As there are a number of different types of combat drones in the AA, what's to prevent a PC from creating one? Other than the entries in the AA not having equivalent entries & thus costs in the equipment section. It doesn't seem too far fetched that a Mechanic can just build additional drones. Obviously there's a game mechanic/balance issue, but honestly 0 fluff problems.
Your thoughts?
(question arose from https://www.reddit.com/r/starfinder_rpg/comments/7rinll/whats_your_opinion_ on_pcs_fixing_broken/)
I'm personally hoping that the Armory book set for May/June will have some rules for this.
In the meantime, I don't see anything unreasonable allowing the non-sapient ones in the book to be crafted/purchased. I'm not sure on the costs/item levels though. I'd probably have to think deeply about it if a player asked.
I'm guessing that functionally having more combat drones is not really much different from having hirelings/etc. The main thing seems to be while the Mechanic gets to do drones for free (their 1 drone) with time crafting a new one, the nature of the 'unique' AI makes it so you can't just make copies of the thing and have a droid army. Nor does it say the drones other than your freebie replacement are free.
Fluff wise, when you look at things like the heavy drones, the blurbs indicate they're falling out of favor because they're actually pretty dumb and dangerous when opponents figure out work arounds of the limitations. So your mechanic's drone is an outlier, much smarter and unique compared to security bots or other things than get mass produced.
Fluff wise again, I'd say the Mechanic is probably always restocking just in case his drone goes poof, but as his level grows and his drone abilities grow more of that stock would need to be used to replace his drone (or do the various upgrades) so he'd have less overall stock to make a bunch of spare chassis/etc.
Also the mechanics drone is pretty flexible in that you can basically remake it to a different chassis every level. If you purchase some security droid/drone what you get is what you bought most likely. And I would agree it would make no sense to not have stuff like this purchasable.
I would however expect if they are available to be pretty pricey so you would be making some serious choices to have a drone would mean less money for weapon/armor upgrades.
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Balance solution- if you buy or build an expensive drone, it only gets a move action each round, and you can spend your standard or your standard and swift to give it more than that. If you buy or build a simple drone, it only gets a move action each round, and that's it. The Mechanic still has a top-of-the-line custom drone (getting a free standard action each round).
Ok thanks. In your opinion, whats better artillery drone or combat
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I'm personally hoping that the Armory book set for May/June will have some rules for this.
In the meantime, I don't see anything unreasonable allowing the non-sapient ones in the book to be crafted/purchased. I'm not sure on the costs/item levels though. I'd probably have to think deeply about it if a player asked.
The next rule book we know of is Ports of Call in May. If there's news of a new Armory book, do you have a link to it?
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Ok thanks. In your opinion, whats better artillery drone or combat
...did you just reply to a post from *checks watch* five years and one day ago? That is some thread necromancy..! You're confusing poor Driftbourne about when Armoury came out XD
Anyways. Depends what you're looking for in a drone. Combat Drone starts off with higher Str and reductive plating, and can start off with a melee weapon arm. Artillery drone starts off with higher Dex, more weapon mounts, and heavy weapon proficiency. So Combat drone is going to be better taking hits and at melee combat, but artillery drone is going to be better at hanging back and shooting things with big guns.
(As a side note, the Artillery drone can make for a pretty decent ranged combat buddy at low levels: grab the Rangefinder Protocol mod, a weapon with the Harrying property, and at higher levels a Tactical fusion. It can take its own Standard to attack each round with a decent chance of hitting the AC 15 required, to give its Mechanic a +3 to hit and +1 dmg per die. Eventually it can take the Suppressing Fire feat, which I'm not sure how/if it'd interact with the Rangefinder Protocol, but would [I think?] work with the Tactical Fusion to grant its bonuses to multiple allies?)
The next rule book we know of is Ports of Call in May. If there's news of a new Armory book, do you have a link to it?I'm personally hoping that the Armory book set for May/June will have some rules for this.
In the meantime, I don't see anything unreasonable allowing the non-sapient ones in the book to be crafted/purchased. I'm not sure on the costs/item levels though. I'd probably have to think deeply about it if a player asked.
You're responding to a 2018 post.