Drones drones drones

[Ed Kolis]

No attack bonus, but +50 to defense.

[Pocus]

What is interesting was the points developped by PvK : mostly advantages on an empire level, whereas StoneMill spoke of the unique assets of drones in tac combat.

thx all, a very instructive set of posting. Definitively to be archived...

[Karibu]

I think that drones are usable only when you have sufficient production capacity. They take a lot of time to build and they need a carrier -> more micromanagement, but I have tested that fully developed drones take down any ship put against them. Of course, you need to have enough of them. I tested like this:

10 drones against 3 base ships. Drones won. Why? I put on them 2 warheads, engines, ECM and couple of shields. They soaked insane amount of fire before destroyed. They are superior when ship has no Talisman or it is not very experienced (ie. hits with every gun). Though, drones are not for novices to use.

Consider this: If planet can target max 10 targets at every combat turn (excluding PD), lets assume it destroys 10 drones at first salvo (assume that planet is full of platforms). Then drones come within range of PD which takes down 3 more. Furthermore next round planet takes 10 more and PD takes again 3 = 26 killed drones. But when the rest ram into planet making 1000 damage (or how much was that planet warhead damage?) and 10 -15 drones hitting planet will propably glass it (2 warhead in every drone).

So, fully developed and defended planet taken down without single ship loss, but loss of units only. I admit, I haven't tested this yet in practice, but Swarming tactics is the only way to use them and it is effective one too. The best advantage of a drone over fighter is that it can have full phased shields, which fighters can't have.

[Pax]

Originally posted by Ruatha:
Make a cloaked drone launcher, load it with anti-planet drones, send it into your friends empires and park it in a storm, use when need arise.

I actually sealed a win in a recent team game, by doing just that -- slipped some cloaked drone carriers into the enemy's home systems, and obliterated a half-dozen built-up worlds in each. Completely glassed about 1/3 to 1/2 of the enemy's real industrial capacity that way.

Granted, I and my teammate were already winning, it was only a matter of time ... but even if we hadn't been, those drones would have done some HEAVY damage to the enemy, all out of proportion to their cost.

...

It's a shame you can't put a starkiller component on a drone; it'd be a great way to pop entire enemy star systems. Heh.

[Nodachi]

I like drones combined with temporal tech. Late game you can build more than one large one at a time, used defensively they can max out at +175 defense (berserker +10, racial +25, ECM +60, drone +50, events predictor +30), and with solar collectors can hang around forever. Using NSP's and swarm tactics they become much more than an annoyance to an enemy fleet.

[Cyrien]

If you have temporal then why not just use temporal shifters? Might be able to produce a few extras with the cost difference between TS and NS and the range and damage difference is actually quite minor.

[wanker]

They could also have a RP element - use them in situations where your race would not use manned ships (i.e. suicide missions).

Of course once you have MC this goes out the window as a reason.