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.
And it's the same problem that actually all drones suffer. If they take any damage they become unable to attack. This means that if you shoot at an enemy drone, it will become unable to shoot back at you. And if you launch your own drones via the drone bay, they won't actually shoot because the enemy's turrets will hit them. This isn't even fixable within a custom scenario. Believe me I have spent dozens of hours trying to make drone bays useful beyond as a mere distraction to draw some fire. As long as drones cannot attack while they are under fire, the drone bay will be useless. Also it greatly reduces the threat from enemy drones. Any teeny tiny chance this could be looked into at all?
Spent about 3 more hours tonight trying to get them to not be disarmed when hit trying every random config setting I could think of. I assume it's just baked into the drone AI itself and it's impossible to change in the game's publicly available config files. Super frustrating the drone bay has been in this broken state since it was released, unless the intention is just that the drones act as decoys.
At some point they implemented some sort of "stunlock" and it needs to be removed entirely from the game anywhere it's used, especially drones. It's a very lazy way of trying to balance things and anything subjected to it just instantly becomes a pacified easy target stuck in a loop. Can't move, fire back, or do anything because it just becomes stuck. As long as the damage is constant the entity is basically broken.
Thank you for noticing that this happens! Yes a single minigun turret will essentially stunlock any drone to death. It makes it too easy when it happens to enemy drones, but the fact it happens to your own drones is very frustrating. Having a droneship or fighter carrier is such a big sci-fi RP fantasy for many people, but that doesn't work in practice since your drones can't actually deal any damage to the target. Imagine if all the X-Wings did was fly around and get hit? Or the Vipers launched by the Galactica just become target practice for the Cylons? Okay, so maybe that last one was a bit true but you get my point. About the only thing I can think of to try to jury rig some janky duct tape solution in a custom scenario is to use the smallest drone model possible so they get hit less, and then add a collider to the front of the projectile to block incoming attacks at the front of the drone. This would at least let them get some shots off, though it would also make them invulnerable to the front. Though I suppose I could use an animation to turn the collider on and off so they could get say 10 seconds of firing before they become stun locked. I don't know. It doesn't feel worth my time anymore. I've already spent so many hours ever since the drone bay was first added trying to make them usable without much success. At this point I might as well just make my own drone fighter animation using a beam tracer that fakes the target being circled and attacked by a swarm of fighters as long as the turret is firing on the target. Edit: Thanks mods for moving this. I forgot where I had posted my original feedback so I didn't find it under the suggestions forums. Didn't mean to double post (though to be fair it's been a year and a half).
