Drones Are Useless

[Q]

I don't think drones are useless, especially not for human players and psychic races.
However IMHO they are simply too expensive in the unmodded game. A typical drone costs as much as a destroyer or even a light cruiser. Therefore it takes too long to build them. And the other point that restricts greatly their use is the lack of the "move to" order, as I said already some 1000 times .

[Crazy_Dog]

One use for drones is build a base with lots of cargo and several drone launchers (optional a shipyard to build the drones); add stealth armor/cloack.
Equip it with anti-ship drones and is a system defense.
Equip it with anti-planet drones and in case the near systems are from the enemy......

[Tezzezar]

Hmm. I think my only beef with drones is I'm not sure they do anything that I can't already do. There's nothing unique about them. I'd rather build other units.

To be fair I haven't played with them much. Maybe some special components that only drones can equip?

How about pods that launch multiple missiles one time only or Planet destroying bombs?

[jimbob]

Never used a drone,
can you retrofit them?

[Fyron]

You cannot retrofit any units, so no.

[PvK]

Drones are not useless, but it's certainly possible to misuse them, and to use them wastefully. I've explained this several times on several "what good are drones?" threads in the past. Their strengths are not obvious, and trying to use them to replace ships, or in other common ways, can be wasteful. However they have some definite strengths. The challenge is to understand what and when they're good, and when they're not. I agree they'd be better and more fun with move-to and recovery from defensive launches.

Some of their unique strengths include:

* No maintenance cost (this is a huge advantage).
* No partial damage effects.
* Ability to be stored in cargo.
* No good way to detect them when stored in cargo inside scanner jamming.
* Immunity to allegiance subverters and computer virus and boarding and insurrection and some other things.
* Ability to draw point-defense fire and resist it with ECM/defense bonus/shields etc.
* Losing them does not reduce population happiness.
* Movement bonus.

PvK

[minipol]

Originally posted by PvK:
* No maintenance cost (this is a huge advantage).
* No partial damage effects.
* Ability to be stored in cargo.
* No good way to detect them when stored in cargo inside scanner jamming.
* Immunity to allegiance subverters and computer virus and boarding and insurrection and some other things.
* Ability to draw point-defense fire and resist it with ECM/defense bonus/shields etc.
* Losing them does not reduce population happiness.
* Movement bonus.

I never used drones but these points do seem to be good reasons to use drones. i'll give them a try. Do you use them to guard warppoints or do you just take them out to battles?