Well, if there were a base that could store large numbers of them and buy them for a good price, there would be incentive for people to mass-produce the things. I don't doubt that someone would make a batch of a thousand within a few universes as long as they could get a positive credit outcome from it.

People have that choice, but there's easier methods to make the same profit margin in less time.

As was stated, Armada Drones are in relatively short supply when it comes to building higher-tier UZ drones. It's much better now that there are numerous blueprints for the things equipped around the Uni, instead of having to rely solely on drops.

Alternate BPs that are credit-only would definitely solve the market inefficiency problem, but in a bit of a silly way I feel. There are a great many inefficiencies in the SS market (in fact, there's not much that's efficient) but circumventing all of these by cash alternatives would be ludicrous. Here are two different spins on the basic idea that I think would work better.

1. You can buy/build nerfed versions of expensive drones for just credits.

2. When an expensive drone dies, a broken copy of it is placed in your hull. You can return this and credits to an AI base (maybe only Lyceum?) in exchange for a nerfed version of the original drone (possibly neurobound). Can potentially repeat the process if one of the nerfed drones dies.

There doesn't seem to be a regular supply of Armada Inferno drones. Armada charges are more common, but still difficult to find.



I don't think people would sell to the base since demand is so high, so the selling price would have to be more than the current market value, which would drive the buying price up even more.



The price is already over 3.5b for Armada Infernos, the problem is that the items they require are in such high demand or have low supply. Sup Damage augs are used for Ada Damage modules, Dem/Ada rage augs as well as for base augs. While armada drones are much harder to get with the lockouts in UZ.



The super rare and expensive drones are much more expensive than 'equivalent' rare and expensive items, lincins are cheaper than Armada infernos, Rhino Restruct and Armada wands are cheaper than charges. People would happily use drones as commodities if only their rarity and price reflected the fact they were commodities.

Probably because drones get used up, but once made, weapons stay around forever. One could make the argument that the drone sub-economy is the only part of the Star Sonata economy that's actually working somewhat well from a game perspective.

Drones are fine.

As far as I can see, there are problems with Engineer, but then again what class is perfect? However, these problems are compounded by the issue that of all the 8 classes, Engineer has true permanent loss if something goes wrong, whereabouts a Slave class can unstasis his slaves.

1. Engineer lacks a large variety of drones at all tech and tier levels. When you can count all the Offensive drones for T19-T21 on your fingers, it isn't a good thing.

2. Whether or not it's your fault, if drones die, the market doesn't have enough supply to keep demand down, and therefore all "good" drones are horribly expensive and teams hoard them as they did Ada.

(If server crashes and downtime exceeds lifespan of drone, that drone disappears when server comes back up. This is an intentional feature, afaik.)

3. Advanced pieces of gear(Fine Tuned, [Ancient] Ruins, etc) are not worth the effort to obtain them, even with the SP change slowing people down in an attempt to get people to use said gear.

(This isn't just for Engineers, but powerful "Engineer" -like Mzungu ruins are definitely not worthwhile hunting down for the time it'd take)

It isn't that the gear is not powerful enough; it is the fact the time effort is greater than just teching up and spending credits. Newbs tend to not understand in the first place.

4. There is not a realistic way to recover or regain drones if case you do lose them.

There are two solutions to number 4:
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A. Drones are [cheap] commodities as you say, and there are ways to obtain larger numbers of either the current drones, or alternatives.

Ex. 1 Build of an AID bp produces 3 actual drones, so multi-build of 4 times means 12 new drones.

Ex. There would be 3 alternatives for "high end"(T20) heat drone. The AID, a Plasma Cannon Drone from Perp Motion, and an UrQa drone with a 3shot and a plasmite laser from bana queen(rare drop from any qokuji ai).

Then 3 Mid level drones(T19), and 3 Low level drones(T17), for heat damage of the upper levels.

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B. Drones are considered hard items in where they will be hard to actually lose, but the upkeep is high like normal gear upon death.

Ex. Build a neurobound or not Drone Generator, which counts as a weapon and therefore takes a weapon slot(multiple gens take the same slot, just the name takes 1 slot each) that deploys a drone when charged up, and goes on cooldown if drone is killed.

Ex. Drone Stasis + Drones requiring Repair when docked after drone death.

Get the fuck off this topic. Honestly you're just being annoying.

Anyways enkelin I like your idea a lot

Beacause i find nothing wrong in making ainfs,charges?

I find nothing wrong with having to get a new 3shot each time my SD dies.

you are still losing gear? gz

I lose gear every time my engineer dies. So I should have to replace my 3shot each time, no?