Do you really feel a ship with 21 drone control is resonable? i do not remember this but then again, I never played the game un-patched.
It was rather over the top. Good for base busting, but smaller ships never stood a chance against it, especially considering some were able to fly fleets of 3 MDC's (one could loft 63 drones!). Hence the CnC rules.
You should pay for expendable. You are pretty much getting free BPV for mission matching, you should have to pay someplacde. Same thing with fighters and PFs. I flew Kzin on GW1 and thought the prices were resonable.
I feel drones are way over-priced on GSA which hurts the Kzin there.
Paying for expendables is a given. However, when the price of replacing drones equals or outweighs the pp rewards per mission. You can see where the problem is. Hence, improved reloads and controlled pricing.
Non-sense. Limited? I have never seen that.
Better look again, drone ships were classified as a "Bombardment class" ship and had a lower production rate in the yards. On other servers they were classified as a hull larger so they would not only cost more but consistantly draw a larger opponent to battle. I believe is was Strangelove that an MDC would routinely draw not one but two Aux. Carriers, resulting in you having to kill 30+ heavy fighters (with only 10 or 12 drone control).
Classification of the "Drone ship" has been the one of the more effective means of controlling which ships are in the field. The larger classes such as Dn's suffered the same restrictions.
I'm not complaining about these steps (30+ fighters was a fun challenge), but these are the methods used to balance certain issues out.