Only 5 small drones?

Sooo i got 10 drones but i can only control 3 and my drone lvl its 3 so that means i can only control a maximum of 5 drones or am i missing something really obvious ?

You can only control up to a maximum of 5 drones.

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Ok , thank you.

For each level you have in the skill Drones you can control 1 drone upto a max of 5. However there have been an exception to this rule, not sure if any of them still remain in the game, but there is/was a ship, Guardian Vexor, which has the ability to launch 5 additional drones (1 per Gallente Cruiser level).

this means you can only control 3, to be able to use a full flight (of 5) you’ll need to train Drones IV and V.

As noted above skill increases the amount of drones you can use up to 5 drones.

But what hasn’t been noted, is ship bandwidth, this also limits the amount of drones you can use.

Light drones use 5mb/s
Medium drones use 10mb/s
Heavy/Sentry drones use 25mb/s
Gecko/Excavator drones use 50mb/s
The medium faction version of Gecko uses 20mb/s

So a ship with 15mb/s drone bandwidth can use 3 light, 1 medium/1 light or 1 medium drones.

So check ship bandwidth as to how many and types of drones can support.

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So it dosent matter if i have 50mb/s bandwidth and i only use light drones im still capped at 5 drones ?

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The drone bandwidth will determine what size of drones, but you can only ever control up to 5 individual drones at any given time.

A Drone Bandwidth of 50mb/s means you can control 5 Light drones (5x 5mb/s) or 5 Medium drones (5x 10mb/s) but you cannot control 10 Light drones, because that would exceed the 5 Drone limit even if it is within the Drone Bandwidth limit.

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Correct

You can have a drone bandwidth of 1000000000mb/s, you can only control 5 drones.

As fun as it might seem to be able to control 20-25 drones at a time on a large ship, and yeah that would be fun, you cant. And theres a good reason for that.

The reason is…

CCP cant handle it. The servers cant handle it. If you have 25 drones per ship, thats 25 more stuff the server needs to track. So they cap it at 5, make it easier for the server to keep track. Means CCP saves money on server costs.

Win win. For CCP atleast.

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The limitation is not to save on server costs but to prevent abuse that some NS blocs used to save their sorry arses during massive battles.

When you have a thousand plus players on your side, fighting against a thousand plus players, with 200, 300 carriers and supercarriers, abuse due to too many drones is not an issue.

but when those on one side 300-500 carriers/SCs (on one side, because they were a popular format at the time) deployed and abandoned T1 drones en-masse - things turned ugly VERY fast.

People can do this without being able to field 20 drones at a time. First off, youre not going to have 200 dominixes who just all have nothing but light drones in their drone bay, that would make them useless in the fight. Second, even if you could only use 5 drones at a time, you could still be able to abandon en masse, it doesnt take very long to eject and abandon drones.

The guns are small because people in EVE don’t need to compensate for their… um… other qualities. :wink:

wrong topic.

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If you’re in a fleet, you can hand control of your drones to another fleet-member, so an individual can have control of more than 5 drones. Having done so, however, you can’t then launch any more drones, so the average maximum per character is still 5.

Yes, and unfortunately it means that Eve ship stats are immensely overbalanced to the point of not being fun at all.

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