This isn’t circumventing the drawback, it’s managing your weapon system. That’s like saying reloading your guns as you fly between targets to maximize ready ammunition when in range is circumventing reload drawbacks.
You really would have to rebalance everything. Drones and ships that use them. What would you do? Increase dps to compensate for loss of drones in the flight? Initial alpha damage just went up, especially on gila/rattle.
Increase drone bay to compensate for more drones being destroyed? You’d have to since this is a droneboats primaru weapon system. Anything else would be crippling.
That’s not even touching the surface in terms of ships using mixed flight, ewar/damp/mining/salvage drones etc. Or ships where drones are the secondary anti-frig defense. Also it’s pointless sending all 5 salvage drones at one wreck.
There are many use cases where grouping the drones would unbalance or negate the usefulness of the drones/mix of drones in question.
Being able to instantly recall a drone is, in my opinion, a way around the drawback of your drones getting shot. It can be replaced by a full health drone in a second and recharge hp in the drone bay. One of the big reasons i like the idea of squadrons is more drones getting destroyed.
You can tweak any stat to compensate. If any compensation is needed at all. Hp, sig radius, resists, damage, tracking, speed. Take your pic. I understand its a nerf to some tactics, but these tactics are, in my opinion, not worth saving or worth nerfing in the face of the benefits.
As for salvaging…squadron drones can increase salvage chance. Not being able to assign a single drone to each wreck is not a huge loss. Same as mining in an orca. It just becomes less afk friendly.
Drone boat’s have spare high slots for a reason, fit a remote repper and repair your entire drone group with 1 repper instead of having to switch between all your drones repping them. ← grouping has other buffs, consider all things.
Also, grouping would balance drones against e-war a lot better as well, since they are way to dominant against e-war, also if e-war was stronger against drones becuase of grouping, it would be easier to balance e-war as a whole so that it isn’t as crippling against gun ships.
@Rivr_Luzade
Just as now to direct drones to separate targets, you just need not set the “attack one target” и and order them to attack in an aggressive mode
In fact, I propose to replace the option “to attack one goal” to the option “to create a squad”
@Corraidhin_Farsaidh
grouping of drones does not remove any of the existing mechanics, but only adds a new one
Probably e-war drones and stationary can not be unified without destroying the balance
@Mina_Sebiestar
mix of drones does not contradict the squading of drones AFTER LAUNCHING!
2 * Warrior 1. - one squad
2 * Hammerhead 2.- second squad
salvag dron . - fly alone
With grouped drones I cannot recall that drone. I either lose drones from the group or recall the whole group and lose 100% dps for the duration of the recall/launch cycle.
If the drone (drone squad) is taken in the lock, from instantly disconnected from the group. The grouping will not complicate the management, but fast immediately showing that the drones now are lock. Do not look at the integrity of the drone, if it appeared in the overlay, you can immediately recall it.
The important thing that I will do in OPost
Identical drones are combined after launch.
The pilot has the ability to have 2 or 3 squad at a same time.
They fly and hit others, until they are taken in the field of view or deal damage.
That’s what I figured as well, and which makes me believe that this would cause even more server strain because it constantly had to check if your drones are in a squad or not.
@Azhek_Ariman I understand your reasoning for the proposal, I simply think the premise is flawed in terms of use case rather technical merit.
The only time grouping drones would help server performance is in massive fleet battles. Any strain removed from the server by this would be immediately replaced by bopth sides bringing more pilots instead. We know this to be the case since this is exactly what has happened since the hardware upgrade allowed ~6k pilots logged in instead of ~2-3k.
What you propose is additional development to add another option to drone management that adds nothing for dedicated drone pilots, but rather removes an important function from them in all activities that use drones.