Retaking Ceres Stinger Drones?

[Gudabeg]

It seems like the only counter to the drones is to deploy all your drones and have them add firepower to your ships.

I've tried sending 20+ nukes at them, but the nukes (manually or automatically detonated) don't seem to take out many drones at all (sometimes 0 drones), even when aimed at the middle of the enemy formation.

[Echo]

One way to deal with drones is to let them run out of dV by evading their intercept, another way is to let them run out of dV by intercepting them with 1 or 2 drones of your own and letting the enemy drones dance around your own,

[AtomHeartDragon]

I know of 3 counters to the drones:

1. (risky) try splashing them with nukes (as you have). Stinger without engine is dead. Stinger without radiators is just large, easily shot down KKV. The tricky part is timing and distributing the nukes to take out engines or ALL the radiators. Note, drones will try to counter missiles by having one burn and act as decoy. As you have noticed this is hard to pull off.
2. (cheesy) intercept and harass with Beam Drone(s) to force stingers to burn delta-v (cheesy because it wouldn't work against human enemy, though you might be able to match velocities and slowly burn components forcing enemy to react).
3. (intended) dance enemy drones out of delta-v. You need to start doing it early and preferably exploit Oberth effect (drones start in much lower orbit, so they find it easier to make in-plane changes but harder to make out of plane ones).

The best counters to stock drones are mobility and lasers, but you only get the latter when you can configure your fleet and the former once you sdtart building your own ships - neither of which is an option at Ceres.

[Gudabeg]

Originally posted by AtomHeartDragon:

I know of 3 counters to the drones:

1. (risky) try splashing them with nukes (as you have). Stinger without engine is dead. Stinger without radiators is just large, easily shot down KKV. The tricky part is timing and distributing the nukes to take out engines or ALL the radiators. Note, drones will try to counter missiles by having one burn and act as decoy. As you have noticed this is hard to pull off.
2. (cheesy) intercept and harass with Beam Drone(s) to force stingers to burn delta-v (cheesy because it wouldn't work against human enemy, though you might be able to match velocities and slowly burn components forcing enemy to react).
3. (intended) dance enemy drones out of delta-v. You need to start doing it early and preferably exploit Oberth effect (drones start in much lower orbit, so they find it easier to make in-plane changes but harder to make out of plane ones).

The best counters to stock drones are mobility and lasers, but you only get the latter when you can configure your fleet and the former once you sdtart building your own ships - neither of which is an option at Ceres.

So to avoid burning up too much delta-V dancing with the drones just do in and out of plane burns?

It seems like a real human would just prep 3 waves of 15 drones and kill you by forcing you to run out of delta-V, and the "real" counter would be nukes to knock them out.

[Rogue_potato]

In general, a good tip when fighting drones is to target their weapons. They don't have any armour there so laseres can dissable them quickly. This obviously only applies when you're trying to shoot the drones down which is not always the best solution. Other comments already explained other options besides just trying to shoot them down.