Drones: Magic Cheat?

[tesco samoa]

so people are using drones. I think their too expensive for what they do.

[dmm]

Geoshmo and others point out that a mine field will wipe out your drones. Anyone considered using (cheapest possible) drones purposefully as "minesweepers?" Probably not cost-effective but, since colonies can build them without shipyards, you may be able to field lots of them quickly enough to overwhelm even a maxed-out minefield.

[PvK]

Drones will be a lot more expensive than the mines they would detonate - the engines are one of the most expensive parts. It might be a little more effective if you piled armor on the drones, but still it'd be pretty wasteful. I tend to think minesweeping components should be allowed on drones, but that would require programming work that might better be directed elsewhere.

PvK

[adder_inf]

Just add solar panels to turn them into sats.

[Fyron]

That doesn't do what I was suggesting. You'd still have to use a ship to move them to different planets or to warp points.

[Phoenix-D]

Not if they still have an engine. Stick one engine and enough solar panels to overcome their natural supply usage.

Problem is, unless you're in a binary or trinary system, it's not viable.

"I tend to think minesweeping components should be allowed on drones, but that would require programming work that might better be directed elsewhere."

Why code work?

"Vehicle Type := Ship\Base"

That's from the minesweeper entry in components.txt. Change it to allow drones, and it might work. Don't have time to test it right now myself.

Phoenix-D

[PvK]

The satellite suggestion was that they should be able to deploy themselves - i.e., it needs move-to.

The minesweeper thing I assumed would need programming to make the sweeper components actually do anything, but I haven't tested it either.

PvK

quote:

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Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Not if they still have an engine. Stick one engine and enough solar panels to overcome their natural supply usage.

Problem is, unless you're in a binary or trinary system, it's not viable.

"I tend to think minesweeping components should be allowed on drones, but that would require programming work that might better be directed elsewhere."

Why code work?

"Vehicle Type := Ship\Base"

That's from the minesweeper entry in components.txt. Change it to allow drones, and it might work. Don't have time to test it right now myself.

Phoenix-D

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[adder_inf]

I have launched them directly from planets.

Now you do need a target to get them to where ever you want.

The ships will attack nothing(I think) but a drone will not.

The fix would be to allow them to attack nothing.

adding a thought

This is also needed to allow attacks from out of system otherwise a drone is just a fancy fighter. The drone needs to be able to hit things that the empire "knows is there" aka has seen before, but is not currently visible.

[ 01 April 2002: Message edited by: adder_inf ]

[dmm]

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
Drones will be a lot more expensive than the mines they would detonate - the engines are one of the most expensive parts. It might be a little more effective if you piled armor on the drones, but still it'd be pretty wasteful.
PvK

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Well of course the drones would be more expensive than the mines, but you can't detonate mines with mines. And you only need one engine. And you wouldn't want armor. The point is to detonate the mines with the cheapest thing possible that can be built in large quantities quickly. No matter how big and expensive the mine, each mine only takes out one vessel. Yes, the tactic is wasteful compared to minesweeping, but if you don't have minesweepers researched/built/handy, then this tactic might work. It allows you to use your shipyards to make warships instead of minesweepers.

Do you know how the Celts used to break the Roman lines? A bunch of lousy fighters would work themselves into a frenzy and impale themselves on the Roman spears and hang on as long as they could. These would be followed closely by skilled Celt fighters who could then take advantage of the Romans while they were spearless. It was a brutal but effective way to use their numerical superiority to offset the Romans' superiority in training and equipment.

[PvK]

I've used fighters for this purpose, but unfortunately for that tactic, mines can destroy more than one fighter per mine, if the fighters come in a group. So it's most effective if you can get the fighters in Groups of one, which is slow and tedious. But it is vastly cheaper than using drones. A small fighter with no equipment and just enough engines can be cheaper than a mine. What it's really good for though is not trying to clear dense minefields, but testing locations to see if they are mined... unless the game is set so that fighters don't detonate mines!

Another option is to set drones to not detonate mines, which of course leads to a different set of options...

PvK