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NPC's and drones -why don't they use em
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Songbird
#1 - 2011-10-15 13:25:35 UTC
I know that the mothership in incursion launches fighters, but I'd like to see all sizes of npc's launch drones. The very obvious example is the rattlesnake, domi and gila, which in playear hands are drone focused boats, while in npc hands they launch missiles only.

Also I'd like them to start dropping some pirate drones with weird stats, even random generated between low and upper value, and depending on the stats receiving names like "dread" and "recon" and "whale".
Goose99
#2 - 2011-10-15 14:04:08 UTC
Songbird wrote:
I know that the mothership in incursion launches fighters, but I'd like to see all sizes of npc's launch drones. The very obvious example is the rattlesnake, domi and gila, which in playear hands are drone focused boats, while in npc hands they launch missiles only.

Also I'd like them to start dropping some pirate drones with weird stats, even random generated between low and upper value, and depending on the stats receiving names like "dread" and "recon" and "whale".


Supported.Big smile
Dorian Wylde
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#3 - 2011-10-15 14:20:48 UTC
Lag probably. And some missions do have NPCs that use drones.
mxzf
Shovel Bros
#4 - 2011-10-15 15:05:31 UTC
Dorian Wylde wrote:
Lag probably. And some missions do have NPCs that use drones.


I was just about to post this.

Lets just toss out some numbers and guess that each mission might have as many as 30 ships that could field a flight of drones at a time (probably a bit of a low guess, but it's just to prove a point). That would lead to 150 drones per mission at any given time (more like 3x that many if you didn't stop to kill the drones between waves). If you had, say, 100 missioners in a highsec mission hub, that would be an extra 1500 entities in the system at any given time. The amount of lag that this would generate would be pretty severe.

Not to mention that it would force a fundamental change in missioning fits. All of the sudden smartbombs would become mandatory just to deal with the hundreds of drones swarming you and that would lead to greifers flying noobships into missions of other people just to get them concorded via smartbombs.

Just no, missions work just fine as they are. If you want harder PvE content, look at Incursions or WHs.
Bormegil
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#5 - 2011-10-15 17:07:47 UTC
The difficulty on level 4 missions would increase exponentially and players would rage. Imagine if all those Amarr battleships in Smash the Supplier fielded a full flight of medium drones! Not to mention the arbitrators... I'm quite happy with things as they are. Frigate spam is enough of a yawn-fest. Wouldn't want to picture how long it'd take to eliminate a hundred something drones. Not to mention tanking that kind of damage.

NPCs would have to be reworked across the board to make it viable, though I will admit, it would be nice to have far less enemies in missions, and instead to give them something approaching intelligence, appropriate fittings, and damage closer to what player ships put out.