mmmm a few data analyzer guards...
I would suggest a 5 minute capture fail timer, and a 15 minute capture success timer, like on hacks/raids. This would just balance it out more for NPC hunters like me, who disable one every 20 seconds on a full tank of energy.

Sounds fair.

My personal targets for the guards would be rogue tech collectors - because everybody loves them.

The question is if they hate flamehawks more...

not a bad idea! +1

a spin on this idea could be you can only ever capture say 5 max at one time but they can gain exp and level up. maybe they can form fleets around bases to blockade them, before u can attack base u must take out npcs, while it may be a dumb idea and hard to add, having ships defending a base does make sense...

I like this idea but instead of them expiring they should just return to the owners hold.

I LOVE THIS IDEA!!!
Data Analysers and RTC's are my intended targets ATM

I think that would be an awesome idea. We have all these planets and people but only one ship. This is kind of like building your own fleet - but it's souly defensive. I love the idea of actually putting a small fleet of NPC ships around my planets.

Awesome idea indeed. I like it !

neat i agree +1

awsome idea best idea ive heard +1

96% like the idea
6% don't like it.

How the hell does that work?

I think if you could capture more npcs a rank it would be better, because face it, 2 npcs a rank when your constanly defending planets isn't enough at low ranks

+n


Best Idea in a long long time.

With a touch of Dan's balancing + magic touch this could very well take GL to the next level.

Some of my friends from other games who played for a while then got bored, It would their address issues, basically they were dismayed that there was no fleet to manage.

Of course I hope this opens up a planet structure that allows for additional NPC guards

One minor problem. Unless the planet is immune to artifacts these guards are not very useful. They just get warped away by an attacker. There's a trap which makes planets immune to artis for a day but even with this a player would still warp away the guard beofre attacking and triggering this trap.

This is of course under the assumption that the black hole emitter works on NPC's rather then players.

True. There's no reason why they shouldn't. A ship guarding a planet is still a ship. If it can be warped away then the value of this idea drops a lot.

When NPC guards are warped they return to your cargo. Any damage they have taken remains. You can simply set them back to guarding like you would yourself.

Currently we already have ships that can guard yea I know not really but you can't warp away the Drannik Swarm Trap or the T-Plasma Attractor both of which attract a swarm of ships to guard so I'd say no to the warping should have to destroy them at least those ones could be removed.

It sort of defeats the value of this idea doesn't it? I have loads of unstable wormhole emitters. Sure, I'd love the extra defence on planets but I don't think players would have much of a problem warping away the guards. It would slow them down for a few seconds I guess. Think the only advantage of guards I could see is the cloak. Ten of those CTP ships could be 600 extra cloak and no planet space taken up.

They'd be useful during an active defence with a planetary vortex deflector on the planet so say you were online and no one else in your legion was then you could activate these ships to guard the planet. If you don't use a PVD then you could force the attacker to keep using up UWE while you keep drawing the NPCs back. Could be kinda funny. There's already alarm sentry traps to provide that sort of defensive action though.

If they were unwarpable it would be more useful but then it'd be like gaining passive attack/defence. At the rate pure NPC hunters go through NPCs that'd be too much of an advantage.