Cogmind Beta 10 Feature Voting Results, w/Drone Concept Work (Patreon)

The voting has finally come to a close, and the results are in:

Drone Overhaul is the winner, so as promised, here come lots of drone updates!

One of the key goals in this area was to remove tedium, but obviously there's lots of room for other kinds of improvements here, not to mention more content.

Over the last week I've been collecting and organizing all of my drone notes from the past years, deciding what will help achieve the goals here, what else we need, and what might just be cool to have. Here is a distilled rundown of what I'm planning to do...

Basic Functionality

I'm sure it'll be controversial, but I'm going to remove the GOTO command from ally orders. The main reason behind this would be to avoid drone tedium, but also really just tedium with ally control in general. This will generally reduce ally effectiveness somewhat under certain strategies relying on having them go to a certain place, but technically if it's really important and you're willing to invest some turn time (and lead them yourself), you can achieve a similar goal by having them follow you somewhere then telling them to STAY.

As a concession, to keep allies from moving ahead of you and potentially getting into fights (which is one tactic for which people like to use GOTO), I'll work on making it so unarmed allies tend to trail you rather than potentially moving ahead.

Drones will also not flee randomly when attacked. Instead they will immediately RETURN at full speed. This will generally make drones last longer, though obviously comes with other tactical considerations ;)

The biggest change of all is that drones require that you have an active bay matching their type. If you do not, they power down and no longer transmit any data until you once again have an active matching bay. Designwise this could eventually allow for more powerful drones.

Technically you can have more drones than will fit in the given drone bay, as long as you have at least one that allows for control of that kind of drone. If you've got multiple matching bays in your possession, for convenience drones will probably be able to RETURN to extra bays in your inventory as well.

New Drones

Overall we will be getting maybe 4-5 new types of drones, and with the new limitations on their use it's likely there will be some better drones, too, with unique functionality.

For the most part their bays will be available as randomly placed items, although over time it's likely they'll be acquirable via other means as well. Obviously fabrication is usually an option, though probably some encounters will include them, as well as probably Merchants one day, too :)

One of the things we've never been able to have before are assimilated Watchers behaving like drones, but I will try to include that here as well (the idea is that you can get Watcher Bays inside Garrisons). Architecturally it might be a bit weird, but I'm going to try anyway.

Z-Drones will come in bays as well, in order to properly fit them into the new system.

I'll avoid spoiling the planned new drone types for now :)

Miscellany

I'd like to add a way to have the map view follow drones (basically whether or not this happens is dependent on input suitability). Note that I toyed with the idea of doing PIP as well, which would clearly be awesome, but architecturally would just run into so many problems it's not worth it.

And based on an old suggestion from DDarkRay, I like the idea of adding an intel marker where your drones have died, so it's likely that will happen.

There are probably a couple more things that don't fit into either of the above categories, though I'm not sure about them since some depend on the characteristics of the new systems and how everything balances out.

DRONES FTW!