapons, engines, and sometimes a beam weapon. If you wanted to charge one up, you'd have to lower power output to another system. This meant there was a great deal of customization within the flight engine on any given fighter.
If you wanted you could flush all shield power to engine and scream through space... knowing that nothing could hit you... but if they did you'd be space dust. Conversely, some folks liked to fly in a more 'tankish' style, beefing up the shields and guns for heavy give/take combat rounds. There wasalso, of course, the option of using settings anywhere in between to suit your style.
If you look at the SWG droid commands, you'll see they're almost exactly the same. You have commands to power up and power down different systems by different degrees. No one ever uses the latter commands though (with the possible exception of a few tier 4 commands). Why is that? Reactor overload. Being able to pump your reactor up to absurd levels means you can boost everything on your ship to quite a significant level, not having to sacrifice much at all (the condition damage is not a balancing factor for this). Of course, the insane delay on most commands just makes this even worse, and even at best the awkward implementation of droid power management commands (and the shield positioning ones, at that) means you'd pull your hair out in frustration trying to set things up.
I'll use the shields as the biggest example of this simply because the command delay is attrocious. In X-Wing if my tail was getting beat on, I had a couple of options: I could shunt generic cap power to shields (which only helped marginally), or I could shunt front shield reserves to the back - the latter was almost always much more favorable (and a bit more tactical IMO, since you'er choosing exactly where you send that power). In theory I could do this in SWG too, but in practice, it's a terrible manuever due to the insane delay of the command (and the fact that the shield shunts take up so much droid memory there's no way you're going to have the level of shunting you want reliably). In X-Wing the commands were simplified in that I could hit button A to shunt a marginal amount of shield, and button B to shunt a lot of shield. I'd have to load up two seperate commands in SWG to do this. Now factor in all the individual components and powere management, and this becomes an exercise in futility if you want to do anything other than flail away at the hotkey list.
This was a non-issue in X-Wing since a simple, elegant system was used for power management, automatically adjusting other systems at the push of a key to compensate for the increased load on another piece, with the engine pool being the communal power outlet that everthing else siphoned off of.
This meant you could simply tap a key twice to convert desired levels of engine output to shield/weapons or vice versa. Cap to shield shunt is the only X-Wing command that works like it did in the game really (and it's similarly useful).
What seems to have happened with JTL is that either an attempt was made to re-invent the wheel, or they attempted to take the wheel and chisel it into something that fit the current system most conveniently. Either way, the current system is nothing like what was used in X-Wing, in practice (largely because of reactor overload). Even with reactor overload gone, the amount of delay between commands (especially shield shunting commands, which should be near-instantaneous on recharge) would need to be reduced tenfold, if not one hundredfold to make commands function ideally for mid-flight changes.
Of course, in a dream-world we'd see a return of the E/W/S system from X-Wing in JTL (except maybeas an E/W/C/S system, adding a bit more depth to the pre-existant X-Wing one).
Message Edited by Bawarr on 09-14-2005 05:14 PM