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please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
im creating my mod and stumpled upon mines.
I like the idea of mining warp points or planets, but there is one big problem for me. Why does small, medium and large mines count just as one mine when being swept ?! I think it would be by far better if a medium mine would count as 2 mines when being swepted and large mines counting as 3. Obviously this it not possible, so i modded "my" mines like this, take a look: To use less space i cut the dectection prevention ability of each mine, mines are invisible. Name := Mine Ring Short Name := Small Mine Description := A small ring of basic mines seeded in random fashion. Code := MS Primary Bitmap Name := minegroup Alternate Bitmap Name := minegroup Vehicle Type := Mine Tonnage := 10 Cost Minerals := 150 Cost Organics := 0 Cost Radioactives := 0 Engines Per Move := 0 Number of Tech Req := 1 Tech Area Req 1 := Mines Tech Level Req 1 := 1 Requirement Must Have Bridge := False Requirement Can Have Aux Con := False Requirement Min Life Support := 0 Requirement Min Crew Quarters := 0 Requirement Uses Engines := False Requirement Max Engines := 0 Requirement Pct Fighter Bays := 0 Requirement Pct Colony Mods := 0 Requirement Pct Cargo := 0 Name := Mine Net Short Name := Mine Net Description := A quite large number of enhanced mines organized in net formation. Code := MN Primary Bitmap Name := minegroup Alternate Bitmap Name := minegroup Vehicle Type := Mine Tonnage := 16 Cost Minerals := 125 Cost Organics := 0 Cost Radioactives := 0 Engines Per Move := 0 Number of Tech Req := 1 Tech Area Req 1 := Mines Tech Level Req 1 := 2 Requirement Must Have Bridge := False Requirement Can Have Aux Con := False Requirement Min Life Support := 0 Requirement Min Crew Quarters := 0 Requirement Uses Engines := False Requirement Max Engines := 0 Requirement Pct Fighter Bays := 0 Requirement Pct Colony Mods := 0 Requirement Pct Cargo := 0 Name := Mine Belt Short Name := Mine Net Description := A huge amount of superior mines placed like a belt for maximum coverage and effect. Code := MN Primary Bitmap Name := minegroup Alternate Bitmap Name := minegroup Vehicle Type := Mine Tonnage := 36 Cost Minerals := 100 Cost Organics := 0 Cost Radioactives := 0 Engines Per Move := 0 Number of Tech Req := 1 Tech Area Req 1 := Mines Tech Level Req 1 := 3 Requirement Must Have Bridge := False Requirement Can Have Aux Con := False Requirement Min Life Support := 0 Requirement Min Crew Quarters := 0 Requirement Uses Engines := False Requirement Max Engines := 0 Requirement Pct Fighter Bays := 0 Requirement Pct Colony Mods := 0 Requirement Pct Cargo := 0 Name := Mine Sweeper I Description := Large array fitted with devices able to detect minefields before contact. Will create shortrange microwaves which will explode mines as if being triggered at distance. Pic Num := 1338 Tonnage Space Taken := 150 Tonnage Structure := 150 Cost Minerals := 800 Cost Organics := 0 Cost Radioactives := 650 Vehicle Type := Ship Supply Amount Used := 40 Restrictions := None General Group := Miscellaneous Family := 7040 Roman Numeral := 1 Custom Group := 0 Number of Tech Req := 1 Tech Area Req 1 := Mines Tech Level Req 1 := 1 Number of Abilities := 1 Ability 1 Type := Mine Sweeping Ability 1 Descr := Array can destroy 1 minefield at distance before they are triggered Ability 1 Val 1 := 1 Ability 1 Val 2 := 0 Weapon Type := None Name := Mine Sweeper II Description := Large array fitted with devices able to detect minefields before contact. Will create shortrange microwaves which will explode mines as if being triggered at distance. Pic Num := 1338 Tonnage Space Taken := 150 Tonnage Structure := 150 Cost Minerals := 700 Cost Organics := 0 Cost Radioactives := 550 Vehicle Type := Ship Supply Amount Used := 40 Restrictions := None General Group := Miscellaneous Family := 7040 Roman Numeral := 2 Custom Group := 0 Number of Tech Req := 1 Tech Area Req 1 := Mines Tech Level Req 1 := 2 Number of Abilities := 1 Ability 1 Type := Mine Sweeping Ability 1 Descr := Array can destroy 2 minefields at distance before they are triggered Ability 1 Val 1 := 2 Ability 1 Val 2 := 0 Weapon Type := None Name := Mine Sweeper III Description := Large array fitted with devices able to detect minefields before contact. Will create shortrange microwaves which will explode mines as if being triggered at distance. Pic Num := 1338 Tonnage Space Taken := 150 Tonnage Structure := 150 Cost Minerals := 600 Cost Organics := 0 Cost Radioactives := 450 Vehicle Type := Ship Supply Amount Used := 40 Restrictions := None General Group := Miscellaneous Family := 7040 Roman Numeral := 3 Custom Group := 0 Number of Tech Req := 1 Tech Area Req 1 := Mines Tech Level Req 1 := 3 Number of Abilities := 1 Ability 1 Type := Mine Sweeping Ability 1 Descr := Array can destroy 3 minefields at distance before they are triggered Ability 1 Val 1 := 3 Ability 1 Val 2 := 0 Weapon Type := None As you may have noticed here is my idea for improving mines. Instead of builing single mines, you build mine Groups, lvl 1 = small group, 10kT, medium group = 16 kT and large group 36 kT. Each group should be considered as a full mine ring, able to do good damage for its cost. There are only 3 warheads, each warhead costs 2 kT and very little ressources, this was made to ensure mine rings can still be build in good time, "old" mines or rather the warheads costed to much radioactives to build enough amounts which could not be swept immediatly. Im not sure, but maybe the cost for each werhead needs to be upped by 20-40%. To sum it up, a small mine group will have 5 warheads, while medium will have 8 warheads and large Groups will have 16 Warheads. This made to ensure that mines look and feel both good. Each warheads does less damage, but a full mine(field) will do slightly more damage now (imho) In generel, sweping mines was made more difficult. In order to increase the difficulty of sweeping mines, or rather mine fields in my mod, i added a component which needs 150KT and can, depending on level swep 1, 2 or 3 mine fields. I felt mine fields where largely underused and could be swept far to easily. I also modified the minelayer component, so you can only lay 1/2 mine fields per turn per module (big sized, too) What do you think of my changed, do you feel mines are more useful (and more important) feel more okay now ? I think they were fainly underused. Im thinking about adding a mine mount which will decrease the warhead size by 50%, so each minefield could have 200% the current amount of warheads, given the right (high) techlevel. Then again this wouldnt help with big minefelds being swept as fast as small ones. thanks for your help and opinions. !! |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
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Other approaches to mines I know of are the DevNull mod and Fantasy Empires mod. DevNull raises the maximum number of mines allowed in a sector to 500, and mines are swept by Point Defense. I'm playing my first DevNull game right now, so I'm not sure what impact this has (I assume I'm just going to have fleets with at least 100 PD V's...). Fantasy Empire also raises the max # to 500, but reduces the amount of damage a mine (summon insect spell) does (to about 50). My thinking there is that if mines do less damage, you might be more inclined to just try to "soak" it up. Not sure how that will pan out...) Another idea you might try is to eliminate MineSweepers altogether, and limit the number of mines to like 20 per sector. Increase the cost to build a mine so you can only build around 1 per turn, and have their damage set low enough that it takes around 5 mines to kill a late-game ship, low-armor ship. Or maybe instead of eliminating Minesweepers altogther, attach the Minesweeping ability to a specific hull-type, and make that ship fairly expensive to build... Good luck with your mod! |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
I'm a solid supporter of the "eliminate sweepers" theory.
I also like the idea of having a divergent cost/effect ratio. Cheap mines would be easy to build in bulk, but do relatively little damage each. Expensive mines would take much longer to build and do much more damage. The expensive mines would have a better damage/mine ratio, but a much worse damage/cost ratio. The cheap mines would be cheap enough that you could fill 5 or 6 sectors for the price of one sector worth of expensive mines, so that multiple-sector fields may actually get built. |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
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Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
I like the "nerf mine damage and minesweepers" theory. I also like the "minesweepers are not the same tech area as mines themselves" concept. AIC mod is a good example of this.
PvK |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
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Your expensive mines end up costing almost the same per damage point, and your cheap mines aren't cheap enough that you can pile them multiple sectors deep. |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
thanks for opinions, yesterday evening i playtested my mines extensive, made a small game with many AIs.
Well to sum it up, the mine Groups cost to few ressources and can be launched in to large numbers to easily, while sweping has been made TOO hard, due to the size of sweper modules. I think i will stick to the mine Groups in generell, but the cost for the "Hull" will be increased while each warhead will also cost more radioactives. In addition im thinking about adding low-cost warheads which will do engines-only damage and later weapons only damage. Maybe even supply-damage. Anyway thanks for all your opions, but i think mines should be essential and just be used like they are now, in big amounts. About the Devnull mod, my mod is slightly inspired by this mode, but giving PD guns the mineswep abilty is crap, because mines could be swept FAR too easily. In the vanilla devnull, each level of the PD gun increased the swep abilty, to later on ONE 20kT module was able to 3, 4 or even 5 mines, this made sweping far to easily and mines not as effective. |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
set the max units per space to 1000 or 5000
that will increase the power of the mine |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
Alneyan,
thanks for extensive post, i like the idea, just one problem: Since im using the devnull mod as the base for my own mod, the leaky armor system is not implented. I need to know, do WARHEADS with damage types engine only and weapons only IGNORE components with the armor ability or does armor ability components get destroyed first even when hit by mines ?!? I guess i will have to add leaky armor system though |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
"Only X" damage types all skip armor.
Unless the armor has ability X, of course. A big question is whether it will get hit first of those components with ability X. There is also a problem with adding boarding party ability to lots of components, in that they'll all be destroyed during offensive OR defensive capture attempts. [ April 08, 2004, 14:37: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ] |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
Incidentally, are stronger components much more likely to be hit than ones with less hitpoints when it comes to the special damage types? We could even have a Leaky "Minesweeper" by going this way. (Which would make sense, as minesweeping cannot possibly work all the time, can it?)
Thanks for pointing out this problem with the boarding ability SJ. Unfortunately, it doesn't leave many other decoy abilities besides these two "Resupply Base Only" and "Spacesport Only". I will give these a try to see if they would work on ships. As they do not seem to work for ships (which makes sense, but I was daydreaming), a workaround would be needed, such as making up a very good reason for the sudden destruction of these minesweepers once the ship Boards another/is boarded. Either that, or using another decoy ability, such as the Shield Generator Only if you do not plan on using it. However, as special damage do *not* stack, will a special weapon try to take down a vulnerable component while the others cannot be destroyed? Imagine four sturdy engines with 100 hitpoints, and a much weaker one with only 10 hitpoints. Would a Ionic Disperser with 50 damage destroy the weak one, or would it target the bigger ones, even if it has no hope of breaking them? It might be a solution if it is the former, albeit a very rough one. [ April 08, 2004, 15:26: Message edited by: Alneyan ] |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
You could give the minesweeper componets the only X allowed per ship ability. If you could have only 1 stock minesweeper V on a ship, then it would take at least 20 ships to clear a stock mine field. And/or you could make the sweeper componet huge (say 200kt), so that you would need to build a large number of specialty mine sweepers. The problem now, IMHO is that you can sweep a full minefield with just one or two speciality ships.
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Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
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For regular damage, if the mine dosen't destroy a component, it was changed so that the damage stacks with the next warhead. That fix may work for Only X damage types, at least for mines. |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
One thing to make mines better would be so, that when you sweep mines, there would be certain percentual for one sweeper component to sweep a mine. Also so, that bigger minefields are easier to sweep. For example:
1 sweeper component of level 5 has five shots. 1 shot has 10% basic chance to sweep a mine. In this case this component would have 5 shots of 10 percent chance each of them = 1-(0,9^5) = 0,41 mines/turn. This number would apply in... lets say a minefield size of 50 mines. Now this percent grows linear up to 20% chance when the size of the minefield is 100 mines. This is logic, because more mines in one sector means they are closer each other. So, lets say a ship, which has 20 components of level 5 minesweeper components goes into minefield of 100 mines. Then it sweeps like this: 1 component sweeps: 1-(0,8^5) = 0,67 mines/turn. 20 components sweeps approximately 13,4 mines/turn. So, in this case you would need approximately 8 ships (20 components in each of them) to sweep every mine in the field in one turn. Yes, this is a quite many ships, but also mines would have a propability to hit one ship (not automatically, like now). The mine hit propability could be for example 50%. In this kind of minefields, enemy could pass it taking some damage, but it would not sweep all the mines at one sweep like now. The sweeper components could also become more accurate in upper levels and mines would have better hit ratio when more developed. Sure these numbers I presented needs some refinement, but I think the idea would be great. Mines would be quite more usable and they would have this unpredictable element which they have in real life also. You rarely find all mines in one area in one day (or month, for that matter). You need to inspect the area very closely. [ April 08, 2004, 18:16: Message edited by: Karibu ] |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
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Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
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Obviously, the armoured engine was mostly targetted, thus protecting the much weaker engines. (They have been destroyed from time to time though, but adding more mines or warheads only increases the odds to destroy some vulnerable components) So it does seem that the damage done by special warheads do not stack, and the warheads will not go for the weak components when they cannot take down a sturdier component. [ April 08, 2004, 18:55: Message edited by: Alneyan ] |
Re: please help me balancing mines and making them more useful
A random idea concerning these mines. It would revolve around using the often unused damage types of Security Stations Only and Boarding Parties (or other such Damage Only types). You would have mines with two kind of warheads, one dedicated to destroying the "minesweepers" and the other ones able to take down the other parts of the ship. (Engines, weapons, internals...) "Minesweepers" would instead be armoured structures able to withstand a few hits from the anti-minesweepers warheads, and many other warheads hits.
Technically, we would have the following: - Minesweepers: Armour ability, a rather important amount of hitpoints (depending on the strength of the warheads), Security Station and Boarding Parties value of 0. Engine and Weapon decoy abilities if needed. - Anti-minesweeper warhead: A portion of the Minesweeper hitpoints, Security Station only damage. These warheads are here to destroy the defences of the ship, and not to deal any damage to the ship itself. - Anti-engine, anti-weapons warheads, if wanted. Little damage done, enough to take down at least one such component per warhead, but you would need a lot of these to bypass the minesweepers. - Anti-internal warheads, here to take down the inner parts of the vehicle. It would be a Boarding Parties only warhead, and these internal components would get the Boarding Parties ability as well. (O as a value) The drawbacks of this are the following: - Your ship will be protected by some armour from these minesweepers, but you might choose to add some maluses to reduce their use as an armour component. - More of a problem, I am not sure if these special damage types do bypass the armour, besides the Engines only damage. Using a leaky armour system should prevent this from being a problem however. - Above all, you cannot use the vanilla system of Boarders/Security Stations, as they would get targetted by these mines. It may be possible to work around this however, perhaps by using some of the other less used abilities. (If Only Resupply Depots and Only Spaceports worked on components, they would be perfect candidates for these dummy abilities. I wonder if it would work though) I am not sure if I made much sense, as this idea just stroke me and so it is only a rough suggestion for now. Still, if you find any interest in this complicated scheme, or any other fail besides the ones above, feel free to point these out. More on topic, I guess it also depends on the scale of your mod. Would you like long battles, where you cannot possibly hope to win the day in a single assault? Should it be possible to launch several offensives at once, or should a given Empire only focus on a single one unless it has a *lot* of resources available for numerous minesweepers? Obviously, strengthening mines will have an impact on how the game will be played, since mines are mainly used as deterrents in the vanilla game. It isn't common for an Empire to gamble and go on the offensive without enough sweepers, and so mines can seldom destroy many ships. Still, they can delay this offensive if the opponent things they will be present. (You don't actually have to use mines in the vanilla game, just make *them* think you are using them. Easier said than done obviously. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif ) However, increasing the maximum limit could have the side effect of making attacks much less common, since you could not know what size of minefields you could expect. Perhaps removing the cloaking ability of these mines would help to check the numbers of warheads waiting for you at the other side of this wormhole, as there would be quite a difference between losing a few ships to rogue mines, and a whole battlefleet of a hundred warships, bringing the wrath of the Righteous Empire against its perfidious foes and... Erh, I should stop raving. |
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