@ Helmut - Yeah, I spent a lot of time making the PPC so it felt "just right." I'm really glad you like it! Mesotronik and I spent a not insignificant amount of time troubleshooting the buckshot script (we have some pretty awesome ideas for it now that it's working properly). On the engine trails, there are about 5x the number of engine particles being rendered as before (there wasn't any other way I saw to extend the exhaust trails). I haven't noticed any perceptible performance hit, and I have a fairly average computer. However, if someone is running into performance issues as a result, I'd be happy to tone down the exhaust fx in the next update.
@ Lopunny Zen and Sundog - Honestly the reason that drones stay at the same level is more due to the way CR is calculated than anything else. It really irked me when Alex made it so that Wasp Drones and Mining Drones used crew. One reason was realism (wtf why do drones need crew all of a sudden) and the other was the fact that Wasp drones suddenly became really costly in terms of crew because you lose them so often. This huge drain on crew forced me to change how I was using them (or stop using them for that matter). So I made a drone wing that didn't use any crew. Inannas are meant to be disposable, which is what Wasps were originally
supposed to be. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the drones no longer level and start at a CR level slightly below green (40%). It looks like the CR calculation is pretty much like this: 40% + Crew bonus + Skills bonus. I'm sorta fine with this as is (the drone stats compensate for the lowered CR), although it's a bit annoying to see that they have a constant "green" experience and CR level all the time. It's definitely possible to change the experience/CR levels- if you look at my mission (mostly used for testing), I've forced all of the fighters to "regular" for instance. I'm definitely going look into fixing this in campaign mode for future updates.
Long story short, if there's something I really dislike about the vanilla game, I'll do my very best to "undo" it here. In addition to the drones/crew thing, an instance of this is the CR timer on frigates, which annoys me to no end. You will never feel like you're forced into racing against a clock in the corner of your screen while piloting Mayorate frigates
.
Sorry for the short rant- I just wanted to give you guys the full explanation for why the drones don't level.