Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If you'd looked around, you would have seen that this has been suggested, and shot down time and time again... I even think it's in the stickies.

Yup, implementing it as a rig is a good idea. I like it.

Better than some ideas.

Not sure if it balances well across ship classes.

Big buff to frigate drone carriers less so to battleships. Almost needs to vary by size.

Cargohold disadvantage makes sense but is probably to weak. Perhaps structure instead.

It's not allowing ships to bump up the size of drone they can have launched, it's just making it so they can carry more. If we make it a flat amount across the board, I think that it'd be pretty balanced.

Let's say we have two ships:
Ship A is a Frigate with a 25m3 Drone Bay and a 25m3 Bandwidth. It can either Drop a flight of Lights, 2 mediums and a light, or 1 Heavy/ Sentry. It puts a Drone Bay Expander in it's Rig Slot for 200 Calibration. It gains 25m3 Of Drone Bay space, allowing him to have another flight of lights, 2 more mediums and another light, or 1 more heavy/sentry. Despite the 50m3 Drone bay size, It's still only able to control 25m3 of Bandwidth.
What this means, though, is perhaps, a flight of damage drones and a flight of utility drones. You could swap at any time for either, but could not have both out, cause of the Ship's Bandwidth limitation.

Ship B is a Battleship with a 250m3 Drone bay and a 125m3 Bandwidth. You can carry quite a bit as it is. If you throw on a Drone Bay expander, you gain 25m3 as well, pulling you up to 275. So you get the same thing a Frigate would, only it's less useful to the Battleship.
Again, Just because it got an extra 25m3 of space doesn't mean it gets a bump up to bandwidth. (what would you even need that extra 25m3 for anyways? You can have a full set of heavies/ Sentries anyways). It also doesn't mean you can have extra drones out on top of the 5 drone limit. It just means you got 25m3 of extra drone space.

/bump

It's useless to existing droneboats that already have more than enough drone bay, and a buff to gunboats that didn't have enough before. The drawback should be real, like decreased gun dps, not cargobay. Gallante don't need another nerf, and Winmatards don't need another buff.

It's hilarious to observe how some people miss the crucial detail: This doesn't give bandwidth.

Either your ship can use drones, or it cannot. If your ship can use drones, then that is considered into it's balance for combat.

Now, before going on and claiming that the drone bay is also balanced properly, I agree.

Yes, I agreed with that. A ship should not be able to mount rigs and modules exclusively to improve defense and increase it's DPS as well as add more reserve drones.

This doesn't do that either.

You must sacrifice a rig slot for it. A rig slot you may have wanted to improve your defense, or increase your DPS. You have to trade that in to get this.

Balance is maintained, it costs to do this.

I think that a rig that trades cargo for dronebay is a win.
If you want to tank on rigs, fine, but maybe a couple of extra drones maybe is worth the trade.
EVE is funny like that.
+1 nice idea i see some good options with this.
Can the code cope? Now that is the question....

Having the room for a flight of ecm drones in addition to dps drones isn't "original amount," it's a game changer. Like I said, it's a buff to gunboats that's not balanced to have this kind of advantage in addition to their gun dps. That cane/drake doesn't have enough dronebay, by design.

And as we have seen, no design is exempt from review and change as the game progresses.

This is a trade-off item, not a free bonus. You must sacrifice a rig slot which has such proven value, most ships only get two or three.

Such scarcity of resource ensures that players must carefully consider what rigs to use, or suffer the consequences.