its long been my pet peeve that people in the future probably wont need to know how to aim and fire weapons, or otherwise perform tasks better handled by machines.
in shadowrun, this was easy to simulate. a rigger could spend an action designating a target, and the various drones on his network would then use their autopilots and targeting software to destroy it. the same could be done for a soldier in military armor, designating a target and letting their automated weapons mounts handle the dirty work.
this had the advantage of keeping your hands and mind free for things that required creative thought, and leaving the shooting to something that doesnt really have an excuse to miss. if Lionhead's "Project Natal" can track my eye and joint movement with a webcam and a modern PC, surely the militarized software of the future isnt going to have a problem with this.
and it wasnt a problem in SR4, but in EP you seem to need an AI to run any skills at all. and an AI has to run in something with a cyberbrain, or at least in something that isnt a peripherial. and it has hard skill caps, making them significantly less effective than military grade autopilots in SR4.
I dont want this to be the "compare EP to SR" hour, but when i started reading about this game I was sort of hoping that one of the combat options would reflect egos commanding semi-autonomous tactical networks of drones and weapon platforms. im having a hard time working out how to do it in any kind of effective way, given the limits on AI.
Drones and other morphs could be controlled by beta or delta forks of one of the characters. Or they could be remotely controlled by a morph with the multitasking cognitive enhancement subsystem. A character's muse might be able to remotely pilot a drone, too.
Also, there is nothing that says that there are no AIs (as opposed to AGIs) that cannot run drones or suitably tricked out morphs with cyberbrains during an operation. One would think that they'd be difficult to get hold of but they'd be out there. And emminently hackable, also - I rather like the idea of a combat hacker in EP compromising an adversary's drone network and changing the orders of the drones to all attack the bad guy.
Personally, I think that EP would be better off with a lighter combat system many players like rolling lots of dice.
But players like playing heroic characters with guns, swords etc etc. So we have complex, archaic combats. Game/story drive mechanics.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by, "in EP you seem to need an AI to run any skills at all." Can you clarify?
yeah, thats essentially why we have Dune, right? does it really ruin the heroic escapism to focus your role playing on the socaial and strategic portions of the game, and when it comes to combat to manage your drone proxies instead of waving your own blaster around?
maybe the logical extension IS a sort of Dune scenario. Weapons will be regulated and if you want to get in a fight inside a hab, you have to use a dueling sword or whatever. then when you leave the Hab you have your combat morphs and drone swarms with all their automated semi-inteligent systems ready to break things on your behalf.