Interesting hacking drone trick

[Caramel_Clown]

This might be old news to many experienced players, but I've learned about this little trick recently and thought some people may find it useful.
You can actually bypass defensive drones with your hacking drone, and avoid it being shot down. It takes a bit of practice, but it's incredibly useful. You launch your hacking drone, and just at the moment enemies defensive drone is about to fire at it - you depower your hacking. This causes defensive drone to lost tracking. Your hacker latches successfully, you can return power to it. Congratulations, you've just tricked the AI :)
Apparently developers weren't aware of this mechanic on release, since it wasn't intended to work this way. But liked it and left it in the game.

[Brosef Iosif]

Yes it's pretty old news but kudos to you for finding out regardless! It's also (one of) the reason why hacking is so overpowered in this game, you can work around its counters.

Originally posted by Caramel_Clown:

Apparently developers weren't aware of this mechanic on release, since it wasn't intended to work this way. But liked it and left it in the game.

Personally I've heard the opposite, anyway they could have changed it and didn't, so they endorsed it at the very least. Also, if you've fought the flagship with the AE and tried to gun down its own hacking module with a defense drone, you should know already that 1) sometimes the defense drone just plain miss, it can also happens with missiles (just, you don't have a bazillion of drone parts to spare unlike the boss), and 2) it's possible (just like irl btw) to overload the defense drone by firing missiles at the same moment as the hacking module so that the defense drone shoot down a missile but doesn't have time to recharge to gun down the hacking, costy but heh, if it works... So there's always been ways to bypass the defense drone, it's just that the method you've found is way cheaper and reliable.

[Meneluma]

If it is an anti-drone drone you can just spam away until you hit the coin flip where the ion damage does not destroy it.
Or you can screen it behind a cloud of flak, as you can do with missiles.

Depowering the drone does feel like cheating, but if you're into exploits, wasn't there one for starting the fight with more weapons than your ship can run total using a pre-igniter?
Or teleporting out the human in the disconnected weapon rooms on the flagship by boarding it with two crew then using mind control.
The game doesn't have a lot of exploits that feel like cheating though, most other tricks are risky, like depowering shields to let ion shots pass so the shields could recover faster.

But hey, good luck getting the drone past when the ship has a Defense 1, Defense 2 and an Anti-Drone drone.

[gambit]

Originally posted by Brosef Iosif:

Yes it's pretty old news but kudos to you for finding out regardless! It's also (one of) the reason why hacking is so overpowered in this game, you can work around its counters.

Originally posted by Caramel_Clown:

Apparently developers weren't aware of this mechanic on release, since it wasn't intended to work this way. But liked it and left it in the game.

Personally I've heard the opposite, anyway they could have changed it and didn't, so they endorsed it at the very least. Also, if you've fought the flagship with the AE and tried to gun down its own hacking module with a defense drone, you should know already that 1) sometimes the defense drone just plain miss, it can also happens with missiles (just, you don't have a bazillion of drone parts to spare unlike the boss), and 2) it's possible (just like irl btw) to overload the defense drone by firing missiles at the same moment as the hacking module so that the defense drone shoot down a missile but doesn't have time to recharge to gun down the hacking, costy but heh, if it works... So there's always been ways to bypass the defense drone, it's just that the method you've found is way cheaper and reliable.

Yeah, when AE released I've been hiding hacking drones behind flak and sometimes missiles as a bypass for def. 1 drones for about 2-3 months, until I read it on forums about depowering them just before they are getting shot.

Originally posted by Captain Yorshka:

But hey, good luck getting the drone past when the ship has a Defense 1, Defense 2 and an Anti-Drone drone.

There is a decent chance two of them will fire at the same time, so it is same as avoiding only two drones. But there is still a low chance of drone firing from the opposite angle of hacking drone, a.k.a. sure hit angle. So it hits hacking drone anyway.

[Caramel_Clown]

Originally posted by Brosef Iosif:

Yes it's pretty old news but kudos to you for finding out regardless! It's also (one of) the reason why hacking is so overpowered in this game, you can work around its counters.

Personally I've heard the opposite, anyway they could have changed it and didn't, so they endorsed it at the very least.

Pretty sure I've seen some forum post from the dev basically saying they see it as an emergent gameplay, and they like it.
Personally, I feel like it's a bit...exploit-y. But my justification for it is that when depowered it disappears from the radar, or something. Doesn't explain why stuff like rocks and asteroids are tracked, but not depowered drone. But I'm willing to ignore that :)

[Timerlane]

What happens is that the Hacking drone freezes in place at the moment it's depowered(which, FWIW, can also happen when Hacking is destroyed, or if a ship cloaks right before the drone impacts; it literally hovers right in front of the ship until Hacking is repaired or the ship uncloaks), which means the defensive shot which was aimed ahead of the fast-moving drone completely misses.

I believe one of the balance mods 'fixes' the problem by giving defensive drones extremely fast shot velocities, so it doesn't need to lead the shot by as much, and makes the timing much tighter, if it's possible to still pull this off at all.

[ddrguy300]

An interesting exploit that probably should have been fixed. It's not an endorsement, it's a lack of game play refinement.

I find it rather telling that this still exists. Makes my theory that this game is truly unpolished hold even more water: Because not only can you work around defensive drones via the power flow on your hack, but enemy defensive drones remain absurdly overpowered as they shoot down 90-95% of your missiles while your defensive drones don't shoot down crap.

An observation that anyone could make with about 100 hours of play testing. So a couple weeks of work by a single person. Add a few more people to colab, and you've got a list of everything that needs to be tweaked.

[Caramel_Clown]

Originally posted by ddrguy300:

An interesting exploit that probably should have been fixed.

I find it rather telling that this still exists. Makes my theory that this game is truly unpolished hold even more water: Because not only can you work around defensive drones via the power flow on your hack, but enemy defensive drones remain absurdly overpowered as they shoot down 90-95% of your missiles while your defensive drones don't shoot down crap.

An observation that anyone could make with about 100 hours of play testing. So a couple weeks of work by a single person. Add a few more people to colab, and you've got a list of everything that needs to be tweaked.

You must be using wrong drones. Defensive drone I barely ever misses a missile. Defensive drone II just gets overwhelmed because it will also shoot lasers.

[Timerlane]

There is a known issue regarding Defense Drones on player ships; it's somewhat complicated, but in a nutshell, Defense Drones are incapable of targeting missiles flying by/toward the front area of many ships, which leaves forward rooms, particularly on very large ships, vulnerable.

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by ddrguy300:

An interesting exploit that probably should have been fixed. It's not an endorsement, it's a lack of game play refinement.

It was a deliberate choice by the devs. The issue was known well before even AE because you could pull this trick with Boarding Drone before hacking even existed. And after AE, there have been multiple updates where the devs were entirely aware of the hacking drone exploit. They didn't "fix" it then either.

This is an intentional feature at this point. Hacking drones, like every other moving object in the game that aren't ships, are able to be hit by projectiles, move or stop moving, or anything else objects in the game can do.

Originally posted by Timerlane:

There is a known issue regarding Defense Drones on player ships; it's somewhat complicated, but in a nutshell, Defense Drones are incapable of targeting missiles flying by/toward the front area of many ships, which leaves forward rooms, particularly on very large ships, vulnerable.

This also is not an "issue" but a feature. Defense Drones orbit your ship and can only aim at things within their range.

This means that "round shaped" ships like Engi ships are incredibly benefited by defense drones, while the long penis-shaped ships like Federation Cruisers are not. Defense drones on these ships often simply ignore incoming missiles because they're not within their range.