new vehicle hacking discussion

[Lonehunter]

Empire Specific Weapons, are empire specific weapons, period

The main reason in alpha, and in beta, for never implementing hacking vehicles was the same reason they VERY early on decided against inventories, swapping of ES gear.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it adds a whole degree of difficulty for game balancing when all 3 factions have access to everything. Plus it opens up to exploiting, and adds more work for the GMs. It's a f2p game where multiple characters are encouraged and multiple accounts are fine. How can they stop an organized arms deal of swapping enemy vehicles?

Plus it's better for the game for each empire to actually own their benefits and traits. To get them you have to play them.

BUT, a compromise I always thought would be beneficial, is for Infiltrators to be able to hack into passenger or gunner seats. They would never show up on the driver's status window so could remain undetected for some time, or just start blasting nearby targets away for a few spontaneous kills.

Now even if you add hacking to NS vehicles only, further game balance is needed. Infils are about to get the ability to cloak permanently and sacrifice a primary weapon. Adding the cloaker game of sneaking in to hack an enemy AMS would be amazing. But right now there is no counter for that. There are no engi deployables to detect cloakers, etc.