Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As far as I’m informed drones are like little ships to the server. Which is easily done for the great hardware in usual situations, but of course in very large battles, like we have seen some in the past, they are an additional mass of data which needs to be processed.
Hey, Time Dilation is a great thing to make fights possible – but I think it would still be nice to try to reduce the produced data so everything will work better and smoother (and faster).

So I had this (raw) idea of helping the server a little bit:
I assume that most players (95%+ maybe) are using 5 types of the same drone and usually have assigned all drones to the same target. If that is true a simple way to reduce the needed information for drones would be to make 1 drone out of that 5.
Like when TiDi reaches a critical point the server starts to run this, lets call it „drone-script“. I wouldn’t use the 10% as a good point, since the CPU needs some power left to work on the drone-script, something between 20-40% seems more senseful to me. With the drone-script active, all the drones in space of a single pilot become one. But of course with the senseful numbers times 5. (Instead of 5 drones doing 1 damage, you will have 1 drone doing 5 damage. Instead of 5 drones with 10 shield you will have 1 drone with 50 shield etc.) This can be done with most numbers like shield,armor,hull, damage etc. – of course not for resistance or speed ;)
Very important with that: The drones do even melt in space. So the server only has to calculate one position instead of five. To make it easier this melting thing should be done while the launching-drone-process. If you already launched drones, they simply are recalled and send back tot he target as soon as they became one. If the drone-script stops the same thing will start the other way around, so drones are being cut off in 5.
The effect should end at a rather high number of TiDi, so you don’t have much „jumping around“, maybe something like 80%.
And before I start thinking about what happens if you have different types of a drone, assigned to different targets and what happens if your melted drone has gotten damage … I just let this idea spread. That are problems that can be thought about later ;)

To make it easier to understand, I just made an example how it could work inside the game:
I’m entering a system where a big fight starts. Time Dilation is at 50% at the moment and I start shooting, getting in position and lauchning my drones: 5 Warrior II and let them fight my target. More and more ships are coming to join this battle – TiDi drops to 25%. [Drone-script starts]
I get a message that „Drone-management for big fights is on“, and while I read that my drones are automatically recalled to the ship. As they reach the hangar they are replaced by one single drone „Warrior II [x5]“ which is – without any additional command given by me – returning and shooting at the original target. All new drones launched now are working the same way, previous drones are called back and melting with the new one. Instead of the big drone ball of 500 ones I only see around 100 in space.
But the fight didn’t last long, TiDi is already going up. It reaches 65%, so the drones are coming back at my ship and being cut off each other. As soon they leave again they are 5 Warrior II. I enjoyed a smoother battle and am happy :D


Yes, I know this is a not-so-little affect on the game mechanics, but I don’t think that drones decide a lot of those mass-battles. So reducing their handability to increase it for ships at the same time seems like a good deal to me.
And of course it’s just a simple and raw idea. Maybe it’s not even possible due to technical things, maybe I was wrong with all the numbers etc. – but at least I tried :D
Feel free to play with this idea!

Well, I don't estimate the effect on the server load near 50% - but of course, this would make it possible to add more ships to the system. But I would take that as a goal to reach ^^

The seperate drone-management-blob-whatever isn't a bad idea, but I think it's not as easy to do as simply "replacing" the drones. I know the drone-problem-ideas aren't new, but haven't found any specific idea like mine yet.

And for the drone-fleets
Yes, there are fleets like that, dunno how many. But they still can run their drones, its just simplified a lot :D


The abandoned drones could just be destroyed in my opinion if the server is having trouble with the load - but I don't think its a bit effect ...