Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Drone Concept

Synopsis
Drones in the current state of worldwide military (in the form of UAV's) are already customizable with various equipment depending on the role they are determined for, why not carry that into the EVE universe as well? Examples will be listed with each category.

Features
Drones will have volume and bandwidth increased, as well as damage and tank increased. This could end up with a full “flight” of light drones being two or three at most. Drones will also be able to be seen better and will function a little differently:

1) Faction Chassis
-Drones will no longer have weapons and modules auto-equipped per drone.
-Drones will have different characteristics based off of chassis design (Gallente, Minmatar, Caldari, Amarr respectively)
-Drone chassis will receive bonuses to a specific form of EWAR, Logi, and Damage/weapon type
*Example Gallente drones would receive a bonus to tracking speed, hybrid weapon damage, and sensor dampening*

2) Drone Fitting
-Drones can have one weapon (OR logi OR ewar) module equipped.
-Drones can fit new forms of modules based on the role they need to fulfill, only up to a maximum of two. Medium drones and Heavy drones should be able to fit more.
a) These modules include, but may not be limited to:
-Armor Tank
-Shield Tank
-Weapon Damage Mod
-EWAR/Logi Mod
-Navigation Mod
-Targeting/Misc Mod
b) These mods can be stacked (as in both slots used for a specific mod type) with a familiar EVE penalty
-In effect, this gives drones a more customized role for players to pursue for specific operations, be it PVP, PVE, or other forms of EVE-based work.
-All of this can be accessed in the Fitting Menu where your ship is docked when you access the Drone Bay.
-Drones are modified on a drone-to-drone basis.
***Example, for a light drone that carries one weapon and two chassis upgrades I fit a drone blaster as well as two drone speed upgrades to create a super-fast blaster bug. On an Amarr Medium chassis, I fit two drone lasers and two drone armor upgrades with one drone weapon damage upgrade for a slow, but heavy-hitting laser bug***


3) Drone AI Rehaul
-Drones right now are little more than mindless attack bots.
-In the updated Drone Bay you can set various forms of AI parameters including, as an example:
*Engagement Range
*Aggression and maximum aggression range
*Orbit range
*What Damage levels to begin Logi repping or engaging a target
*Auto-seeking or not
-I feel these updates will make the fewer drones that exist more competitive in a PVP and PVE sense being more like programmable robots.
-This plan has a huge impact on reducing the need to micro manage drones by setting their behaviors in the hangar bay.
***Example: In the hanger, I set my previous Gallente Light drone to auto-engage targets with less than 50% shield HP with an orbit range of 2k and engagement range of full targeting range. Then I set my Amarr Medium drone to defensive mode, to seek out targets that have only harmed my ship, with an orbit range of 5k and full engagement range as well. This means when I am attacked the Gallente drone will stick next to me as the Amarr drone takes some of the initial damage and begins pounding on the attacker. Once the shields lower the Gal drone will have a trigger set and move on the offensive.***

4) Sentries
-Because of the nature of sentries, sentries would probably not receive any form of change or update as they are essentially flying guns of death and doom. Instead they would only receive updates to bandwidth and capacity as well as damage and tank.

5) Fighters/Fighter-Bombers
-Fighters and Fighter-Bombers will benefit the highest from the above proposed ideas with new features and customization.
-Fighters and Fighter-Bombers will still be some of the highest number of drones to be able to be sent out (as per regular carrier upgrades to improve drone numbers) and have more choices for upgrades and damage being the final stage of drone work essentially.
-Such upgrades include (as a brainstormed concept):
*Warp scrambling EWAR
*More weapon choices than the Heavy Drone
*Warp-to and range of engagements in Drone AI segments to be set throughout the entire Solar System Map
*Solar System Map will show slight hologram (when zoomed) with the average location of your Fighters and Fighter-Bombers where they are subject to engagement.
*If Fighters and Fighter-Bombers are further away than warp range they will only be able to respond to the command “Warp to Me” and will instead act upon their AI based on what has been programmed.
-I feel these changes work well with the future carrier updates, allowing carriers to play out the supportive fleet role with even higher success.
-In order to prevent certain levels of abuse (sitting in a shielded POS with a carrier, for instance) the advanced Fighter and Fighter-Bomber warp AI will not work if the carrier is within 100 km of a POS.
-In order to incentivize players to sit with their fleets during engagements, drones will have their tracking and sensors slightly penalized if they are not within 1AU of the carrier.

Conclusion
I thank you all for reading what my weird mind has to think in regard of drones and drone warfare. I feel this will add a slight element of surprise when working with drones as it breaks the potential meta of current engagements, allowing players one more step of creative freedom. Plus, in the current MMO market, most player 'pets' or 'followers' are becoming more and more customized day in and day out. Allowing EVE drones to be something similar, but better, will make EVE a more competitive game in the long haul for us RTS fans.

Honestly seeing all that just makes me wish some of that was available to us that can't just dump a few billion ISK in the marketplace to have that kind of fun. It's not really fair in the long run.

Plus, by conveying some of those new features to lower-level ships it will assist with the learning curve once folk get to the biggest fish.

Also just a note, I thought I made it rather clear but drones would not be able to fit loadout items from frigates or other ships. Those are made for ships larger than 10~50m so it wouldn't work. What I think would be nice would be drone-specific items and fittings.

No to the drone customization. As said earlier, it makes balancing drones a nightmare.

As to bringing the new carrier drone UI into subcaps, I'd also have to say no. While I really enjoy the new drone UI on sisi, trying to manage drones while also managing weapons, tackle, and other offensive modules on a subcap would be a colossal hemorrhoid. Leave that UI with the carriers, where there's far less module management than on your average subcap.

You say it might be too much of a UI hassle on subcaps but what about battlecruiser and battleship sized vessels who will probably just be tank and spank during fleet ops? I could see forgoing certain levels of AI on frigate and dessies, but perhaps integrating more options the more advanced the ship goes.

I don't see drone fittings causing too much of an issue if you look at it in the long run.
1) Drone fittings would add a new submarket for aspiring EVE entrepreneurs to pursue
2) The total cost of drones and their equipment may be a little more but if there are less drones in the flight that should counteract any offset of funding per utility/offense/defense
3) Balance would actually be more based on the overall value of the fewer drones you can fly at a time. Yes, it would appear difficult to balance but not if losing a single drone is losing three with the previous system. Losses will hurt, people will target drones more often due to their revamped system. It makes you think about how you will send them out and how you will engage with them and I, personally, enjoy this kind of thinking and would promote it with drone vessels. Don't like it? There are gunboats and missileboats.