Tough I am still a fairly eve Online player, I have played before for a few months a long time ago. Currently playing Gallente Federation and using Tristan, and playing around with a Algos destroyer with its large drone bay. So training drones to level 5 which allows for 5 drones I noticed level 4 does not get you to 5 drones. I would really like to see it changed so that level 5 drones gives you 6 drones in total. Not sure if that would be over powering but in my case I am using drones for killing rats so far.
So can we have 6 drones?
I was also thinking of modding drones so that you can use 5 or 6 drones with the ability of launching 5 combat/scout drones as well as a few scavengers or other non combat drones. So generally you would be able to launch 5 combat drones in a group and also a few scavengers. Not sure on what the amount of support drones that could be launched.
Lastly was thinking of having the ability so that drones are electronically data linked to your ship and have sensors with a data link giving scanning and enhanced targeting around where the drones currently are and the ability of locking on a target near where the drones are. Also the ability to command the drones to be able to approach a non targeted ship at a reasonable range.
This game surely don’t need more dronepower, in whatever way. And I say this as not-so-new EVE Online player, sorry. They are scaling much too well with multiboxing and droneassist to give them even more features or numbers.
What do you think about having ship drone Rigs? Possibly a very expensive rig drone item that allows a player to use 6 drones at a time, and or possibly a rig item to increase the size of the drone bay.
There are already Drone Rigs to make Drones more powerful. Give them more speed, increase control range, increase their optimal range, increase their damage, implants for increasing their hitpoints or speed. Why do you insist that it has to be “more drones”? Every additional object that the server has to calculate and sync over possibly many hundred clients in a large battle makes the performance worse.
And again, Drones are already borderline OP especially when it comes to mass-multiboxing or afk-gameplay styles, there shouldn’t be a way to give these ships even MORE drones, MORE bandwith etc…, it really would make them even MORE powerful to mass-multibox them or go brainless afk-ratting.
Dealing with multiple entities increases CPU usage very quickly if you have a lot of drone ships in a single system very quickly increases processing requirements.
Eve is a game of specifics, its much better to fit a ship for one specific activity and carry that out. THEN return to the site for another activity if you want to. (Take the combat ship and blow them up, then go back later in the salvage ship).
There are mid and low slot modules that increase scan resolution to improve locking speed if this is something you need, butas with anything in eve, you have to make the choice between that or something else. If you intend to make the target a bigge target for other purposes, there ARE target painting drones, which will allow other assailants to lock on to and more easily hit a target.
TBH. I’ve always wondered why the game hasn’t gone the other way on drones yet. Either treating a wing of 5 drones as a single entity or simply replacing groups of drones with singular “super” drones. Perhaps there’s already a bit of server side optimization when handling drones.
As while 1 drone being added to a fight doesn’t incur as much additional network/cpu load as 1 player… they aren’t “free” to the server. Every player on a grid still gets updates for position, speed, distance, and 2 dozen other bits of info, for every drone present, additionally all the calculation required to make those bits of info.
So at a glance, a dozen ships flying 1 gecko each (for 24 total entites, and 12 clients) is probably requiring less server time to process than that same dozen ships fielding 5 sentries or heavy attack drones. (72 entities+12 clients)
The quickest and dirtiest way to rework drones to optimize for server load, would be to cut the number of drones that can be deployed down to 1 for every ship, and introduce more drones beefed up to offset the smaller numbers (Like the Gecko does in place of Heavy Attack Drones).
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Do note, this is not an endorsement of such an overhaul to drones. I’m personally pretty happy with how drones are at the moment.
yeah, especially since the drones are always changing direction it means they need to be updated and broadcasted every tick to every client on grid - just like missiles.
That being said, their effect in terms of update is less important than AoE like bombs, bubbles, boosts.
It’s a LONG time ago but i definitely remember a dev blog that mentioned multiple drones would be treated as a single unit where possible.
I think the optimisation in thatdev blog was to make the two things the same.
Not really, if your client is given the vector, you only need to update the client if the vector changes, it can continue to display the existing vector until it changes. I think missiles work the same way. Their velocity and direction is reported then the client just displays that path.
And it changes every second. Unless the target is still and they are just moving towards it.
How the game engine is : every second it changes the acceleration vector of each entity. So when something orbits something else, every second the engine accelerates it towards the closest point in the sphere that is closest to you present direction. And most entities actually orbit.
Well i guess we can be pedantic, why not. the information from the server is the flight path, whether that be a straight line or a circular path. If the situation you describe were true, ships and drones wouldn’t follow nearly a smooth a path as they do when orbiting. Particularly fast orbits would look like an octagon or similarly numbered sided shape path.
Just throwing this out there as I was looking at Ship Mastery and licence. Could have a 6th drone if you get the certificate for ship mastery 5. Just though I would mention that but not very seriously.
Nope, it’s acceleration vector not speed vector.
That’s nob being pedantic. The server needs to transmit those data every second when they change every second.
So getting the gist that 6 drones are not happening but. So thinking about drone combat and came up with a few things to make drones a bit more useful for drone boat pilots. First off it would be nice to have drone control icons in the Selected items display. I would like to see drone approach, orbit and an attack icons for pilots with drones, this may also auto deploy drones. It just puts all your combat options where your mouse action is. If not maybe control icons in the drone control window. Also thinking that drone boat ships should have a special drone control radar, sensor, and targeting electronic systems increasing the target range. So with a Tristen normally looking at around 10 clicks for lock on I would recommend pushing this up bit to like 30 clicks. This allows a drone pilot to engage a target a little more before the target gets close to you. Generally kind of a torpedo or long range missile affect.
Edit there are a few skills that increase drone speed and range and skills for better target range and targeting. A tweak to target range will make these skills more useful for a drone boat.
