Reward System for Dropship Pilots

[fierce agate]

So some sort of player economy will be a thing in the future. If not for changing class then st least for certain advanced gear or something.

I just played a match in Rift Basin against Aliens. Some dude was flying around with a Dropship. I wouldn't rank him as MVP but having him around was super useful. Helped me reposition to better areas and rengage. Much more interesting and fun then manually respawning and teleporting.

In the future I'd like players that drive ground transports or fly Dropships get rewards. It's actually surprisingly useful to us infantry players. Sort of a battle taxi getting us from place to place.

Almost felt like playing Halo, jumping out of the back of a Pelican with my Balterium rifle. Good stuff.

[fierce agate]

Now in my example I was working alone. Unfortunate but you make do with what you have. What was nice was that I was able to signal to the Dropship my position by firing my gun into the air and he immediately came by to pick me up. That's a level of immersion that's just hard to replicate without players deliberately trying to role play the experience.

Perhaps in the future we can have some sort of signal wheel associated with pings. So we can signal for allies to attack certain targets, request fire support, request an air lift, or point out key targets/areas.

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I'll add that most of what I did was go after Hive Spires. So I wasn't the biggest game changer on the map but I was able to clear some out and let our air force contest more space. We were winning anyway so Behemoths were few and far between, and largely unable to respond to the Dropship. I guess they saw it as a low priority target and the nearby Scorpions kept marching to the front lines.

But this is sort what I think the role of Dropships and Infantry should be. Infantry can't get around the map easily, are vulnerable by themselves, and can kick ass when working together. Introduce squad mechanics and better weapons and we can get a team of AI infantry, infantry led by a single player, or a team of player infantry working together to pull off some map changing moves. Simply knocking out an AA battery has huge consequences and lets your air force swoop in to obliterate the remaining targets. Dropship can pick up the infantry and bring them somewhere else.

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What I would really love to see would be the Dropship almost acting as an infantry command unit. So imagine if a player was the Dropship pilot with a Bird's Eye View of the ground situation as the infantry move around. The Dropship can sit behind them and provide fire support and neatly move its AI infantry around, carefully advancing using terrain and hitting key objectives. If something approaches the Infantry the Dropship can also choose to engage with its weapons. If a wasp goes after the Dropship the Infantry and their AA weapons could take it down before the Dropship is in any real danger.

Im spitballing but this all provies an opportunity for players to engage with combined arms warfare in Silica. Heck if more players had to get familiar with being in a field commander role they would probably be more conservative with other gear and learn the value of not driving off on their own into the open.

[kindred kite]

This would actually be awesome, love to see it in the game. It will especially be more viable once teleportation is gone