Antiswarm Tech R&D

[Nickizzy]

With titains being titains, npcs focusing on number over size, and fleet controls, it seems the best strategy right now is drone swarms. How do you counter them?

Starting point-
Many limited-size turrets to deal with drones. I've heard of turrets with Adv Armor CC shots followed by an explosive shot, if in high enough quantities with good enough firing angles they could help.

Sniping Push cannons could keep close range swarms away.

Can't think of anything else.

 

[Winterhome]

Swarm missiles. :|

 

[Gasboy]

1) Drones.

2) Anti-drone turrets. Cannon or beam turrets small enough to keep up with drone movements, but punchy enough to put big holes into them. Kind of like secondary guns on early 20th century battleships and cruisers.

3) Swarm missiles. Really only useful for when you're the only friendly in the area, or if you're at your home station with everything safely docked. And uh, all friendly astronauts in the bowels of said station.

 

[Nickizzy]

One annoyance I have is that it never seems like I can use AOE on any of them. They don't pack together enough to use even pulse-pulse/missle-pulse on them. Maybe if pulse was a different effect of a lingering cloud or a larger effect...

 

[Gasboy]

One annoyance I have is that it never seems like I can use AOE on any of them. They don't pack together enough to use even pulse-pulse/missle-pulse on them. Maybe if pulse was a different effect of a lingering cloud or a larger effect...

Cannon+missile+pull effect. Drag them all closer to you, and closer together. Then hit them with a maxed out nuke.

 

[sleepnow2]

Here was an idea on the drone RnD forum...

Coin drones!

Extremely tiny, very flat drones that can hardly keep their own in a fight, but with numbers, can be deadly. You can wait easily pack hundreds in a titan with minimal negative effects. And with just missile/beam at 1/1, you can have the coin drones fly out very far and pelt everything from a distance and distract ams. Maybe it will cause a lot of drones to engage them and run off with them as the enemy drones try to gain distance and yours try to get away.

Maybe you can pack a bunch of disintegration, jammer drones that suicide Rush the enemy drones in noticed. Then you can watch as all those lights get snuffed out and the only two left is a carrier and your destroyer with jump inhibitors denies the enemy the right to flee with their expensive equipment.

 

[Sgtwisky]

One thing to keep in mind if you go the swarm missile route, is that many of us who build drones, have started outfitting them with AMS. The other issue is last I am aware, Swarm Missiiles can sometimes all decide to hit the same one or two targets. So you might try stagering the launching of said missiles. As they can be fired by logic without you worrying about aiming them.

 

[Dire Venom]

Here was an idea on the drone RnD forum...

Coin drones!

Extremely tiny, very flat drones that can hardly keep their own in a fight, but with numbers, can be deadly. You can wait easily pack hundreds in a titan with minimal negative effects. And with just missile/beam at 1/1, you can have the coin drones fly out very far and pelt everything from a distance and distract ams. Maybe it will cause a lot of drones to engage them and run off with them as the enemy drones try to gain distance and yours try to get away.

Maybe you can pack a bunch of disintegration, jammer drones that suicide Rush the enemy drones in noticed. Then you can watch as all those lights get snuffed out and the only two left is a carrier and your destroyer with jump inhibitors denies the enemy the right to flee with their expensive equipment.

Better hope yout computers up for it :P If they get un-dcoked and touch anything your computer might melt

 

[sleepnow2]

Better hope yout computers up for it :P If they get un-dcoked and touch anything your computer might melt

Yea. We all make sacrifices to the great God of the swarm Whether we like it or not!

(now to make a mine layer ship that it's only job is to deploy a devastating amount of mines and run as everyone else's computer turns into a pool on their desk)

 

[Edymnion]

I call those coin drones "chaff drones". When I make them, they're basically little more than docked cores with a bit of armor plating. Not even weapons. Idea is to make them like WWII chaff, where they simply fill the space and distract/hit incoming missiles.

Basically, they're a lot of tiny essentially free decoys.

 

[Loadout]

I hate to say it, as it feels like giving away trade secrets from a drone builder but, I find the following methods to be useful in countering drones...

1) Loads of AMS. Most drones attempt to maximize firepower by using missile based weapons. Only a handful I've seen successfully use beams/cannons to any extent. Hence AMS will neuter most drones, and why most of my drones are now cannon/beam based. Make sure it is plentiful, around 10 AMS turrets should suffice (at the bare minimum), otherwise they will overload your AMS and you won't get any use of it against the primary enemy vessel.

2) Pulse drones are annoying but as a player ship you can safely ignore them in favor of virtually anything larger. AI will need buried turrets to fight against pulse weapons. By placing the turrets behind layers of the ship's armor(not the turrets armor) less of the turret will be exposed to the fairly random pulses that are fired off. It'll take more internal space but I feel it's worth it given the benefits. I'll share an example pic later...

3) Push and Pull effects get very sloppy very quickly, if you're going to use an effect based turret, use either EMP or Stop effect. Drones can't carry a ton of energy given their size and most are barely considered power stable, any disruption to that is catastrophic. Stop effect also has a greater effect given the low mass of the drones so even smaller turrets can effectively neutralize pulse drones. Alternatively overdrive turns a rather small weapon into something considerably more potent allowing smaller turrets to perform better against drones with armor.

4) Never use swarm missiles, they are barely more effective than regular missiles (and arguably so). One would think they have a greater effect but they target anything that includes your own turrets, your own ship, any astronauts, random space debris, chaff drones without any AI at all, and the list goes on and on. Odds of them actually hitting the intended targets is pretty slim. With newer models having AMS that makes this option even less effective.

 

[Madman198237]

PTW this. Got no ideas for it, other than be prepared to see more drones since the new reactor mechanics is going to make a mess of turrets, at least as I understand things.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

It can be a pain to kill drones quickly with beams and cannons; hence why swarmers are a recurring idea. Here's something I cooked up a while back, that works like swarms; only smarter. It works very well for me.

Composite missile turrets. 360 degree rotation with 180 elevation or better.

Armaments
- Guided missiles: 1 or more outputs of M/B/P. Minimum of 200k damage per missile.
- decoy missiles: (anti-AMS) multiple outputs of M/C. Small arrays; 1 missile block, one cannon block.
- (optional) an ion beam weapon can add anti-shield punch without destroying your outgoing missiles.

Mount them all over your ship; organized into fire groups and set them to selected target. Using fire groups will stagger your shots and increase your efficiency.

Make sure to armor them up and either add logic controls or a logic safety so you don't shoot friendlies when you select them.

 

[Panpiper]

The new power system is going to obliterate any theory crafting we do. With no docked power, no self powered turrets, no auxiliary power reactors, large ships are very likely to be utterly starved for power relatively speaking. It is very unlikely that we will be able to deploy anti-drone defenses in any significant quantity the way we used to, and any such defenses that we do deploy will come as a net loss to the offensive capacity of the ship. Drones and such are without question in my mind going to utterly dominate after the power update.

With the old power system, my solution for drones was several self powered cannon/cannon/punch doing 2K per hit at 20K DPS. Married to that in each turret was a coaxial cannon/cannon/stop guaranteed to stop any normal sized drone dead in it's tracks with one hit. (My standard battleminer would have eight such turrets in addition to eight self powered 'meta' cannon/beam offensive turrets with twice the DPS.) That meant that any single hit would immobilize the drone and render all following shots utterly devastating to the drone. Unfortunately while that was possible back when we could make self powered turrets, that will no longer be practical.

At this (way to early) stage of theory crafting, a likely armament for a standard ship after the power update, so as to (try to) handle both drones and other ships, will be to mount as many 1K DPS cannon/beam/punch weapons as possible, breaking the bullet perhaps into four discrete bullets each doing 1K. This will permit it to break any armor block with full pierce/punch protection or otherwise do substantial internals if not stopped by max armor.

 

[PriZm]

Thats one of the 2 things i like the most about the update (from what we know atm). Power management will finally be a thing. At the moment the solution to power problems is simply put more power regen in and make self powered turrets/docked weapons/docked thrusters etc. While this is fun from an engineering point of view (as well as docked reactor have been a lot of fun to design) its bs from a balancing point of view. If you invest enough time/effort/blocks, you end up with a ship that can burn tons of power per second without ever having real power problems. Same for the passive effect/utility thingies. Atm its no problem to build a ship that can be called a master of everything. In the future we will have to decide what we want our ships to master. It will be hard at the beginning for all of us, since it will feel like a nerf to our ships, but at the end of the day, im pretty sure it could improve gameplay and make the game more balanced overall.
A question always comes to my mind when thinking about the new system. What will happen to the power softcap? From what i read, there wont be aux power anymore and ofc no more docked reactors.

 

[Mork2]

Drones and ships might be easier to kill after the power update once the shields are down.

From the dev video I watched the reactor system was getting its own set of HP. Depending on how that works it might be possible to kill the reactor with a big enough gun hit. Before you would just kill a line of blocks and unless you hit one of the few critical blocks on a drone the shot would punch through the entire drone but it would keep operating. But the entire reactor system is a bigger target now as well.

This is just speculation though from the dev video. It depends on the exact mechanics of the reactor HP though.

As for the new power system, you do not use capacitor blocks anymore either. So no need for massive stockpiles of capacitor to have enough power to fire off those massive missile salvos. On onboard capacitors on turrets for the self powered system to charge up.

From the dev video the reactor blocks power output is linear and the stabilisers have a linear block count ratio to the reactor blocks to be effective. If the combined block count of the reactors and stabilisers is 25/power per second per (reactor and stabiliser block) block then its equal to the old power system after hitting the power softcap. If its 125/power per second per (reactor and stabiliser block) it will be equal to the power per block ratios of efficient docked reactors and efficient auxiliary power cores. It will come down to the power to mass ratio for whether it will be harder or easier to power things on a capital. Though you do have to redesign all your turrets. Also if your lacking power it will just recharge the what it can according to your power priority settings.