An important aspect of protecting the bee colonies is detecting enemies as early as possibly so you can intercept the most dangerous ones with your drone.
The drone is always going to be your best weapon available so making sure you're in the right place at the right time is critical to keeping the bees safe.
Introducing Sensors
In Drone Warfare enemies are detected using a variety of sensors. The drone itself as well as the drone case where the drone is launched from each have their own sensors which are represented as sensor circles when viewing the in-game overhead map.
If enemies come into range of the drone case, or the drone flies near to an enemy, then they are marked as "detected" and shown as red dots on the map. Detected enemies are then relayed to your drone's HUD and shown in its scanner panel (located on the right of the HUD):
Zoomed in:
Sensor Turrets
Using just the drone and drone case sensors would leave a lot of the map uncovered, meaning you'd have to rely on sight alone to locate undetected enemies.
That's where Sensor Turrets come in. These can be deployed around the environment by using your drone to build them in locations that maximise enemy detection.
Sensor turrets also provide another function which is monitoring and relaying data about the bee's nest itself. You'll need to build a sensor turret near to the nest for the drone's HUD to report data about the nest's health (and also show its location on the overhead map):
The scanner panel in the HUD also needs 3 or more sensor turrets to be built before it can come online:
Bear in mind turrets can be destroyed, or rendered useless by enemies or environmental conditions, so they may need replacing if the drone's HUD is suddenly not reporting what it should!
Effective Detection
Having enough sensors to effectively (and efficiently) cover as much map area as possible is critical to maximising protection of the bee colonies under your care.
There is a cost to building turrets so you must decide whether to deploy traditional defences (machine guns, SAMs, etc) or passive ones like sensors.
Distance from the drone case is another important consideration when building turrets, which I'll cover in a future post.
Thanks for reading,
Faster Time Games.
