So current drone stats:

All the armada drones are sub par or so-so compared with cheaper alternatives

The inbuilt aug mods on drones does stack with augs, making some stats difficult to aug for

I didn't test them all but some were clearly missed/botched balance like the solar collection drone and iko drone.

Every drone in the list represented in the first post was modified, the drones that you are referring to are definitely beefed or looked at, but probably not to what you expected.

The Iko drone and Solar Collection drone was left alone as we felt it was already decent, but if you feel they need a beef I can look into it

How are the armada drones still sub par: Armada Ambrosia Drone had more healing and has increased range, Armada Bastion does a lot more DPS, Armada Defender has a speed debuff effect, with a high rof with a knock-back effect, Armada Ambush Mine does a lot of damage with debuff aura.

Apologies for late response the patch has taken me away from the forum a bit. The drone improvements wont be ended until its all resolved, I was hoping the changes would be good, but I suspect some drones may need tweaking even after.

Issue with iko/solar collector: they have significantly less range than Qa Quuu and Quu drones whilst also doing less dps (solar collector fares better here). My initial testing of advanced pirate drones was that they are generally inferior to the lower tech portable surgeon. Some drones seem like they were buffed to surpass their old stats but then weren’t compared against the other rebalanced drones.

I started writing this and decided it would be quicker to just get this out of the way: a lot of drones are hamstrung by the aug mods you’ve given them, effectively forcing the use of one or 2 aug setups and making variety impossible (in particular, most drones don’t seem to go past 2k range very willingly). Is this actually intentional, and if so why are you severely limiting some drones in this fashion? The only notable exception seems to be Andaman drones.

Armada ambush mine: only has 1.5m shield bank and doesn’t actually seem stealthy. Has questionable resists and banks before being able to do significant damage, at which point I’m not entirely sure if the target would still get constant debuffs, yet alone multiple targets. Seems to have a large energy modifier as my aug plugs gave a miniscule energy bank bonus. So far as I remember damage bonuses didn’t yield much either so at best it’s a fancy gimmick drone. It can’t be put out in the open to debuff enemy kits because it’s too fragile and It puts out questionable dps (with no sustain and low range) for bursting targets before banking. The resist debuff doesn’t seem large enough to justify using the drone in light of these facts, when other, more effective drones are available. As is, a player would just fly around them, unless a prohibitive number are positioned around strategic positions, at which point you might as well use a different drone.

Armada ambrosia drone: I recall it has a lower bank than the current Andaman drones , less range, a worse dps weapon, fewer aug slots and due to its aug mods it’s not possible to effectively aug for range. As an attached drone it has the problems I’ve previously mentioned and takes up more slots as a t20 drone. At best it seems like a sidegrade to Andaman drones.

Armada Defender: Relatively low shield bank, horrendous dps (think it was 4.5k on the mags), not 100% sure about range on the mags but it didn’t seem above average. If its sole purpose is to give knockback and – speed (which should really be more an additional feature) I would expect more tank and range.

Armada Bastion: Yes, you did buff it to have good pulsegun dps. The caveat is that it’s less tanky, has less ethereal dps/range than kasa and AD (also the beam is laser, a less valuable damage type). Very little (no) setup diversity is allowed and its projectiles are slower than Kasa’s making them less likely to actually hit players. I think I can see what you were going for, but it was only partially achieved. Its slightly superior dps doesn’t outweigh its shortcomings.

As for a general suggestion of what to do? Give the armada drones some more resists/tank to put them on par with other drones (why deploy expensive drones if they’re pretty much designed to die in BvB and players outrange them anyway?), give them an extra aug slot and allow for more niche applications or just remove their augs entirely and balance them as a fixed stats package (you seem to be doing this already for all drones, assuming one setup to be the “base” stats- possibly why you didn’t catch some of these issues?) and add a secondary trans/weapon to the ambrosia/bastion drones or buff them to better excel in a niche role (would probably end up op). Don’t forget- drones generally can’t be used offensively, only defensively. A niche drone that is slightly better but has X shortcoming isn’t worthwhile because the attacker is guaranteed to exploit that shortcoming and render the drone subpar (and no I’m not going to grant you incompetent attackers. As in chess, one should assume a competent opponent).


Ideally I would’ve run some mock PvD battles on test for the defender and mine, but drones can’t fire on test so this will have to do. I probably ended up repeating myself a few times, but I’m hoping this more in depth analysis will let you see where I’m coming from. Don’t think I can expound much more without things getting ridiculous.

Could we have the stats on some weapons that we can't normally get, but are used on drones? E.g, Station Ice Cannon, Ambrosia Gourd, Andaman Gourd, Station Argoblaster.

EDIT: Also, Pirating Drones still don't have a decent weapon. X-surgical laser is too low range for a permanent drone.

Pirating drones received a 300% damage and 300% range augmenter bonus. Wasn't increased too much due to the fact they're positioned in Bonnet.

I've discovered putting augmenter modifications wasn't the way to go so after universe reset, a change has been made that will allow players to augment there drones will have full effect. Just will take time again as I process through them all removing / fixing the massive augmenter percentages I attached to them.

Hopefully this will take me less than 4 weeks this time, just going to start after universe reset. Additionally making armada drones more powerful.

Do Annihilator Platforms and Defenders come in batches of 5? I mean you get 5 Platforms/Defenders from the blueprint.

Yes I built 4 and got 20 drones

Cool, that's nice to know, if only the blueprint would actually tell you that.

OMG! Just started a bunch, might even have enough for next uni to fill everything up then.
<3

Um, they can't be taken out of the galaxy. Or stored.

Oh well...

Thanks. I know to cancel them now.
How do they prevent storage?

Decay on uni reset

They decay on warp and on reset I guess. I only assumed they were like XYZ because the build mats are basically the same. Asked a dev, got confirmation, canceled all of my builds.

Yes that is correct, apologies for the late response. These platforms and defense drones will decay on universe reset and you cannot warp out the same galaxy you've built them in.