Drone Targeting: An emerging meta and how the game could adapt to it.
In my area, a new strategy has been emerging: Targeting portals with drones on them to limit remote access to high level farms and generally waste an enemy agent’s time. Now, this is cool in itself (well, obviously not for the person being targeted), but I think that the game devs could take it to the next level.
My proposal: Drone modifications. Drones would have one (1) mod slot that can only be accessed when the drone is recalled to the agent. Modifications could allow the drone to retaliate against agents that are attacking the portal the drone is docked at, allow the drone to jump further to get more resources, or cause the drone to stick to its docking portal better. The types of mods agents equip to their drones could reflect different play styles. Of course, each mod would be temporary, only capable of being used/damaged a certain amount of times before it stops working. Limitations aside, this would introduce a new layer of strategy to resource acquisition, one that could make the game a bit more varied in terms of gameplay options.
I’m curious to hear what changes or additions you would make to this system; as it stands, it’s just a concept.
Comments
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Drone mods could add a whole new layer to the game, allowing players to specialize their drones and make them a much more dynamic part of the game board both for drone operators and for agents on the ground. There have been a few other suggestions like this, and they've all been pretty good. Some of the highlights:
- reducing movement cooldown (independent of hack cooldown)
- reducing hack cooldown (independent of movement cooldown)
- providing a chance to survive a faction change
- travelling via link (maybe up to a certain distance?)
- a kinetic "battery" that reduces cooldown by walking
As long as they can't change the game board (leave that to the Agents themselves) then I'm probably in favor of whatever they add.
I personally feel that the drone adds an extra dimension of exploring rather than taking away from it, and like the idea of these suggestions.
I am more likely to pay attention to the portal picture and description while playing the drone (because of the cooldown time), so more likely to realise what the interesting features are that people have submitted.
Couple of other ideas:
100% agree - do not allow drones to change the game board. And that, imo, would include any sort of "retaliation" by the drone against an attacking agent - I don't think the drone should be able to act as a movable force amp.
Yeah, In hindsight that could be OP. I do like the idea of using a key to get the drone to navigate to a portal, but then the tier scaling of the drone-related medals would need to be adjusted.
I’m not sure how the hack and move cooldowns would work, since you can only hack once per visit. But the other ideas could work as you suggested.
One idea I just had was a mod that, when the drone is on a portal that changes, it sends the drone back to the last portal it travelled from. It would be pointless if sitting on a farm thats being destroyed, but means that people who are trying to travel to their drone don't need to start from scratch again
Great idea, hopefully Niantic will start some testing. Definitely agree on no impact on playing field. Right now a portal can accommodate eight drones, imagine half of them have Aegis and the rest force amps / turrets.. Sounds like a bad time.
Since the only actual medal is for hacks, and that can be earned by sending your drone to a portal, hack, recall, repeat an hour later, a key for navigation wouldn't affect anything currently in game.