DROIDs and Workforce
DROIDs are robotic workers — a workforce resource that is fundamentally different from raw materials. Metal, Carbon, and Hydrogen represent what you own; DROIDs represent what you can do with what you have. Assigning DROIDs to a planet's mines boosts their hourly output, compounding your income over time.
What DROIDs Do
Each DROID assigned to a planet's mines contributes to a production multiplier. The effect is asymptotic — early DROIDs have a big per-unit impact; adding more DROIDs gives diminishing returns. An unstaffed mine runs at a fraction of its rated output. As you assign more DROIDs, output rises with diminishing returns — once you reach the mine's full demand, you are effectively at full production and adding more DROIDs yields almost nothing.
The result is a global production boost on that planet. A well-staffed planet produces significantly more resources than one with no DROIDs, even at the same building levels.
Building DROIDs
DROIDs are produced by the DROID Factory building. Each unit takes time to build — the build time decreases as you upgrade the DROID Factory. DROIDs cost Metal and Carbon to produce.
DROIDs are a patient investment. They take time to accumulate, but once assigned they provide permanent, compounding production benefits.
Planet DROID Cap
Every planet has a hard cap on the number of DROIDs it can hold, determined by the planet's size — Small, Medium, or Large. Large planets can host substantially more DROIDs than Small ones, which is why planet size matters for long-term production.
The cap is a hard invariant — you cannot produce, receive via transport, or colonize more DROIDs onto a planet than its cap allows. Surplus DROIDs are destroyed on arrival with no refund, so pay attention to cap headroom before shipping DROIDs between planets.
DROIDs as Defenders
DROIDs are not purely an economic asset. They also defend your planet in combat with the DEFENSE combat role. DROIDs have meaningful HP and attack power — a well-stocked DROID workforce is a meaningful deterrent to raiders. Unlike ships, DROIDs do not leave your planet to attack — they stay and fight when an enemy fleet arrives. They have the highest target profile of any unit, meaning incoming fire concentrates on them first, shielding stationed ships behind them.
DROIDs on Colonizer Missions
When you dispatch a Colonizer to claim a new planet, the idle DROIDs on the source planet ride along as cargo. The new colony starts with a small baseline workforce — whatever the Colonizer carries is added on top, up to the new planet's cap.
This gives new colonies an immediate workforce boost without having to build DROIDs from scratch.