You can now craft and place the Drone Bay and equip it with Defense Drones. A Drone Bay Spawner is required for starting the drones. Notes: Pay attention to the direction you set the drone spawner block & also place it on the outside of the vessel so the drones have easy access to it to spawn & despawn from. To “retrieve” spawned drones toggle the power off for the drone bay & wait for them to return & despawn. When they are close to your vessel keep it still so they can find the spawner & despawn. Please note this is the first iteration of this feature. Please leave you feedback here https://empyriononline.com/threads/v1-10-exp-drone-bay-feedback.101630/
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.
