How to use drones - the guide.
Posted: April 26th, 2006, 23:12
Drones are good. They're like little henchmen that are cheap and replaceable. You can have fighter drones to attack your enemies or provide cover while you're mining, you can have miner drones to pull in some ore while you're ratting, you can have electronic warfare drones, and you can have repair drones to help heal your comrades or even your drones!
The basic skill needed for drones is 'Drones', pretty straightforward. For every level you have in 'Drones', you can control one additional drone to a max of 5. Here's where some planning takes place. Look at the drone bay on the ship you want to use drones in. If it only has a 5 m3 drone bay, you'll only be able to fit a 5 m3 size drone, which is a light drone. So training to level 3 drones would be pointless, as you'd never be able to fit three in the drone bay anyway.
That, however, is just the beginning. When you open up the drones list of skills in market, you'll see that there are quite a few to choose from. Some of the ones I suggest are scout drone, which increases the range they can be away from your ship before you 'lose control' of them. Don't worry, they just become docile and sit still in space if you have to warp away before retrieving them, they won't attack you as rogue drones upon your return. Enemies will attack them if you have to leave suddenly, but they are cheaper to replace than any ship by far.
Another good drone skill to have is drone interfacing. It does wonders for the drones to the tune of 20% bonus to damage, possibly their armor, and mining effectiveness. So 5 levels of interfacing would double your drones effectiveness.
Drone durability is nice, but there is a trick that keeps your drones from ever being attacked in the first place. Tanking! If you keep your drones in your bay until the enemy targets you, they'll never attack the drones as long as you're around. So your drones will never be attacked, let alone hit for any damage. However, there are missions where enemies show up after you have your drones deployed, so if it's not practical to retrieve and redeploy your drones, it's nice for them to be able to take a couple hits before they disintegrate.
There are fittings that you can add to your drones to have extra range, speed, and tracking capability. The range module is a high, and the tracking and speed are both mediums. Don't spend too many slots though, you'll decrease your ability to tank. Omnidirectional tracking is good for sentry drones, whereas a speed boost to T2 medium drones is just evil with the resulting speed. (Drones navigation skill helps with that too)
But the benefits are many! It all depends on how you use them. While mining in low security (not 0.0), time is of the essence, so i fit as many mining lasers as I can, and even use mining drones to help carve more asteroid. When rats arrive, I put away the mining drones, wait for the rats to target me, and then deploy my scout (fighter) drones to deal with them. Since the rats keep attacking my ship, and I was able to outfit it for tanking without having to use any slots for my drones, I'm able to mine away while my drones chip away at the rats until they're gone. Then my scout drones hop back in the hold, and the 5 miner drones come back to work. You can't change fittings like that on the fly, but you can change drones.
You can even organize your drones into groups. My first grouping was simply 'Injured' If I had drones with damage, I'd put them into this group to keep them from getting launched by mistake. Then I branched out to 'fighters', 'miners' and 'repper'. Now when I have drones in my injured category, I just launch them and the repper drone, target the injured ones, and right click the repper drone and have it 'engage' the targeted injured drone. Pretty soon it's armor is all fixed, then I just right click the 'drones in local space' tab, and either 'scoop drones to bay' which is the command to retrieve them if they're within 1500m, or 'return to drone bay' which instructs them to return to the ship and then the drone bay. You can choose to scoop a drone to your cargo hold as well, and if you're comrade has left drones in space, (they'll just float quietly until retrieved or destroyed by enemies) you can scoop their drones to either your hold or drone bay as well, you just have to get withing 1500 m, as if you were looting a can.
There's endless tactics for use with drones, and lots of types of drones that I haven't even looked at using yet.
Let me share one of my favorite stories about drones though:
While flying about one day I came upon a level 3 DS. I was flying my Vexor with a fit for ratting, and a drone bay full of medium drones. I've got drone interfacing 4, so 5 of these mediums hitting something at once is as scary as heavy missiles, so I thought I'd try to fly a DS by myself. Most of the regular tactics applied, don't aggro everyone at once, let your cap recharge before you aggro the next group, but what I did different was letting my drones do all the damage. I'd fly up to a group until all of them had targetted me, then I'd turn tail, fire my AB up, and release the drones. (You can right click on a groups header bar to launch all of them at once) Once all the drones were out, I'd fire a singe shot at whatever was targeted, and then just fly. Since the enemies were following me, they stayed within drone control range, but out of range of their weapons, (most of the time) and once they were depleted some, I'd start picking up loot, and only targetting them if my drones didn't all pick the same target. With the help of a tractor beam, i was done picking up loot about the time the drones had returned to the ship to orbit, and my cap was still well-charged.
Enough for now, hopefully this will give you some ideas of how to use the little guys. But if you just HAVE to have that webber, and don't have the slots or energy to fit it, think about a drone for the job. Drones don't use any energy from your ship, they don't take a slot (unless you want them to be more uber than skills alone allow), and they're cheaper than a ship every time.
-Drone-lord Dres
Soon to come, bandwidth changes, (as soon as I learn about it! )
The basic skill needed for drones is 'Drones', pretty straightforward. For every level you have in 'Drones', you can control one additional drone to a max of 5. Here's where some planning takes place. Look at the drone bay on the ship you want to use drones in. If it only has a 5 m3 drone bay, you'll only be able to fit a 5 m3 size drone, which is a light drone. So training to level 3 drones would be pointless, as you'd never be able to fit three in the drone bay anyway.
That, however, is just the beginning. When you open up the drones list of skills in market, you'll see that there are quite a few to choose from. Some of the ones I suggest are scout drone, which increases the range they can be away from your ship before you 'lose control' of them. Don't worry, they just become docile and sit still in space if you have to warp away before retrieving them, they won't attack you as rogue drones upon your return. Enemies will attack them if you have to leave suddenly, but they are cheaper to replace than any ship by far.
Another good drone skill to have is drone interfacing. It does wonders for the drones to the tune of 20% bonus to damage, possibly their armor, and mining effectiveness. So 5 levels of interfacing would double your drones effectiveness.
Drone durability is nice, but there is a trick that keeps your drones from ever being attacked in the first place. Tanking! If you keep your drones in your bay until the enemy targets you, they'll never attack the drones as long as you're around. So your drones will never be attacked, let alone hit for any damage. However, there are missions where enemies show up after you have your drones deployed, so if it's not practical to retrieve and redeploy your drones, it's nice for them to be able to take a couple hits before they disintegrate.
There are fittings that you can add to your drones to have extra range, speed, and tracking capability. The range module is a high, and the tracking and speed are both mediums. Don't spend too many slots though, you'll decrease your ability to tank. Omnidirectional tracking is good for sentry drones, whereas a speed boost to T2 medium drones is just evil with the resulting speed. (Drones navigation skill helps with that too)
But the benefits are many! It all depends on how you use them. While mining in low security (not 0.0), time is of the essence, so i fit as many mining lasers as I can, and even use mining drones to help carve more asteroid. When rats arrive, I put away the mining drones, wait for the rats to target me, and then deploy my scout (fighter) drones to deal with them. Since the rats keep attacking my ship, and I was able to outfit it for tanking without having to use any slots for my drones, I'm able to mine away while my drones chip away at the rats until they're gone. Then my scout drones hop back in the hold, and the 5 miner drones come back to work. You can't change fittings like that on the fly, but you can change drones.
You can even organize your drones into groups. My first grouping was simply 'Injured' If I had drones with damage, I'd put them into this group to keep them from getting launched by mistake. Then I branched out to 'fighters', 'miners' and 'repper'. Now when I have drones in my injured category, I just launch them and the repper drone, target the injured ones, and right click the repper drone and have it 'engage' the targeted injured drone. Pretty soon it's armor is all fixed, then I just right click the 'drones in local space' tab, and either 'scoop drones to bay' which is the command to retrieve them if they're within 1500m, or 'return to drone bay' which instructs them to return to the ship and then the drone bay. You can choose to scoop a drone to your cargo hold as well, and if you're comrade has left drones in space, (they'll just float quietly until retrieved or destroyed by enemies) you can scoop their drones to either your hold or drone bay as well, you just have to get withing 1500 m, as if you were looting a can.
There's endless tactics for use with drones, and lots of types of drones that I haven't even looked at using yet.
Let me share one of my favorite stories about drones though:
While flying about one day I came upon a level 3 DS. I was flying my Vexor with a fit for ratting, and a drone bay full of medium drones. I've got drone interfacing 4, so 5 of these mediums hitting something at once is as scary as heavy missiles, so I thought I'd try to fly a DS by myself. Most of the regular tactics applied, don't aggro everyone at once, let your cap recharge before you aggro the next group, but what I did different was letting my drones do all the damage. I'd fly up to a group until all of them had targetted me, then I'd turn tail, fire my AB up, and release the drones. (You can right click on a groups header bar to launch all of them at once) Once all the drones were out, I'd fire a singe shot at whatever was targeted, and then just fly. Since the enemies were following me, they stayed within drone control range, but out of range of their weapons, (most of the time) and once they were depleted some, I'd start picking up loot, and only targetting them if my drones didn't all pick the same target. With the help of a tractor beam, i was done picking up loot about the time the drones had returned to the ship to orbit, and my cap was still well-charged.
Enough for now, hopefully this will give you some ideas of how to use the little guys. But if you just HAVE to have that webber, and don't have the slots or energy to fit it, think about a drone for the job. Drones don't use any energy from your ship, they don't take a slot (unless you want them to be more uber than skills alone allow), and they're cheaper than a ship every time.
-Drone-lord Dres
Soon to come, bandwidth changes, (as soon as I learn about it! )
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