New Railgun AI Drones Are Devastating - Space Engineers

New Railgun AI Drones are Devastating. The new update automatons has allowed players to build some super powerful weapons. Today we are looking at building a long range loitering mini railgun drone.

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[kerbalairforce]

Imagine a custom turret on a large ship that you can cut loose, and it becomes a drone.

[spacetoastgaming]

I find that small large grid artillery drones are the most effective, faster load time, decently cheap ammo and still cheap to produce, only real way to fight it is with your own defensive drones or incredible aim

[daniellclary]

I like the fact that it really hinges how well something is designed and programed that allows a ship to have a superior edge or not. So often its just bigger ship always wins.

[ethanwright]

I'll be perfectly honest, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. I'm a bit of a solo player, and the biggest problem I've always had is my inability to have multiple ships on my side. I like using swarm tactics, but that's been impossible for me until now. I have always dreamed of vast swarms of drones on my single carrier to multiply my firepower, and now it is a possibility. I really hope servers don't start banning these kind of weapons, as they add a whole new level of combat to the game.

As for countering them, I think a new class of ship will be developed, a fighter sized vessel with much heavier cockpit protection and several gatling turrets. My guess is that the fighters in this scenario did so badly because of primarily missile based weaponry and no turrets. A ship with 4 or more gatlings would be more than capable of ripping these small drones apart.

[onenerdyboi]

If you put an ai block and a gyroscope on a custom turret instead of the custom turret block you can have 2000m automated railgun turrets. You just need to balence the center of mass so the gyroscope can rotate it. I made a large grid one, and a small grid ball turret with the railguns opperating accurately at maximum range. Same goes for artillary and every other +800m weapon. Its stupidly easy to make work and would offer a perfect defence for these types of strategies

[Zero_]

Counter with railgun turrets of your own for defense. In a pitched battle, high speed drones with machine guns is probably what you want, if not your own railgun drones. Given that the railgun drones are tiny squishy things with next to no armor, they'd be crippled by cheap machinegun fire

As for defense, people already like burying their bases underground/in asteroids, so aside from exterior defenses, you can still have a turret gauntlet with strictly controlled engagement range (or there's the safe zone shields)

[ericevans]

AI radar using a 2.5k intercept with groups of standard assault cannon turrets or custom turrets with other long range weapons could in theory blow them to hell as the drones get into the engagement area.

[fellysmarts]

Combat blocks work on unmanned stations too. Shoot those drones down before they get into range.

[vplcupv]

I don't play SE but I have been following it recently, something to balance this new "meta" out would be the integration of electronic warfare, sensors, and of course a rework of countermeasures which has the potential to really make this game interesting beyond who can print drones the fastest

[Jalbesbe]

Underground decoy rings stop this from being an issue. You space the rings out just a bit from the base and the railgun drones will target them instead as it is a closer target. Railguns are also pretty bad at breaking voxels making it hard for them to even hit the decoys underground. So a very good bullet sponge stopping basically all AI based combat, forcing any player attacking you to have to take manual control.

[Agora]

Don't know about how effective the AI can be, watching that fight at the end, but it makes some pretty awesome cinematic battles for the background.

[TehNoobiness]

tbh I think the last example went way better for the fighters than should be expected, given the numbers advantage and that the actual objective was to damage the towers

most of those fighters made it through their first bombing run, so you could optimize their payload for that

[steeldarling]

And now I'm imagining Orion's Arm style autowars in Space Engineers. Imagine an autonomous mining/printing drone that just flies around, mining minerals and printing these things off.

[Comicsluvr]

I can see some huge changes in tactics. Imagine if the first couple of drones are just decoys? They can be set to circle at extreme range to draw off enemy fire while the next wave come straight in to attack. If you mix in some missile/suicide drones and make them all look the same, it would be crazy confusing!

[mindlessmrawesome]

I just saw a video on how to autonomously launch defense drones, should be a fairly effective way to counter this

[OmegaUberDeathbot]

I was under the impression that you couldn't use a railgun with the AI Offensive block. I couldn't get it to recognize the static weapon.

[lunettesfumees]

Equivalent of stellaris' torpedo corvette spam

[calebslusher]

It seems more and more with this video that the best way to beat a sniper-style craft is to have as small a cross-section as possible, and be nimble. Useful info for designing ships, that's for certain.

[ethanspaziani]

At last the potential of drone combat is reaching its fullest yet it is beautiful I had thought about stuff like this for a very long time to see it actually realized it's something else honestly this game has so much potential I just wish it was better optimized for larger structures

[longwingdetrain]

This video got recommended to me by random, and I havent watched Soace Engineers in years. Last time I watched it was with you, Sage, and Tazoo in Joint Survival! (Like 7 years ago). Awesome to see you still making content!
Cool video man!