Combat Mechanics

[Xrati]

SE4 did have missle design and fighter design and even troop design...

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by Xrati

SE4 did have missle design...

I remember drones which you could add warheads too and use like a kind of missile - but the missiles (always preferred the torpedo's myself) that you could build into a ship were more fixed from what I remember.

The biggest thing I hated about the drones was you couldn't use them like a UAV etc. and arm them with "ship" weapons - I might be recalling wrong as it has been a while since I played SE4 - but I would like in SL to have an autonomous (no crew) in-system only drone platform that would be bigger then a fighter but much smaller then even the smallest of ships.

[Ed Kolis]

I don't remember if drones could carry ship weapons in SE4, but they definitely could in SE5... made 'em pretty darn powerful!

Actually, I think they COULD in SE4, it's just that they were hardcoded to ram, so they wouldn't get to fire very much before they died; SE5 let you assign other strategies to your drones!

[Xrati]

They had the same capabilities in SE4 Ed. They didn't have the fire rate of a ship for missles carring 'direct fire' warheads. Anti ship missles would 'Ram' and you could even put drones (like a Multi-Warhead) on the missle. Due to the three turn re-arm cycle. They weren't too effective.

[jars_u]

Because of their superior speed on the tactical map I always found drones without any weapons or warheads were best used to blockade the worm holes/warp points. Enemy ships would just chase them around until one or the other ran out of resources.

[Xrati]

Seems like exploitation of the AI's limited capabilities. Not much of a strategy and a waste of resources jars. If you had played with 'finite resources' [on] you wouldn't be wasting resources on such items.