[PvK]

Originally posted by oleg:
PvK, drones need some balancing.

As it is now, large drone is completely and utterly useless ! With max. speed 7 it can not catch up with same tech level cruiser !!!

These are exaggerations. A large drone can inflict 4200 points of damage to ships, or 7000 points of damage to planets, so it's not useless. A speed 7 cruiser is maxed out for speed and will be expensive and either very short-ranged or require space for supply storage (point being, not all cruisers go as fast as they can be designed for). Exaggeration aside, it's a good observation.

Why not make 2,3 and 4 engines for small, medium and large drones ? They will have the same speed.
In normal SE IV, drones are fastest space ships and I do not see any reason why it should be different in Proportions. If you think it is way too much, add at least one engine to large drone. Right now I can see no reasons whatsoever to build even medium drones.

Good suggestion to increase the engines to 2,3,4... I think I had intended to do that originally, but forgot. The thing I don't like about standard drones is they get a "materials" speed increase that makes no sense to me and makes the smaller ones truly obsolete.

So, good suggestion/catch and I will put it in. I disagree though that there is no reason to use larger drones with 2 engines compared to smaller ones. Speed is not everything, and the extra 80kT allows things that are impossible on a small drone, such as dumping Stealth/Scattering armor and ECM on, to make them very hard to shoot down - a slow but very-hard-to-kill drone is better than a fast but easily-shot-down drone, in many cases.

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Regarding to research, I think the best way is to add one or two levels to research facilities. And may be increas a little the output of RC-2 and RC-3. But not too much of course, or it will spoil the whole idea of Proportions mod.

I will look into it.

In my 2000-pt one-planet Low research cost test game, though, I was pretty happy with the AI's progress by turn 120-130. It seemed to still have good techs it could get in a few turns, and had good mid-game type techs (cruisers, fighters, CT engines, shields + regenerators, EW III, CSM V, etc).

PvK