X-TRA POLLS Round #17 | What cargo drone behaviour do you usually rely on when flying capital ships?

[Axeface]

I have been saying for years that cargo drones need work.
They are utterly useless for collecting loot crates, in fact they are entirely detrimental because they will 'stunlock' a capital ship for like an hour while it waits for its drones to not reach the crates before they explode and then wait for them to return. For this reason I exclusively turn off cargo drones on all capital ships.

[flywlyx]

Oh yeah, speaking of which, give us a global order for drones! As mentioned I added them just in case I need to trade for some reason, and while I rarely remain IS to the bulk of my disposable fleet, having a global order to disable drones or set them to trade with stations only or something similar would be helpful. I already turn them off manually for personal ships, since afaik setting them to disabled doesn't affect trading with stations.

Or configure the shipbuilding page to have "disabled" set as the default behavior.
I’ve always thought the shipbuilding page should include more settings, allowing us to configure ship behavior before they are built.
Egosoft has not provided the ability to manage the behavior of selected ships collectively. At the very least, they should allow us to modify the behavior of ships of the same type simultaneously.

[Raptor34]

Oh yeah, speaking of which, give us a global order for drones! As mentioned I added them just in case I need to trade for some reason, and while I rarely remain IS to the bulk of my disposable fleet, having a global order to disable drones or set them to trade with stations only or something similar would be helpful. I already turn them off manually for personal ships, since afaik setting them to disabled doesn't affect trading with stations.

Or configure the shipbuilding page to have "disabled" set as the default behavior.
I’ve always thought the shipbuilding page should include more settings, allowing us to configure ship behavior before they are built.
Egosoft has not provided the ability to manage the behavior of selected ships collectively. At the very least, they should allow us to modify the behavior of ships of the same type simultaneously.

Oh yeah. I forgot about that function since I rarely used it. Those are saved to loadouts too right? It'll be very useful if we can fully customize everything before we build the ships.
Actually, considering Egosoft is developing that ship replacement thing, what if we can even auto assign ships to stuff before even building them? Since afaict those should be the same code base. Of course since we can't build with good pilots, it'll be restricted to no-star jobs/behaviors, but being able to fire and forget bulking up a fleet by just assigning them on the build page instead of needing to do it later would be a great QoL feature. Doubly so if you do not want to build your own shipyards and instead buy from any faction not named Terran. You could say order a whole bunch of M transporters to trade for station and when you've supplied the wharf so it builds them, you don't have to worry about leaving your ships doing nothing for hours since once they are built they are automatically assigned.

[EGO_Aut]

To me their only useful purpose is the transfer of cargo with stations. Too slow and clunky for anything else. As soon as I take over a ship I turn them off to ensure they won't launch.

This and loot magnet

[adeine]

In my experience, cargo drones cannot successfully pick up drops. They're so slow and launched at great distances, so by the time they get there the drop despawns, and the cycle starts all over again. They also tend to get separated from ships in more active scenarios, effectively disabling them as stuck on 'waiting for subordinates'.

The solution I've found is to have an M/S ship docked at your capital, and sending it out to collect drops. For persistent loot collection, doing so from a station on repeat orders works wonders (although there is no way to repeat order 'deposit wares to station/HQ').

[vvvvvvvv]

I fly with cargo drones disabled and collect with cargo magnet.

Issues:

* Cargo drones are SLOW. Ridiculously slow, to the point of being useless.
* 7.2 introduced a problem where if you forget cargo drone behind, NPC-controlled ship will begin to spam "recall subordinates" command. That command effectively disables ship, because the ship comes to a full stop, and waits while drone r eaches, meanwhile the drone leisurly travels at speed ofsomething like 100 m/s and no travel drive through multiple sectors.

So in 7.2 cargo drones were effectively a trap.

You'd send a ship into combat, mid fight you teleport in and take control. The ship will then IMMEDIATELY release cargo drones. It didn't release them before, while under NPC control, but now the player is at the helm, the ship will launch them to collect all the stuff floating around. Even if you immediately recall them, it will take a long time for them to dock back, so you'd be immediately stuck. You can't leave, because then the ship will spam "recall subordinates", you can't get rid of the drones, and there's no self-destruct command.

Overall, the drones could be useful if they had higher speeds. Both cargo and defense drones.