Drones Are Useless

[tesco samoa]

I could see drones have use in a limited resouce game....

[tesco samoa]

I could see drones have use in a limited resouce game....

[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 .

[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?

[Arkcon]

Anybody notice that the AI uses the planetary warhead on antiship drones. Seems a little unfair, same space and cost, 4x the damage. I'll let it have that little exploit, but I think it's a bug that should be fixed.

[Orthogonal]

mmm, I did not notice the planetary warhead thing, pretty clever! Good eye.

minipol, you can do all sorts of thing with them. You can use them "long range" by having a spotter in an enemy system, and send the drones (with a solar collector) as remote planet killers - right from a forward base where you construct them. You can also use cloaked (or hidden-in-storms) drone carriers to pounce on stragglers. One of my Favorites is to disable AI ships of engines and leave them in space taking maintenance and the AI sometimes never comes to repair the ship - huge maintenance cost!

I don't guard warp points with drones, though, unless under durress... sattelites are the more cost/supply effective for that.

I generally don't "fleet" drone carriers together with "general" fleet warships, I run them in separate "droner" fleets, or as single pirateers.

cheers.

Orthogonal

[Baron Munchausen]

If that's true that the AI is using planetary warheads in its anti-ship drones then there is a design problem in the AI files. What is more likely is that the AI just doesn't distinguish between the two types and launches any available drones at ships. Since planetary warheads do NOT do damage to ships, unless there is another bug, this is a huge waste of resources used to build the drone and of available strategic options.

[Nodachi]

Check the target types on the planetary warhead, it won't harm a ship. Just another case of stupid AI.

Almost any escort design you can come up with can be done with a drone. The drone would be cheaper and more importantly you can build more than one at a time. The downside is limited movement capabilities and they blow up when they run out of gas.

I've found that they work well for early game defense. Mid to late game you just have to be more creative with them.

[geoschmo]

What if from an AI design perspective you simply made them build drones with one of each type warhead? If I recall correctly there is room on a drone for two warheads and some engines right?

Geoschmo