Drone Swarm

Combat role

Mid-range swarm harassment — attacks at Range 2; low AP cost enables mass deployment.

Lore

A Drone Swarm is not a squadron; it is a single weapon with two hundred expendable parts. The munitions are printed by the pallet, cheap enough that doctrine writers stopped using the word "loss" and started using "expenditure." The intelligence lives in the swarm logic — a distributed targeting mesh that reforms around every casualty and treats jamming as weather.

The South Asian Confederation fielded the first massed version, reasoning that a bloc rich in engineers and poor in airframes should fight with numbers that think. Everyone copied it within two years.

Veterans describe a swarm attack the same way regardless of language: first the sound, like rain on a tin roof that keeps getting closer, then the discovery that point defense built for missiles does arithmetic badly against two hundred targets.

When to use

Throw Drone Swarms at Artillery, Battleships, and wounded heavies — Range 2 harassment that is cheap to replace. Avoid feeding them to dedicated defenders; the swarm wins by volume, not by duels.

Counters