Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
I was wondering if mines in seV will work the same way as they do in SEIV, since I kind of dislike the SEIV system. The problem is that it is kind of an all or nothing situation. When you have researched mines and your enemy hasn't you're kind of invincible. It's very cheap, and very easy to lay a minefield, and your enemy has no chance to get through untill he has researched mines and has built enough minesweepers to sweep one hundred mines (or more if the game settings are changed). After that point mines are completely useless, and you might as well not bother to build them.
A solution would be to make mines work differently:
The main defence against mines should not be minesweeping but mine avoidance. A player that wants to defend it's ships against mines could research a "mine detection" technology. when discovered a ship-component would become available that gives ships a 70% (or some other percentage) chance to escape from a minefield unharmed.
When a fleet consisting of ships equiped with these components would enter a minefield, each ship would have a 30% change to be hit by the mines, which would most probably mean the ship would be completely dead. 70 percent of the fleet would survive, which would make the mines less of an all or nothing weapon. This would also mean we could abandon the silly limit of a hundred mines per sector which we have in SEIV.
Ofcourse research in mines would lead to components which makes mines more effective, and gives them a to hit bonus, this would lead to a research arms race between mine avoidance on one side, and more effective mines on the other side. Also designing mines would be a bit more interesting, you would have to choose wether you put in that extra warhead for maximum damage, or that new sensor that gives your mines a larger chance to hit.
Ofcourse normal minesweepers would also be available, but they should probably be less reliable, and more suited for sweeping minefields around planets or warp points that have already been taken from the enemy.
What do you think?
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