Feedback Required V.1.10 - Drone Bay

Got a chance to play a bit more with this. Got a test base, spawned in a base attack. Drones behaved as intended, lifted off & engaged enemy. However I noticed two things:

1. The enemy drones did not attack the base - one reached it and just hovered over. Didn't seem as if they were attacking my drones either. The enemy ground troops worked fine.

2. My drones engaged the troops fine - except as they circled round they tried to persistently shoot them through the base as it got between them and the troops. This blocked the attack obviously (not sure if it damaged the base).

 

1. The drone bay is far too large. The larger it is, the less blueprints that can be updated to include it. It's current size prevents it from being able to be added to even some of the largest ships out there. Something Warp Drive sized would be far more sensible.

2. Two drones is a pretty low amount, I would say at minimum you should be able to spawn 4 if not more. Only two means you can't even have drones cover all sides of your ship, especially if one or both get stuck because of their AI.

3. The drones NEED an option to manually retrieve them, like picking them up (like a bike) or with the retrieve option on a multi tool. Otherwise unless their AI is greatly improved, players will be wasting a lot of time and possibly drones waiting for drones who get stuck to return.

4. I'm assuming you guys are keeping the testing simple for now, but in the future I would love to see different options for drones like enemies have already, such as rocket, plasma, etc.

 

Heya,

1) Spawn radius is with 500m waaaay too short. They end up in front of the enemy muzzle and are destroyed before they can accelerate.
(changing this in the config didn't do anything)

2) The drones would really benefit from a specific material type (damage multiplier)

3) They dodge nothing, instead they fly directly into the enemy fire (maybe a spin maneuver could help)

So far i would say nice idea, but totally useless maybe except vs NPCs and creatures. Just a way to burn resources.

 

the drone bay is way too big and large to place on a base.... and worst for a cv ... you could even fit some starter cv in it ...

if the drone bay is useless for endgame warship, ...... the drone bay could be usefull for a light or starter cv who need some defense... but not with this big size ....

 

Some of the updates to the drone bay have made it much better so far.

Drones can now be configured to launch and return much faster.
The drone control range of 1000 makes it viable to use in space now.
I also found out they can be used with space drones now (they used to not be able to return).

The size is too big though. And it would be nice if you can set targeting options on the drone bay like you can with turrets.

 

As others have said, it's just way too big.

I was kinda expecting it would be something like a single block that could dock a single drone, and maybe have cargo extenders added to it to increase the number of drones it could send out. This way folks could incorporate the drone launching into their existing carrier designs similar to how you manage the various cargo controllers.

As it is now, you kinda have to build a ship around it and it seems too unusually large. Also, the model/skin seems an obvious placeholder so prefer to wait and see what the final thing is going to look like before investing too much design time in it.

 

The major grip with the current implementation is that the drone bay is too big to install on a CV, more precisely: Players would not engage to modify their CVs for allowing drone bays to be installed because they judge it's not worth the effort just to see some average performance of these drones afterwards.

I think this could be resolved in a way not too difficult for the devs to implement and also bypassing the installment on the CV completly:

- Make the Drone Bay for BASES exclusively, there is more place there for big installments of them. Give us a nice launching ramp and it would be cool if some nice launch sequences and rocket 'trails' are shown.

- Once a drone base is installed in a base, make drones spawn with a hotkey from space in a CV, with a certain delay for them to simulate their launch and their joining your CV. Even warp-capable drones could be added later in the game, their build requirements would be appropriately higher of course.

 

Drone AI is currently too broken for them to be useable in any way.

 

Agree, problem is that they are flying directly into enemy fire.

The bomber drones actually perform better than any other drone and could be a good starting point that might one day even work for npc sv (which i think should replace drones entirely... being able to launch your sv from the drone bay would not only justify its size, but also create new reasons to keep building stuff)

I recommend doing a bit of pvp to get a feeling how they should attack and dodge. Pve simply wont tell you much about that and it will always be much worse than it could be.

Note: From my own experience i would suggest modifying projectile speed to the point where a sv can dodge in a spin maneuver, but a cv cant due to its size. In our scenario we were able to make svs great cv hunters unless the cv has hit scanning projectile turrets. (also allowed us to turn back on cv weapons on planet and get rid of this stop gap solution)