Been thinking for a while now seeing as I'm sure we all have a limited artifact we wish we could get another of I had the idea of a rare npc and i mean silthion hybrid larva rare at most at the very least maybe as rare as a TO terraseeker.

Regardless this NPC would be match and have a drop, the drop would be a artifact case that you can open inside would be some random artifact you would normally get from a mission that you have already finished, this could be anything from a void tower to a mutagenic cartridge.

There would be no way to predict what artifact you could get, you could end up with something useless like a chron shifter or something awesome like a cluster missile.

For clear reasons the case would not give you ship mods or items to upgrade your planets I.E. no drannik colony ships , gaia seeds or of the hyper terraformers.


Comments? Anyways to make it better?

chron shifters are far from useless that is all

Too many potential rewards and it would have to be recoded at least once a month to include artifacts from recently added bi-weekly missions. Knock the reward possibilities down to 3 - 5, with a spawn rate of roughly Rogue Experimenter rarity and high cloak (1000?), and it's a workable idea.

Could work but as already pointed out, chron shifters? Useless?

I say useless cuz planet cloak means little to nothing seeing as you can have 20k cloak and still have someone with 500 cloak pick your planet up.

Well the rarity you put forward would be about right but the reason why I suggested so many possible rewards was to balance out the fact you might get something really great but I do see what you mean, the trick would be picking out what artifacts would be worth giving or maybe more then one version of the NPC? Maybe one that the crate rewards planet artifacts and one that gives ship artifacts?

That's not how planet cloaking works... not at all. If a planets cloak > player's scan, the planet cannot be scanned

......then why have i picked up planets that have 2-4k cloaking?

Because Blue's wrong (at least to my observations similar to yours), however you can't scan a 20k cloaked planet with 500 SCAN, the way I understand it is the higher your scan and the lower the planet cloak then the better chance of you scanning the planet. More cloak = less of a chance, chron shifter = awesome.

Well i guess i stand corrected about the shifter lol i just personally never found much use for planet cloak most defenses you can put on a planet doesnt do much in the end unless you take a huge bite out of production space.

Cloak only really comes into it's own when it's used in the thousands, defence varies in it's usefulness when you take into consideration who's trying to get it. there are some people no matter how much defence you put on the planet, it's never gonna keep them out. But for instance the standard defence I have on my best planets is enough to keep out any low-middle ranked ships, if they neither have the capability or want to use sabs that is. Which leaves me a fundamental question, should I put defence on my planets or rely on temp fluxes and try and squeeze as much production as I can out of my planets?

Even if you put a #&$# ton of cloak on you still have to rely on the crazy statistic system that will make you fail a invasion 3 times in a row when you have a 90% chance.....


But back on track lol what would you say would make the npc idea work better epic?

Well to be honest it's pretty useless especially when that rare, however if it dropped rarer artefacts, obviously hyper-terraformers and the rest of the rewards in that chain would be off limit, but if it dropped rarer rewards it could be decent, owing to the small chance you'll get something truly amazing. But I don't see it as something Dan should be diverting his attention to.

Well as darth pointed out with such a large artifact pool you could get that rare wouldnt be to great, I was just trying to be overly cautious about getting shot down right away, the question would be what would be a good set up of artifacts to have it drop?

It would need both meh and great drops, to make it fair. The idea is still just skeletal at the moment an good idea needs to be fleshed out by more then one person. Besides even if this idea is a flop gets everyone thinking about some way to make something better.

Crimson Cluster Missiles,
Mutagenic Cartridges,
Trellith Resequencers,
Planet Structures,
Those Xecti passive things.
That's a start.

well the ccm would of been one of the ones that made the cut for sure but it cant have the resequencers seeing as the perm planetary boosts would just be to over powered that and it would need junk rewards to.

Actually I was hoping you'd say that, the reason why it's in there is that it wouldn't be OP at all. You see there's a rare drop from high level base crates that work in the exact same way as resequencers except they only work for arti, no option. The rarity from this would be much greater than that, so actually it'd be far from overpowered.

chron shifters are awesome.

Still would need as many junk artifacts with the drop as there is great artifacts epic, besides as you pointed out theres already another artifact that has its effect, the npc idea is just to maybe get your hands on one of those one of a kind mission artifacts like a CCM, muta cartridge, maybe paradox gens every once in a while.

Paradox is a bit of an iffy one, but I guess the rarity would off-balance that, as for crappy ones? I don't like it. I mean you npc hard and long, kill maybe 2-3k of them and find one. And you end up getting a thetacron mine trap, or krionite torpedo or something? I know I wouldn't be too happy.

It would have to drop a arti that you cant get from a repeatable mission or from a npc and what not, would be kinda pointless to make it so it drops those more common arti besides i like what darth said make it as rare as a rouge lab pod.