I was thinking about the suit upgrades and how necessary it is to upgrade the dominator suit, but very much not necessary for the Artemis and Maverick (well, maybe in case of getting jumped).
My suggestion is that the various suits have a bit of cross over in terms of gameplay; especially when it comes to combat. There's no real reason to upgrade the shield and armor on an Artemis unless you just happen to forget to swap suits. But... what if there was a specific role for Artemis suits on the battlefield? Say the genetic sampler can also be used as a medical device to revive a fallen comrade? Then, you'd have a sort of medic role. Depending on how difficult this is, there might be a bit of range on it. My suggestion would be for the revival to be the alternate mode on the genetic sampler
The next obvious thing would be for the Maverick suit to have some sort of combat engineer role. I'm unsure of what would work best, but it could go in few directions. I think the NPCs never really run out of ammo, so it might be useless to have the suit be sort of an ammo supplier. But that would be a bare minimum capability. What I think would be real cool would be to actually pull in the settlement defense grid to the fight. Think about taking over the command center and reprogramming who has control, but this isn't a capture point. This just helps your side. Which means you are putting less resources into the actual fight and could cost you the battle. Also, I would think that you could manually override a single turret locally or just turn on/off the power to the settlement (Mavericks would just always start a fight with a power regulator that is removed from inventory after the fight is over). IDK, this seems like a lot, but I like the range of capabilities this brings.
On the other hand, this would make it so that every suit can participate in combat, but other roles would be specific to the suits... so, let's change that as well... Okay, so instead of every panel requiring a Maverick suit to open, say that some panels are damaged in some way and can simply be shot off. or that shooting the panel has some chance of removing the panel and also a chance of damaging the internals (if damaging is possible, you would need a way to repair it... I would give the cutter a repair mode on the alternate fire mode).
As for genetic sampling, you could have it so that you can shoot off a part of the biological and basically get what you would by scanning it with the SRV.
This means that if you prefer to stay in a specific suit, you can and do pretty much anything, but to a varying degree. it also means that if you happen upon something you didn't plan for, you don't exactly have to call your ship to change your clothes so that you are 'dressed for the occasion'. Maybe you want to do that anyhow, but that would be a min/max approach instead of necessity.
When it comes to on foot combat, I think this will help breed a much more dynamic system. I'm more of a solo player, but I would expect a team of players might enter with a very specific team build in mind to maximize their efficiency.
Now, at some point we also need to talk about NPC SRVs...
My suggestion is that the various suits have a bit of cross over in terms of gameplay; especially when it comes to combat. There's no real reason to upgrade the shield and armor on an Artemis unless you just happen to forget to swap suits. But... what if there was a specific role for Artemis suits on the battlefield? Say the genetic sampler can also be used as a medical device to revive a fallen comrade? Then, you'd have a sort of medic role. Depending on how difficult this is, there might be a bit of range on it. My suggestion would be for the revival to be the alternate mode on the genetic sampler
The next obvious thing would be for the Maverick suit to have some sort of combat engineer role. I'm unsure of what would work best, but it could go in few directions. I think the NPCs never really run out of ammo, so it might be useless to have the suit be sort of an ammo supplier. But that would be a bare minimum capability. What I think would be real cool would be to actually pull in the settlement defense grid to the fight. Think about taking over the command center and reprogramming who has control, but this isn't a capture point. This just helps your side. Which means you are putting less resources into the actual fight and could cost you the battle. Also, I would think that you could manually override a single turret locally or just turn on/off the power to the settlement (Mavericks would just always start a fight with a power regulator that is removed from inventory after the fight is over). IDK, this seems like a lot, but I like the range of capabilities this brings.
On the other hand, this would make it so that every suit can participate in combat, but other roles would be specific to the suits... so, let's change that as well... Okay, so instead of every panel requiring a Maverick suit to open, say that some panels are damaged in some way and can simply be shot off. or that shooting the panel has some chance of removing the panel and also a chance of damaging the internals (if damaging is possible, you would need a way to repair it... I would give the cutter a repair mode on the alternate fire mode).
As for genetic sampling, you could have it so that you can shoot off a part of the biological and basically get what you would by scanning it with the SRV.
This means that if you prefer to stay in a specific suit, you can and do pretty much anything, but to a varying degree. it also means that if you happen upon something you didn't plan for, you don't exactly have to call your ship to change your clothes so that you are 'dressed for the occasion'. Maybe you want to do that anyhow, but that would be a min/max approach instead of necessity.
When it comes to on foot combat, I think this will help breed a much more dynamic system. I'm more of a solo player, but I would expect a team of players might enter with a very specific team build in mind to maximize their efficiency.
Now, at some point we also need to talk about NPC SRVs...