Speed is King in PVP. This doesn't just mean while your red combat lights are flashing. Intercepting or escaping are also directly effected by speed, as well as logisitcs and the ability to zerg.

Any speed 'booster' module would be immeditally a 'must have' unit for PVP, unless it was limited to use on alpha; and that's just really poor design.

My suggestion, Remove the navigation skill. This is already something that everyone has to spend thier EP on and its the first (or should be) skill new players get to 9 or 10. When a skill becomes like this, it stops being relevant and is just an EP sink; which is not good with a a 1 EP / sec fixed system.

Adjust the base speed of the bots to the equivalent of Nav 10, and remove the skill. Vet players already have this skill to 10 and new players will benefit with quicker travel times from the start.

Maybe just link or transform navigation to something else? Making it influented something, or maybe some negative effect even. Says, higher navigation allows you to polot heavy bots well but making light bots harder to control somehow, due to high-speed.

Pfft, wish you guys posted a little sooner. Just started 30 lines of assaults last night, one whole factory account cockblocked now.

Will be interesting how you balance new bots tho, more toys is always good for sandbox.

Guns nButter wrote:

Simply increasing the number of roaming groups and the number of bots in said roams would be pretty cool.

Yeah, I agree.  Having the constant threat of encountering a roaming spawn even when farming NPCs or mining on alpha greatly increases the enjoyment of the game, at least for me.  Any way to remove the monotony and repetition in the game is a major plus, and having to avoid/kill a roaming spawn every now and then will pull you out of your coma like state when mining or farming NPCs.

The only issue with increasing the roaming spawns and having more of them happen is the chance that one spawns directly on top of you and you are hopeless to defend against it.  This is where the regions/player detection would eliminate that chance.

Even if the roaming spawns didnt stay in their starting region, but they simply had to spawn inside of a region that currently has no players in it then starts running around the island would be a big improvement.  Have the roaming paths run through each region on the island and have a few spawn points in every region along that path where they could spawn when the conditions are right.