Couple of new uses for drones

I never used them like this before. it might have been the fact that I always considered them expendable units.

Nice ideas there.

How did you get cargo containers on the drones? I tried to make a drone like this a few weeks back but discovered that cargo containers were not an option to be placed on a drone. My idea was to use drones like Halo troop/cargo pods. e.g. Launch troops from drones to planetside. If you can put cargo pods on drones then this should be able to be done.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

What small supply storage? I'm confused too.

He's using a Mod rather than stock, I'm guessing Balance Mod. Maybe IRM. Both add some more components and change Drones uses slightly.

I've actually thought of another use for drones - if anyone here plays Warhammer 40k or Battlefleet Gothic, you may have heard tell of Boarding Torpedoes. This idea intrigues me, so I'm thinking a subgroup of boarding party components that are drone-mountable - it gives a double advantage. Firstly, you can board more easily because the drone will almost definitely be able to run them down, and second, you can have many drones, meaning you can board multiple ships from the one drone equipped one, instead of the usual system of the one ship dumping all its marines into another, which seemed kinda comical in some settings. I mean, suppose I have a cruiser packed full of marines. I'm not sure they'd even all fit into say, a frigate if I tried to board it, but they did, and they killed the frigates crew. Presumably killed it all over the room.

up until 1.58 i've only used drones for exploration since they were broken. engines and sensor and turn em loose. who cares if they get killed. and if you load a frigate with a couple drones it can explore a whole system in 1 turn. (this is pre-long range sensors )
now i might try and use them more. but without being player controllable they don't do anything unless they have a warhead on them... so really. all they are is big missiles. at least they're cheap??

If you just changed BP component so it could be put on drone, you could get "funny" results like:
(I made up numbers in example, so they can be close, but not exact)
speed 20 drone close with speed 14 ship and launch his speed 13 BP so target ship get away.

btw. trick when capturing ships like colony ship in tactical combat. Use boarding ship and fighter. disable fighter's weapon and chase target towards boarding ship.

BP?

And for what it's worth, my most heavy use of drones is as scout craft (All that movement, and it didn't even tie up a construction yard!), and small drones as commerce/colony ship raiders - a couple meson blasters or APBs on such a fast ship can do wonders if you can sneak them past hostile defenses. Of course, this can be fairly trivially defeated by the opponent employing convoys... but if he's using ships to escort, he's not using them to attack. (This works in most mods, but not Stock due to an odd little bug-thingie in the drone description lines.)

Unfortunately, you can't make Drones carry cargo or use boarding components - units just don't have the correct lines in their files to allow them to use the components. Which is a terrible shame, because I can think of quite a few uses where they'd be handy, but... ah, well. You just can't, unless you beg MM really nicely.

BP = Boarding Party

I like the drones because I use them more like a torpedo...ever seen Atlantis? they call them drones =p

Neat ideas. I like the rescue drone concept.

You could also create a drone, load it up with ordnance or supply, and resupply your front line in a jiffy.

I suppose if you are tight on shipyards, you could group up a set of drones that would essentially work together as a full fledged ship.

Construct a sensor drone, a supply drone, an ordinance drone, a couple long range weapons drones, a few PD drones, and to maximize time, construct them all on different dead queue planets and send them each individually to a single planet where the planet could pick them up (using the Transfer cargo order) and then re-launch them together as a single group to hunt down stray enemy ships. Viola, instant hunter ship, and you didn't even have to use up a valuable shipyard queue!

Hmmm, this idea could use some further development. Say take your backwater backyard planets that are just sitting there doing nothing with their queues, and construct drone group members for use at a designated front line drone group assembly planet or mobile drone launcher. Use the drone groups for hit and run guerrilla attacks deep in enemy systems, or slap a cloak on them for deeply embedded mobile supply and ordinance providers in between drone group raids or once the pickings get thin. A standard drone group "refit" would simply mean constructing new drone group members with the new parts, and bringing the group to a drone retrieval, re-assembly, and re-launch location (planet or drone launcher ship/base).

Not sure if it's cheating but drones can planet/launcher hop like any other unit, except they can also cross warp points! This means you can create a drone on the furthest planet from the front line and move it to the front line in a single turn, no matter how far away. As long as you have colonized planets and drone launchers reachable by the drone all along the way, when the drone is relaunched it takes the supply and ordnance from the launch point and continues on its journey to the next recipient. Simply target a colonized planet or friendly drone launcher vessel and get cargo transfer for pickup. Relaunch and go to the next hop. Very fast and easy way to move backyard constructed drone group members to front line planets/launchers in a single turn no matter the distance. Disadvantage is that drones lose their ordnance and supply if you forget to transfer such to the receiving planet/ship. When you relaunch the supply and ordnance is lost and you will have to resupply your supply and ordnance with supply and ordnance from the launcher. But if you want to get backyard constructed drones to the front line quickly, drone colony/launcher hopping certainly is the way to do it.

I normally use drones for cloaked scouting and neutral space patrol. I also use them for the occasional expendable harassment against enemy defenses, usually to probe for weaknesses. Too bad you can't fleet up drones together. You have to launch them all at the same time in groups. Now if only there was a way to convince Captain Kwok to mod in a cargo bay for drones that could pickup small packages of other unit types for quick micromanaged delivery to the front line, but not be able to in fact launch those units (or else the drones themselves would be classified as ships worthy of a spaceyard!)...

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Captain Kwok, if you are reading this thread:

Let me know there if you think being able to add a drone-specific cargo bay (incapable of launching units, but capable to transporting them) to BM is a good idea or not. The idea would be that the drone is still a unit (and thus not capable of launching units...even other drones, because it could be reasoned that items transported via drones are unassembled or in stasis and therefore unusable/unlaunchable from the drone's perspective). It would help with transporting needed good to the front lines quickly, even for backwater planets with no shipyard nearby, freeing up freighters to work on transporting larger amounts of goods across systems also having the ability to launch units and repeat orders.

I was thinking that the drone-specific "compact cargo bay" would essentially be able to carry twice as much as a normal cargo bay. Such fleets of drones could compliment a freighter system whereby cargo is transfered by drones to waiting (planets or) freighters who would fill up and move to the front. A dedicated micromanaged drone could even hop all the way to the front in a single turn with the needed units.

The concept could also extend to fighters perhaps labeled as "workbees" - again using the same "compact cargo bay" to pickup small numbers of units on planets and gather them in a central system location for pickup and delivery the front by drones or freighters, since fighters can't warp.

Thoughts?

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So you could load drone with cargo (don't remember numbers, so here are fictional), load it into ship. So 50 kt drone with 2 20 kt cargo bay carries 400kt of cargo and two of them fits into standard cargo bay. Hmm. And you can transport other drones too. So one cargo bay could pack infinite amount cargo drones thus infinite cargo.

Units can't carry cargo.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Allot of great ideas killed by that simple fact....

Yea, I was thinking if it would be possible to mod a small cargo bay into BM for drones and fighters to use to carry disassembled units or troops in stasis.

This way in theory, a large fighter converted to a "workbee" (fighter with engines, cockpit, lifesupport, and small cargo bay) could carry two large troops in stasis, or two "disassembled" drones or two large "disassembled" weapon platforms; or two disassembled large satellites, or a drone could perhaps carry 2-4 times as much as a workbee.

Such a fighter to drone to freighter unit transport and freighter launch system would do much at improving the efficiencies of harvesting units for use at the front line.

I wonder though if this would really mess up game balance issues. What do you think Captain Kwok?

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As I mentioned above, units can't be made to carry cargo. And if units could carry cargo, you'd run into that infinite cargo situation described above.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Ok. Well at least my drone swarm idea still stands as a viable backyard planet production strat. And you have to admit, the drone-planet/dronelauncher hopping idea does have merit to move them quickly to the front line.

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But it's somewhat an exploit. Thankfully, you can't do that in simultaneous games (AFAIK).

how about a repair drone? Have a repair component on a drone that works at say 1/10 of what a normal repair component does on a regular sized ship.

The simplest way to avoid 'infinite cargo' is that the 'mother' cargo vessel has to carry all the cargo of the unit carrying it. By which I mean if you have a 50kt drone with 80kt of cargo on board, if you want to load it into a freighter, it takes up 130kt total... Kinda like how fighters nick supplies from their mothership, they'd 'nick' cargo too.

As for dronelauncher exploits, you could simply have the game track the movement remaining of units in cargo, at least for the turn. You already track damage, afterall, so a 'movement remaining' feild in the same area of code wouldn't be that hard to track & implement.

...Of course, the hard part is suggesting this - and getting it implemented - by MM. Any volinteers?

Or give the 20kT cargo component the ability to store no more than 20kT of cargo...

or maybe put in some script function that checks to see if something is carrying cargo, and prevent anything that is carrying cargo from being carried as cargo.

In some ways, it does simply seem silly that a 375kt small freighter with 200kt of cargo bays can carry 2000kt of cargo.

I like the idea of a cargo components only carrying about as much as it weighs, although for me, it makes sense if they carry less than they weight, to represent the mass of the component itself (a cargo bay is going to need walls to hold stuff in), with a little less space for any 'equipment' needed for ones that deploy/recover units.

Maybe increase the overall size of carriers and freighters so they can still be capable of carrying a good deal of stuff, but perhaps not as much as before.

It will have the added side effect of reducing the amount of fighters and drones that can be fielded by ships/fleets, and lessen the chances of someone getting hammered because another player built up some nigh on unstopable fleet crammed with a large number of fighters or drones.

If cargo-carriing ships were made 10 times bigger (and required much higher percentage of cargo components), cargo components would cost less/weight more and carried just little less than they weight, then it would be much closer to description in lot of novels, where warships are much smaller than cargo ships (except of course Dahak).

Thing is, we're measuring "size" in tonnage - i.e. mass. Our ships are sailing through space. In actual physical size (length etc) I'm sure our cargo ships actually are much bigger than warships.

The one thing that's "illogical" is how you get the same speed and same supply usage no matter whether the cargo bays are full or empty. But I'm willing to suspend my disbelief on that.

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You could alsways use the actual physical measure of volume and mass, two values tide to each other for cargo storage ability (track it as a vector). This way when your texh gets to a point where you have energy storage, you can just dtore it as pure energy and materialize it when you need it.

Would make some cool weapon concepts also...

One measure I like comes from an RPG type game I had.
Basically Tonnage was a dual purpose measurement, on everage equalling a 10ft cube or 1 ton of mass, so a ship with a tonnage of 1000 can be very, very big with lots of space, or not so big with little extra interior space. It also had 'storage' as taking up more space than the stuff it carrying, something like 10% iirc, so 100 tonnage of storage space took up 110 of the ship's tonnage.

About the matter of supply use/speed never changing based on ship size.
If a ship was made to need multiple engines per move (like SE IV?), wouldn't it have the added effect of also increase supplies used by a ship?

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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

That would be interesting, but it seems extra mass wouldn't do so much as to slow the ship, but simply reduce its ability to acceerate, decelerate and turn.

True, in the frictionless environment of space, "max speed" probably wouldn't be affected by mass. Supply usage most definitely would be, unless you re-define what "supply" actually represents.

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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

The problem, of course, with arguing over newtonian physics in terms of fuel consumption is that the entire game functions on an inertialess model to start with. Your ships cost fuel to move; not to speed up and then slow down

Hmm...
Random pondering results in this idea.

Actual supply used per move = engines per move * default supply use per space moved * % of present ship mass compared to default mass...
So, if a 500kt freighter had 1000kt of cargo, it would be at 300% of default mass and use up three times normal supply usage for a ship its size per space moved...

Or something to that effect...

The only glitch to getting this to work is the shipsize data file that creates the hull sizes (and has all the values your wanting to mod) is defined and created on game start up. So any formulas used in that data file will work but only on start up and not during the actually game turn, like when you load cargo or offload it.

hhmm max speed would be affected by mass as objects aproaching the speed of light gain mass in proportion to their speed, at light speed u hav infinite mass and have then just consumed all of the available resources of the universe...

what fun.

hhmm max speed would be affected by mass as objects aproaching the speed of light gain mass in proportion to their speed, at light speed u hav infinite mass and have then just consumed all of the available resources of the universe...

what fun.