Hi

I'm not sure how to best represent those.

Engineering-mechanics is a must from what I see but would in addition to this also Ace-pilot fit? (from what I saw in the series and films astromechs are also good at piloting, but not sure if that additional spec is overkill there or not). The pilot primarily for galaxy mapper and lets ride.

And then naturally "slicer"

Or is there any other "must have" to represent a good R2 unit?

Can of worms!

There is some argument for Technician Slicer + Rigger, gives all the relevant skills for flying and fixing a ship as well as the Slicing side of things.

But Engineer Scientist & Mechanic gets a lot of the way there too.

Colonist Scholar with the well rounded Talent is also a great way to get what you need.

Notice I haven't included Pilot? It because to me an R2 is there to support the meat bag at the helm, they don't need all the talents to pilot better, skill alone is enough for the times they do. They need to provide other abilities the Pilot simply doesn't have.

As a player or as a NPC? As an NPC use the stat block. As a player depends. What kind of quirks does the astromech have

We have an Engineer Saboteur Astromech.

He likes to blow things up.

To quote Dave Filoni "If Artoo's your favorite dog, Chopper's the cat."

What if you made a house rule that said an R2 PC uses the intelligence stat as the governing attribute for piloting any vehicle that can be "plugged in to"? That way he's not stacking agility to shoot things, but can still fly. I don't envision an R2 unit flying by trying to manipulate a control stick, thus I don't think agility applies.

If they wanted to ride a creature though, agility would still be the governing attribute.

I've had a few astromech PCs show up in games that I've run or played in, often by the same guy.

In most cases, they've been Technician/Mechanic with skill selection made to match the dice pools for the NPC astromech as much as possible, often going Intellect 3 and then 2 ranks in Astrogation, Computes, and Mechanics followed by 1 rank in each of the Piloting skills.

Of course, seeing as how astromechs aren't limited to the R2-series, I'd say as long as they have at least one rank in Astrogation, Computers, and Mechanics then the rest is up to the player. Perhaps their astromech PC has been substantially modified to operate more as a pilot and gunner than as a support unit?

What if you made a house rule that said an R2 PC uses the intelligence stat as the governing attribute for piloting any vehicle that can be "plugged in to"? That way he's not stacking agility to shoot things, but can still fly. I don't envision an R2 unit flying by trying to manipulate a control stick, thus I don't think agility applies.

If they wanted to ride a creature though, agility would still be the governing attribute.

Having a low Agility but multiple ranks in Piloting would be the RAI way to represent any character that can fly well but isn't Agile.

And riding beasts is based on the Survival skill and Cunning.

Agility makes sense if the character is flying the ship with the flight stick. He needs to be dexterous, have quick reactions, and good instincts. He is using fine motor control to manipulate the flight stick, the ships computer is then interpreting those movements of the stick to manipulate the ship in the direction desired.

When I think astromech pilot, I think of the rolling trashcan in the back corner of the ship, plugged into the ships computer. It's basically flying the ship by thought, not fine motor control of a joystick. It's processing the data from sensors and computing optimal flight paths and thrust adjustments to put the ship on course. It wouldn't even need to be in the cockpit to fly, it should be able to pull all relevant sensor data and access flight controls from any data port in the ship. I suppose modifications could be made to either prohibit or enable that access.

The faster the astromech can make those calculations the better of a pilot it would be. And the higher the intellect, the faster it could calculate.

Anyway, it's just a house rule to consider if you want an astromech pilot. Obviously with the exception being vehicles that cant conceivably be plugged into. You're correct about creatures, but things like small landspeeders, or speeder bikes. Starfighters that aren't designed with an astromech port would also fall into that category. X-Wings and Y-Wings, any light freighter really, I think there are strong arguments for a droid being able to fly those via computer terminal "thoughts."

To my mind, droid-based agility is more about positional processing and spatial awareness. There's certainly a physical component to it, but understanding how things interact in the world is a part of that as well. Consider it a physics engine in a game. If the droids software isn't upgraded sufficiently, they can have all the raw processing power in the universe and they still won't be able to tell the optimal angle of approach to avoid that asteroid tumbling on 3 axes.

It's not just reading sensors and interpreting them, it's reading sensors and interpreting them correctly, accurately and in sufficient time to implement the needed corrections.

Therefore, I'd still treat it as an agility-based check rather than an intelligence-based check despite being done through an SCOMP interface or equivalent.

More so even than biological characters, one can interpret the droids in the movies and animated series as either PCs, or NPCs, depending on the character.

NPC droids by and large have what a droid of that make and model has.

PC droids have whatever the player (that is, the writing team) wants/needs them to have within the framework of the story.

My Personal opinion; Agility in a meat bag is largely a measure of the persons ability to process sensory input quickly and output that in a meaningful and precise way, it has nothing to do with the amount of information stored in their brains. Twitch muscle fibres is a part of it as well of course but not the only part. To me droids are exactly the same, intellect is a measure of the storage space, not processing speed. Reaction speed, accuracy of output commands, fast input processing are all measures of a Droids agility, so is Buss speed. Of course an R series have limitations on physical activities, but in a ship as mentioned those limitations disappear. Astrogation and Knowledge is about how much information is stored in the memory.

I wouldn't necessarily house-rule any stat/skill combinations on anything other than a case-by-case basis. What I might think would work in the case of allowing an uplinked droid to use Int instead of Agi is a pricy attachment. I haven't looked at it in a while, but droids get pretty liberal use of "cybernetics" as I recall. Just have a unit that takes the place of the +INT upgrade, so that there's a real choice involved, especially for a character focusing on INT. My reasoning is that a droid's spatial awareness is typically governed by its AGI value. A specialized piloting module could, feasibly, use a separate processing engine to take advantage of a droid's intelligence.

Advanced Avionics Module - A droid equipped with this unit has used it's processor upgrade for a sophisticated flight analysis module. This allows the droid to bypass its standard spatial awareness subroutines when hard-linked to a ship with the appropriate flight computers, such as standard starships and some airspeeders. Mechanically, this means that the droid may use INT instead of AGI when making piloting checks while jacked in.

I would just like to add that the starship attachment: Autopilot Droid Brain (in Fly Casual), still uses agility for piloting checks (even if it is an agility of 0). And it is literally a droid brain plugged into the ship. Nothing else.

Well, IMO Piloting (Space) should have been a Cunning or Intelligence skill anyway (or both), and there's a lot of reasoning here to support that, but w/e...

If the astromech is an NPC, just give them whatever they need for the campaign.

If the astromech is a PC, then Technician - Mechanic seems the obvious choice to me. This gives the droid both Piloting skills, so they can be proficient in moving vessels from point A to point B, and Astrogation. I'm not familiar with any canon event/scene/occurrence that shows an astromech being anything beyond competent at flying a vessel, which to me just means they have skill ranks. The "pilot" specs, from Smuggler and Ace get you piloting talents, but these are really just stunts that Astromechs simply don't need to fulfill their directives or programming. They're not even remotely required. Looking at the books, this apparently doesn't give tyou

The Fringer and Scout specs for the Explorer are also reasonable alternatives.

Similarly, Engineer - Mechanic would be a reasonable selection for an AoR campaign.

None of these is the single "right" way to do it, just options.

I would just like to add that the starship attachment: Autopilot Droid Brain (in Fly Casual), still uses agility for piloting checks (even if it is an agility of 0). And it is literally a droid brain plugged into the ship. Nothing else.

Right. That is there to provide ranks of Pilot skill to use in “Skilled Assistance” maneuver, when paired with another character that has a certain amount of Agility, but perhaps no ranks in the pilot skill.

But for doing normal mundane things, anywhere from two to four green dice based on skill alone and no Agility, is plenty.