Subset Games Forum

So I've never used a boarding drone before, and I'm trying to use the Mantis B ship. It starts with a boarding drone, teleporter, and no weapons.

When I fight an auto-drone ship, I shoot a boarding drone at it, in the hopes that my drone will just destroy a system repeatedly until the ship goes down.

But three times in a row, my drone has just breached into an empty room with no system to destroy, and of course no doors.

Question 1: After firing a boarding drone, is there any way to just self destruct him so I can fire another? Removing power just puts him to sleep, and restoring it just wakes him up.

Question 2: Is it just bad luck that my drone is always hitting the same empty room, or is it by design to prevent exactly what I'm trying to do?

1. Not that I've found. Personal advice is to sell the drone at the first shop you find / buy a weapon with the scrap. In the meantime, turtle up against auto-drones and get the heck out.

2. You've just been thoroughly unlucky. Drone hits are random, although I think the RNG trends towards "Room 0" a bit much when calculating hits (My Obsidian's O2 room is in Room 0 and is ALWAYS getting smashed up). An anti-ship drone would do you more good, probably.

Until you get a weapon, you obviously can't defeat the auto-drones that have no doors (without losing crew). The best tactic with them is to upgrade your teleporter to level 2 quickly, and then teleport two of your crew into their weapon systems, and beam them back out before they die, you have just enough time to do with with the level 2 teleport. You still can't kill them, so the weapon destruction is just a stop-gap to jumping away.

The auto-drones with doors, however, can be destroyed without weapons. Launch your boarding drone and it'll do one hull damage each time it completely destroys a system. It'll take a long time but, because auto-drones heal over time, your boarding drone will eventually destroy it. The only risk there is if your drone decides to take out the weapons first. Although, in that case, you can use your crew and a level 2 teleport to take out the weapons, exactly as with the other drone.

The boarding drone is great, you might well want to sell it later on, but don't sell it immediately.