3 hours ago, Lyote said:Well at least you agree it's a tax, lol.
Adding primitive versions of what INT will do later wont change the endgame balance at all.
INT pre Stun Baton and Junk Turret is an entirely different experience. Its this period that needs some TLC.
I called out needing the Workbench along with your Tech books to make the Sledge because everyone else gets to make a gun in their pocket, so a primitive Sledge turret also made in ones pocket using Wood, fiber, springs and stone but can only punch directly forward with a terrible RoF would at least allow INT to utilise the Robotics perk immediately, as others get to do with their respective gun perks.
A primitive pusher turret would be enough for you? I could live with that, even though it would remove some uniqeness. That seems to me a different category than a crossbow for example and calling it a "ranged" option can be argumented but is still a stretch.
3 hours ago, Lyote said:So why not utilize the trap exp on Advanced Engineering, tie a trap effectiveness bonus to Robotics and give INT a trap launcher for its ranged option.
Firing small deployable, short lived traps at range. Much like Pipe Guns, it'd have a bad reload and RoF, and can even have it only capable of launching primitive traps, necessitating upgrading it to a proper T1 version later to use more advanced traps.
Since 'utility' is the buzzword for denying a dedicated gun to INT, Keep the traps utility flavored mostly, With damage being a secondary effect on the triggered traps.
You could have these be anything really.
Why not have some 'ammo' options for it be things like a deployable beartrap that locks a zombie in place and applies a bleed for a short duration. (Bonus for teamplay if allies couldnt trigger such traps)
Perhaps launching a speaker to continously attract zombies to investigate an area to setup a killbox.
Basically, small and non recoverable versions of what we typically have as base defense traps. No more difficult to craft than bullets for standard guns with primitive Iron, wood and stone versions to use in the Pipe Gun era.
Could really get as creative as you want without having them be outright zombie killers.
You can do a whole lot with the invention/robotics theme that INT has without applying raw power to it.
Sure. You won't get any counter argument from me if you want to make INT even more different or distinct. And you got nice ideas there. I would change the trap thrower to a mine thrower though, and this could be a development task nearly as big as the drone because of new mechanics and I can imagine lots of corner cases that have to be found and debugged. So I don't think they'll do that at the moment.