Combat Drones - are they useful at all?

[Raptor34]

Yep. My newest fleet is a Zeus E carrying 12 osprey's with 17 drones each.

204 drones is really hard to argue with. With a complement of 24 torpedo pulsars on hand this makes short work of enemy stations.

Resupply ships can also dump their 100 drone complement into the battlefield very fast with launch tubes.

A recent change? Because I used to try to keep the Scale Plate pirate HQ alive once and keeping an eye on it they weren't able to do much against a single faction destroyer.
60 drones or so iirc? I was expecting them to kill subsystems at least.

[gorgofdoom]

There was a time back in 3.2 where i used a cerberus to take out SCA destroyers. granted it was a lot of micro-- launch drones with escort then put them on attack my target and cycle thru surface elements... but it did work with just one cerberus' drones without entering weapons range whatsoever.

It's better now i think, easier to keep the drones deployed. but also turret improvements many make drones less effective. will have to play with it in the beta to really tell ya.

[budforceuk]

I don't bother with them personally, as mentioned you have to watch out for them on the Xenon stations as they can really mess your destroyer up.