Topic: Drones

Any chance of us getting deployable combat drones eventually? Releasing a swarm of tiny spider mechs to attack stuff would definitely be awesome. I'm sure it'd be a potential nightmare to get them to behave properly on the terrain, but it'd be a nice feature should it make its way in the game.

Re: Drones

and would laag the hell out of us all i guess *g*

Re: Drones

Would be an awesome idea to have spider bots at some point but I would wait until the game is optimized to perform a lot better than it currently is.

Basically, great idea. But currently bigger fish to fry.

Re: Drones

+1

I love the idea of drones.. combat, mining..etc..  Do it when you guys can do it right.. but please do it..

Re: Drones

no

Re: Drones

is there any other Eve feature that you want in here?

Re: Drones

can you implement some kill streaks ?

Re: Drones

Michael J Caboose wrote:

is there any other Eve feature that you want in here?

space ships?

I am Perpetuum's Most Dangerous Agent and an equal opportunity troll.
-> You just lost The Game <-
"Perpetuum sounds like a something I would stick up my *** for enjoyement." -Kaito Kurusaki

Re: Drones

could be different than drones like:
-deployable radar turret(alarm player when someone get in range, good for spoting enemies in pvp)
-deployable repair turret( repair X armor/sec when player in range)
-deployable cloaking turret (make player in range sealth untill they attack)

Re: Drones

Poulpe wrote:

could be different than drones like:
-deployable radar turret(alarm player when someone get in range, good for spoting enemies in pvp)
-deployable repair turret( repair X armor/sec when player in range)
-deployable cloaking turret (make player in range sealth untill they attack)

NO! i want my drones to zoom around my enemies and shoot them!  A robot that just spits out little robots all day would be really cool, kind of like the eve's "dominix".

and maybe the drones could hover over the ground a little, rather then have spidy legs?

Re: Drones

I would support deployables before drones. Armor reppers, Energy transfers, Turrets, Shields, etc. Lot's of possibilities and would give battles a bit more of a static feel imho.

Drones would just become one of those, 'must haves', in order to compete unless it was implemented differently than EvE.

-Gallowglass-
I've played just about everything once. Now it's Perpetuum's turn.

Re: Drones

I'm not too sure about the idea of drones. I felt drones in EvE caused a lot of imbalances.

Firstly there's the obvious lag problems of adding 5 NPCs per player to big battles. And second I think it would cause problems between mechs and smaller robots.

Currently medium weapons miss a lot against smaller bots and thus smaller bots can survive in PvP to do their thing, whatever it is. In return smaller bot damage is a lot lower compared to that of bigger bots. Adding drones in the way EvE has them would cause mechs to be able to deal equally good damage to both other mechs and smaller robots. Especially since the speed differences between the robots are much smaller then the speed differences between the different classes of ships in EvE.

However an alternate solution could be the following:

Drone Launchers, using most of the Missile Launcher support skills, this weapon would launch small drones at enemies that would fire several shots over time before running out of energy and disappearing/self-destructing. Technically they would function like a stacking DoT weapon and the drones crawling/flying around the target would be a merely visual effect.

It would be a weapon with basically no Alpha at all but after 10+ seconds the maximum number of drones would be on the target and the DPS would be above that of missiles. Say give it a 3 second RoF ( both for launching drones and the RoF of the drones themselves ) with each drone able of 3 shots. Thus by the fourth shot the first drone would expire and the target would only ever have 3 drones on him at a time.

To me it sounds like an interesting and cool weapon system that gives the same feel as drones would but without additional lag issues ( a DoT on the target should take a lot less server load then spawning a new NPC ) and you'd still be able to make small and medium weapons ( just give medium drones a higher hit dispersion on their stats, but make their hit dispersion scale with Seismics ) as not to unbalance the relation between small robots and mechs.

The missile support skills would be explained by the fact that launching a drone in a better position would increase the damage, RoF and accuracy of it. While shooting a drone without skills would result in it landing in a bad position and thus be less effective.

In addition to that I think it's fair to add a second weapons system to the missile skills seeing as guns have 3 while missiles only has 1.

13 (edited by Industrial Witch 2010-12-01 16:46:43)

Re: Drones

The trouble with drones in EVE is that everyone has them which means that everyone _has_ to have them. If they were an option only for certain types of vehicle instead of another weapon system then that would work wonders - like 'pet' classes in other MMOs.

I'd like to see deployables too - the STO engineer class had some pretty cool abilities like turrets, shield walls and so forth

Re: Drones

RockSteady wrote:

can you implement some kill streaks ?

haha this made me laugh. Reminded me of the quake sound pack for counterstrike and the UT3 voice over's.

"Multi-Kill!"

"UNSTOPPABLE!"

ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-RAMPAGE!!!!

"GODLIKE!"

-Gallowglass-
I've played just about everything once. Now it's Perpetuum's turn.

Re: Drones

Please god, no drones.

Re: Drones

I'm in a drone already... :$

Who was born a gecko, will never be an alligator.
M2S - Menace to Society fraggin since 2009

Re: Drones

Allowing drones like in eve easily tripples the number of objects the server has to keep track of drastically reducing the amount of players you can have in battles before you start getting server lag. 

Not worth it, imo.