Alan-Ibn-Xuan Al-Alasabe
Planetary Response Organisation
363
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Posted - 2013.06.20 12:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
In my mind there should be three variants of the dropship. I see it as a support aircraft, and want to encourage that role.
The base dropship works essentially like our current base dropships. It's capable of carrying troops and gets bonuses to things like mCRU respawn or scanner radius.
The second would be the logi dropship. This would work differently than our current logi dropships, in that I would nix the built-in mCRU and exchange it for bonuses to range and transfer amount of reps and cap transfers, as well as bonuses to certain remote buffs such as tracking speed. Basically it's the vehicle version of a logi suit. Turrets which function like remote reps and which also benefit from these bonuses would be very useful. These are essentially the T2 logi cruisers from EVE.
The final variant is the recon variant. An example would be the one at the end of this dev blog. It's a dropship that specializes in electronic warfare. It's still a support ship, but offers its support offensively through such things as cap neuting, sensor jamming, and the like. It's essentially a T2 recon cruiser from EVE
You'll notice no assault or bomber dropships. Those roles deserve their own hulls, and I suspect that's where CCP ultimately wants to end up. They just wanted to give us these roles to play with while they work on other things.
Things to assist dropships that aren't actually the dropship:
Larger maps and team sizes. The biggest problem with all vehicles, not just dropships, is the lack of role. Because of the small maps and team sizes there's not much a vehicle can do that small arms can't do more cost effectively. I suspect this is why CCP hasn't implemented transport assist WPs. They know that even if they were in the game, we'd almost never get any, because why sit around waiting for a dropship when you can just walk? This would help eliminate issues with dropships durability, as they would not necessarily have to sit in place to operate anymore.
Transport requests. An option available to troops to bring up the map, select a point, and have a request broadcast to friendly transport pilots of their location and where they want to go.
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Alan-Ibn-Xuan Al-Alasabe
Planetary Response Organisation
363
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Posted - 2013.06.21 01:50:00 -
[2] - Quote
There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread*, and a lot of incredibly bad ones. But ultimately I think that the fixes for the DS are conceptually very simple, but incredibly difficult to implement. It's an operational tool in a game where everything is at a tactical level. The bulk of the problem is in the scale and scope of the game at present. Bring in large maps and large teams and rapid transport will become invaluable.
*MIne is the best, obviously.  |