Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Right. Going to make this short and sweet. Missiles in PvP are pretty much accepted to be less than useful. I propose to make them useful. Not by changing how they work, but by adding in a strategic element.

Single-Volley Drone Missile Pods.

These drones carry a couple (2-6) missiles and orbit your ship (Disable the ability to send the drones following a target aside from the player's own ship). Upon being told to attack, they launch everything they have and the drones themselves are expended in the process. This gives a single ship a rather large and potentially nasty ALPHA capability for a single shot.

Advantages: Reuse of existing game code for missiles and drones. Alpha-strike capability.

Disadvantage: No drones unless you happen to have replacements in your drone-bay after Alpha is launched.

Easiest way to maintain game balance would be to scale them according to size and missile type (+ number of missiles carried), perhaps even adding in a bit more fun by having the sizes/types/tier of drones being dictated additionally by a skill or two.

Proposed new drones:

• Rocket Drone Pod - 2-4 rockets per pod. Equivalent to a Scout Drone.
• Light Missile Drone Pod - 3-5 light missiles per pod. Scout Drone.
• HAM Missile Drone Pod - 2-4 HAM Missiles Per Pod. Medium Drone.
• Heavy Missile Drone Pod - 3-5 heavy missiles per pod. Medium Drone.
• Torpedo Drone Pod - 2-4 Torpedo's per Pod. Heavy Drone.
• Cruise Missile Drone Pod - 3-5 cruise missiles per pod. Heavy Drone.

# of missiles per pod would of course have to be balanced for game-mechanics and to not break the game.

Possibly situational, but certainly fun. In fleet-fights, it might give wing commanders something to consider. For example, a wing of frigates diving down upon a chosen target, releasing a whole horde of rockets.

Another thought - the old venerable Drake is long overdue for an overhaul. last I heard, the plan was to strip it of it's resistance bonus and making it a missile platform. Perhaps give it a bonus for using missile drone pods, give it and other similar ships a truly vicious Alpha capability - albeit slightly delayed in landing that hammer down due to existing missile mechanics with missile travel times, explosion velocity, etc.

Certainly open for thoughts here, but this would certainly give missiles a new lease on life in PvP in my book.

You know I was ganna post something about missile drones.

But I would do it a little different.

Drones hold missiles witch ranges in amount.
Rocket drones (lht drones) with the most and the larger the missile the less each drone can carry. (torp drones hold hardly anything)
Instead of drones becoming useless after they are out of missiles the have to return to the ship and restock.
that way they don't have unlimited ammo like regular drones but they may do more damage.
It also makes different drone set UPS available (rocket drones small targets, or just for close range)
(lht missile drones for sniping small ships, were as heavy missile drones are close range for large ships and torp or cruise missile are for sniping for large ships.

Jesus...that was hard to type on a phone lol

You can even make missiles that only drones can use if you yearly wanted to.

The only real advantage missiles have, is the power to change damage types while keeping the the same firing range advantages.

The whole advantage of your missile drones, would seem to be a MLRS function.
(The MLRS was a weapon system used by the US army, dunno if it is still active today. The name meant Multi Launch Rocket System, although it had alternate loadouts using larger payloads.)

Would the pilot be able be able to select damage type, and if so would this be because you had to manually load?

Drones are currently balanced to be a source of continuous DPS. Some ships even have them as the primary DPS.

If they are one shot non reusable things, then they need to take up less space in the drone bays, and cost little more than the missiles they fire.
In that case, what you really created was a two stage guided rocket system, where the first stage was simply limited to orbiting the parent ship, and the second stage was the missile cluster itself launched as a multi warhead device.
The pilot using these will be limited to how many they can carry in the drone bay. If they rely on them significantly, then they will need to dock and reload.

For re-usable launchers, I would suggest to give them a sizable reload time, like one minute in your drone bay. Possible requirement you be carrying the needed missiles in your cargo, although every other drone supplies its own ammo or laser crystals.

I like the idea of having drones return to the bay. but that would mean you will have re launch the drones?
My while take on missile drones was high damage over a short period then back to the ship to reload. Unlike the pretty constant damage drones do ATM. For me massive damage that does they type of damage you can chose is a positive.

If you want a drone that doesn't do constant damage, why not suggest a simple suicide bomber drone? Rather than this weird reusable cluster missile thing