Drone and Anti-Drone Tactics?

Puke · #1 January 28th, 2002, 08:25 PM

so, is the general consensus that drones are the way to fly, and they have made other tactics obsolete? are fighters still effective? how about missile tactics against drones? are non-drone-carying capital ships now worthless?

-50 to hit sounds a bit extreme, i would think that they would not be any harder to hit than fighters.

also, does this mean that ramming in strategic combat now works? how about the bugs with boarding when multiple design/types are present?

PvK · #2 January 28th, 2002, 08:36 PM

Drones can be quite powerful, but they're pretty expensive to build up (like building an escort), and are automatically lost. I would tend to think they make sense to build up in peacetime and use to tip the scales by concentrating them on hard targets, but they may not be efficient compared to warships if built during a large-scale war. Drones are a good way to build up a lot of firepower without maintenance costs.

PD may not look like it's doing anything until a kill is scored, but it can be quite effective.

Missiles and torpedoes are not effective against drones because (Last I checked) they can't even hit drones.

PvK

mac5732 · #3 January 28th, 2002, 08:36 PM

Ditto for Puke's questions, are the drones going to make larger msl/beam carrying ships obsolete? How did ftrs handle them? How about using the Drones thru wormholes to hit targets, any problems in this area?

just some ideas mac

Atraikius · #4 January 28th, 2002, 09:24 PM

Fighters seem like the best defense against drones from what I've seen. Seen 10 fighters stop 5 drones attacking a planet. As for drone tactics, they work very well for taking out enemy colony ships and transports.

PvK · #5 January 29th, 2002, 01:03 AM

quote:
Originally posted by mac5732:
Ditto for Puke's questions, are the drones going to make larger msl/beam carrying ships obsolete?

No. A missile-only ship would have no defense against drones, but that doesn't make them obsolete, and beam/PD ships in enough quantity seem to be able to handle drones on reasonable terms, or even cream them, depending on tech, design, and tactics, of course.

quote:
... How about using the Drones thru wormholes to hit targets, any problems in this area?

If you can see into the next system and the enemy can't see into your launching system, and the targets are in range of the warp point in one turn, a drone attack could be a deadly surprise, but this is of course true of ship attacks, too. Drones do have limited supplies and range, and can't change targets, so if you see a swarm closing in in time, you may be able to avoid them until they expire. I don't remember the exact results of dodging through multiple warp points and how they do/don't track in that case, but that's of course good to know (I forget).

PvK

Resident Alien 2 · #6 January 29th, 2002, 01:14 AM

I was thinking some Plague bombing drones would be interesting if you could sneak in and launch against all the planets in a system simultaneously.....

However in the demo you can't put a Plague Bomb on a Drone. But I would imagine it would be easy to mod this in if desired.

PvK · #7 January 29th, 2002, 02:26 AM

Oh, the other anti-drone tactic one beta tester (forget who - sorry) found was to build anti-drone-drones - cheap-o drones that ram other drones. Of course, you have to have them on hand in the right place at the right time.

PvK