Warfare & Tactics

A long long time ago, in a familiar area of space, domi's had 15 drones.
There was much lag, and everyone was unhappy, so the 5-drone system was implemented. Everyone was happy, and ran around with Nosferatu's that drained your cap no-matter what.

Now the time is 2014, and it's been along time since those days, but perhaps it's time to look back at those solutions, and ask if a similar solution should happen again.

Namely, a new attribute to the programmed into all ships. A relatively easy to program . ' DCF' Drone Control Frequency.

What is DCF then? It's the number of drones a ship can launch.
as such ships would have 3 stats.



So for example, a ship with



would only be able to launch one light, 1 medium or 1 heavy.

Drone boats such as the Dominix, Ishtar, (etc) would get a DCF of 4
Mryms and other vessels a DCF of 3
Moderate drone-ships a DCF of 2
Minimal drone bays a DCF of 1


What I'm suggesting is we get rid of the idea that most ships should launch 5 light drones with no bonus's, and instead totally re-balance drones.

Now this would be a lot of work, re-doing the stats to compensate for lost DPS perhaps.....making heavies perhaps have better tracking so that a Drake can launch an anti-frigate drone perhaps....

Etc etC

But the general idea is that Fewer Better drones.
This also gives the devs more tools for racial flavor in the long run.
One ship could have 40m/3 drone bay, and a DcF of 4 , whilst another could have a 50m3 drone bay, but a DCF of 2.
Now one will tend to use mediums and the other will tend to use Heavies.

CONS:
Re-balance of all drones will be a huge undertaking.
Re-programming all the ships could also be difficult in the short term.

PROS:
Improvements in very large scale fleets as the number of drones on field is dramatically cut.
Another tool for re-balancing ships in the future.

I'm welcome to here feedback on this idea, and hope it get's picked up by the devs.

I propose a bad idea frequency, so that there'd be a limit to how many bad ideas can be thrown around relating to drone balancing

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I think its a good idea.

It would also pave the way for an Escort-Carrier class subcapital type ship.

But honestly, do you want your "fleet pvp" to consist assigning drones and /afk? Keep in mind, it would make the ships that COULD carry drones much more competitive, and really, isnt that what this game is centered on?

Adding limits to drones will not make them more fun.

In-fact, adding limits to a game with great capacity for customisability wouldn't really flow with the core design concepts, surely?

If you are going to do anything with drones, give me swarm drones! (Or at least a graphic model that looks like swarm drones, keep the single game object for all I care.)

25% bonus to what? Drone awesomeness? MWD speed? Winningness?

Considering it gets 5 drones now and at level five a 50 percent bonus to damage and hit points, as well as a 37.5 percent tracking bonus, yeah actually it does seem bad.

Your idea is bad and your attempts to rationalize it after the fact are even worse.

Bad Idea: The Discussion



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