We have been working on adding drone bays to the alpha of Reforged Eden 2 in an attempt to make them useful. Note: all of this is about using the drone bay in space and does not include planetary use. While drone bays can be heavily customized in a scenario, there are two, hard coded things which prevent them from being useful as anything more than a novelty no matter how the configs are set up: Drones become "stunned" once hit by any weapon. Drones are too slow to keep up with movement in space. For problem 1: Once a drone takes one or two hits they become permanently stunned in place and will quickly die without firing any more shots. Even increasing the drones launched at one time doesn't help much since all it takes is a single turret of any kind to hit a drone and it will stun it. Your drones will spend more of their time in a stunned state, unable to fire on the target. This makes them nothing more than bad decoys to draw a bit of fire. I have tried several config options in an effort to remove this stun but as far as I can tell it is hard coded. For problem 2: In space, regular defense drones are not able to move at the same speed of most patrol vessels, making them only usable versus stationary targets. This can be worked around by making custom drones that use the SpaceDrone type instead, as those can move at high speeds in space. However adding a defense drone style drone that can fly at max speed in space would be nice as space drones waste a considerable amount of time making hit and run attacks. I have uploaded two videos showing the problem with using the drone bay in combat. Note: these are custom drones with a lot of health and very damaging weapons far stronger than the vanilla drone, against the weakest type of patrol vessels in Reforged Eden which is far weaker than the weakest patrol vessel in vanilla. And my ship could launch 6 of them at a time compared with vanilla's 2. The patrol vessels only took minor damage, and were capable of destroying multiple waves of drones launched by my ship. I use this as an example that even when trying to make overpowered versions of the drones in a custom scenario they are still not usable as a weapon system due to the stun mechanic. These problems would be amplified in vanilla where the drone bay is far weaker and you can only launch 2 drones at a time. My suggestion is to remove the stun mechanic for drones in space, or at least add some kind of configuration option to the drones themselves to ignore getting knocked around by taking hits. This also affects enemy space drones, causing them to be much less of a threat than they should be as they will become stunned by taking any weapon fire. See the videos below to see what the problem is. The drones spend a considerable amount of time being stunned and unable to fire. Video showing the space drone style drone bay: Video showing the defense drone style drone bay:
It would be appreciated is reasonable requests like the above were actioned. Extra bonus points for allowing the scenario designers to be able to do their own thing with drones and drone AI. There are many potential avenues to explore, but without more widespread access to the configuration and behavior of drones, none of those possibilities will ever be realized. Thank you.
I would greatly appreciate if this could be changed as proposed. Not only are the drone bay drones currently basically useless, the stun behavior also contributes to npc fighters/drones in space being basically completely harmless to the player.
