Drones

What are they?

Drones are little automated combat platforms that attack enemies, provide healing or combat auras to allies, or even produce bubbles to shield you from enemy fire.


Drones come in two forms:
• Temporary – These drones have a time limit, after which they will decay, never to be seen again, unless you scoop them.
• Permanent (also referred to as Pillboxes) – These drones do not have a time limit, they are more commonly used as permanent defence to your stations and other assets (refer to station guide for more info).

Drone related skills

Utilizing drones requires the Drone Deployment skill, this skill costs 4 skill points per level, up to a maximum of level 21.

Drone Mastery (a sub focus of the Engineer [Support] Class) – This skill gives your drones a ‘weighted combat bonus’. For each level in the skill, your drones will gain an extra:
• 0.5%: Damage (up to 10.5% at 21)
• 1%: Recovery, Energy Regeneration, Visibility, Rate of Fire, and Range (21% at 21)
• 1.5%: Energy, Shield Bank, and Tracking (31.5% at 21)
• 3%: Radar Strength (63% at 21)

Users are able to have up to 3 Temporary Drones deployed at any one time, but this number can be increased by training the Drone Mastery skill, up to a maximum of 6 at level 20.

Drone Research – This allows for an increased number of Permanent drones to be deployed, as well as a 10% increase to Shields, Energy and Range of Temporary Drones per level. This skill requires 50 Skill Points per level.

Astral Injection – Allows you to ‘inject’ augmenters in to your drones to increase their abilities. This is accomplished by bringing your ship to a halt over the top of your drone, targeting it, and tossing the desired augmenter overboard. You may only inject augmenters of a tech lower than or equal to your level in Astral Injection. Different drones have differing numbers of slots for augmenters to be equipped in to.

Station Mastery – This skill gives 2% to all Permanent Drone stats, per level.

Obtaining Drones

Drones come in a number of different types! Healing Drones, Offensive Drones, Disruptor Drones and many more!

Temporary
• Stationary – The majority of Temporary Drones are of this type, they cannot move on their own.
• Mobile – These drones will circle you if you are stationary and follow you if you are moving. They will follow you through warp gates, which makes them great for defending yourself while on the fun.

Permanent
• Stationary – Once again this type makes up the majority of Permanent drones.
• Attached – These drones can be attached to planetary bodies to give them the added advantage of mobility. This prevents your enemies from being able to tow them in to suns to weaken your defences.

A number of drones can be bought from regular AI bases, but it is believed that the more powerful drones are bought from exotic AI bases, dropped from dangerous bosses in dungeons or built from rare Blueprints.



Deployment

Temporary Drones

These must be charged on your ship before they can be deployed, this can be achieved by equipping them on to your ship like a regular item. You may only deploy a drone, less than or equal to the tech level of the ship you are deploying it with. For example a Porpoise (tech 17) may only deploy drones that are of tech level 17 and below.



Only a certain number of drones may be equipped to your hull at any one time, depending on the class of the hull. This is as follows:
• Light Fighters – 4
• Heavy Fighters – 8
• Capital Ships – 12
• Freighters – 18
Once they are fully charged, they can be deployed by either right clicking to display the options and selecting ‘use’, or they can be assigned to a hot key for rapid deployment.



If a drone is unequipped when the hotkey is pressed (given that there are free drone equip slots available) the drone will first be equipped to charge, the hotkey must be pressed again in order to deploy the freshly charged drone.

Permanent

Unlike temporary drones, these do not require charging. As long as you have the required amount of energy to deploy the drone and adequate space surrounding your ship, these will be deployed instantly upon clicking the ‘use’ option or the hotkey.
NOTE: The galaxy you are intending to deploy permanent drones in to must be either owned by your own team, or un-owned.

Retrieval
As previously mentioned, all temporary drones have a time limit before they decay in to nothingness never to return. In order to prevent this from happening you must scoop your drones, you can do this the same way you would scoop any other debris, except you must target the drone first (this prevents accidental scooping of drones). Also, you must buy a special scoop for this purpose, called a ‘Drone Scoop’. Don’t worry though, this scoop can still scoop up normal debris so no need to carry more than one!

Capture
Some enemy drones may be captured and made your own. To do this, you must irradiate them with a radiation weapon. When you have reduced their shields to zero drone will become hostile to everyone. At this point, anyone can scoop the drone up and become the new owner. However, the drone is still functional, and as such, will continue firing at you until you can scoop it.

Useful Equipment for Droners

There are a number of items that can be used to boost the effectiveness of your temporary drones in combat.

Drone Mastery Augmenters

These are equipped on the ship that you use to deploy drones. This can be obtained by trading Drone Augmenter Tokens in to the Engineer Base in Lyceum, or as drops from DGs or Ubers. These will also boost the stats of your ship to increase your overall ship stats.

Drone Controllers

The blueprints from these are found at Lush Incision in Shadow, these require a number of augmenters to build, and are equipped on to your ship. They boost the strength of the corresponding drone stat. You may only have one equipped on any one ship at any one time.

Drone Overloaders

There are a number of ship overloaders that give offensive / defensive boosts to your drones. These can be acquired from Engineer Missions in Lyceum, or from DGs.

There are a number of other items, but I won’t spoil the surprise, you need to discover these for yourself!

Trouble Shooting

In your time as an Engineer you will more than likely come across a few error messages in your event chat, no need to panic! I will explain what they mean below.

This scoop cannot be used on drones -- upgrade.
Your current scoop does not have the ability to scoop drones. As long as there is some time left on your drones there is no need to worry, just head to the nearest AI base and buy yourself a 'Drone Scoop' and you will be able to pick up your drones.

Cannot place a drone in this galaxy
Many special galaxies do not allow for the deployment of Permanent drones. These include, but are not limited to: Galaxies owned or protected by a Player Team, AI owned galaxies such as Sol, Galaxies in Perilous space, or dungeons (DGs)

*Name of Drone* can't be equipped on a ship of less than tech *drone tech level*
Your drone is of a tech level that is higher than that of your ship. To remedy this situation, either use lower tech level drones, or upgrade yourself to a new ship.

You need 1 more slot to deploy this drone
You have deployed the maximum number of temporary drones that you can for your current level of Drone Deployment. Either level up your Drone Deployment (or Drone Mastery) skills or scoop some of your already deployed drones.

Not enough slots
This means you have deployed the maximum number of permanent drones for your current level of Drone Deployment. This can be remedied by levelling up either: Drone Deployment or Drone Research skills, or by scooping some of your other deployed drones.

Invalid equip number
You cannot equip any more Temporary Drones to your hull. In order to equip more drones, you can train the Drone Research Skill which will grant you +1 equipped drone per level, or upgrade your hull to one that allows for more drones to be equipped (for example a Freighter).

-Swift.

The formatting is completely ruined in this post, it looks a lot better when the pictures are in the correct places with their annotations (which have also been lost in translation it seems).

-Swift

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=54945

Accept no imitations. The majority of the content in that thread is directly plagiarized without contacting me first. I would have been more than happy to collaborate...

-Swift

You know you guys can work together and still get a prize

I would have been happy to if he had PM'd me and requested to update my post. Instead of by directly plagiarizing it, which is what he has done. Without giving me ANY credit.

-Swift.

If you are trying to explain something using the same pool of information, no one is copying each other because regardless of how you may feel, everyone is using the same information.

That's not what I'm talking about, obviously we have used the same sources, it's the fact that he has directly copied whole sections of my guide, using my own phrasing. With no credit to myself.

There are a near infinite number of ways to summarize all of the information relating to drones, instead he has copied mine.

-Swift

Some parts do look copied. But, you're just as bad. You're making a big deal out of a tiny competition over a vanity item. If he's copying, just make a simple note to the judges and make your submission better. Don't go crying to the audience.

I disagree churchill, plagiarizing is plagiarizing. He is within his right to complain where ever he wants and there is nothing wrong in doing so.

Note: I dont actually see any instances of plagiarizing, but my point still stands.

I'm not saying plagiarizing is not plagiarizing. I'm just saying he's acting like a child in his tone of complaints. This is the same problem that befell Zephyr when Blade NZ killed them, after Heaven mouthed off the SP guy, and when Traders poked TFC's palace.

They all complained like children on the forum expecting the public (everyone who isn't an admin) to rise up, comfort them, and condemn the offender through wars or political pressure. And I will admit I sometimes do this too, as much as I hate people that do.

Instead of complaining, all of these people could have gone to a leader (Director or Admin) and explained the problem in a clear and definitely not full of passion and rage post. Nope, they had to act like a child.

His has now been updated (which I am pleased about)! Which is why you can't really notice much plagiarism any more.

Also of course plagiarism is important Churchill, it is a competition after all.

-Swift.

It's finally finished. Corrected a few errors, and added some more content. I think I have covered it all now.

-Swift

F2p-Wild Space-No deploy drones.
Not totally needed, and a F2p-P2p guide should cover it, but would be helpful for any noobs who run into wild space and discover nothing works.

Thanks Max, I wasn't aware of that!

-Swift.