Drones really hate me!

[Growltigga]

Can some bright spark out there tell me what I am doing wrong?

I have just developed drone technology. I would like to load my drones up with meson bLasters or whatever and use them in conjunction with light cruisers as close assault ships. Good sound tactical thinking I consider

BUT everytime I get into a brawl, irrepsective of the strategy setting I have on the fleet or the drones, the wretched things fire one bLast on the meson cannon and then ram the opposing side - hardly environmentally friendly and evidence of a resusable galaxy

can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong

[Bman]

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Growltigga:
Can some bright spark out there tell me what I am doing wrong?

I have just developed drone technology. I would like to load my drones up with meson bLasters or whatever and use them in conjunction with light cruisers as close assault ships. Good sound tactical thinking I consider

BUT everytime I get into a brawl, irrepsective of the strategy setting I have on the fleet or the drones, the wretched things fire one bLast on the meson cannon and then ram the opposing side - hardly environmentally friendly and evidence of a resusable galaxy

can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong<hr></blockquote>


Drones have 1 mission life: to crash into something. It is hardwired into their brain. You should flog your engineers for making them so limiting.

[Growltigga]

Cheers Bman but is there any way I can stop them doing this?

I mean, what is the point of putting a 20K meson bLaster on a drone, one shot as it goes past and then kablooey!? they would be far more useful as kind of swarm gunboats!!

[dogscoff]

you could try restricting their tactical speed so that they never quite catch up with the enemy and so can't ram it.

Or maybe gift repulser beam tech to your enemy...

[Urendi Maleldil]

You should be able to set the strategy to something like "short weapons range" and have them not ram. I've designed gun drones before and they seemed to work fine. You just have to change the strategy every time you upgrade the units.

Gun drones with 2 PPBs are very cool in the early to middle game.

[Growltigga]

blimey, so the consensus appears to be that you cant tell drones not to ram things then??

OTOH Urendil, if you are right, then you are mirroring exactly what I was going to do to the cream puffs on the international challenge game - gun and beam drones to really make life unpleasant in the early game!

[ 08 April 2002: Message edited by: Growltigga ]</p>

[PvK]

No, you should just have to specify a strategy other than "drone attack", "ram", or "kamikaze".

[Growltigga]

Cheers PvK, I will give that a go again but I tried that and for some reason my meson bLaster drones just trundled off and rammed the nearest baddy after firing one desultory bLast

[capnq]

You might also try tweaking the targeting priorities as well.