Yes, mines are a crock. All or nothing for both mine attacks and mine sweeper attacks is completely out of character with the rest of the game. We've been pummeling on MM to fix them since before the game was officially released. No progress so far. I guess you'd have to get hundreds of people to email their rants in to convince him it's important.
Sats in the default game do become less useful as combat sensors and ECM evolve. I've modded my own game to give sats natural defensive and offensive bonuses due to their small size. They can also use the same combat sensors and ECM as ships, remember.
Recommendation: make a special emissive armor for sats, or increase the power of standard emissive armor, to match the damage rating of PDC. Then sats fitted with this armor have to be attacked with normal weapons.
Training: Yes, it's that effective. I rather enjoy it but since the AI is not smart enough to use training it amounts to cheating in single-player games. The problem is (again) the all or nothing nature of so many parts of the game. If damage was slightly randomized instead of exactly what you set for the weapon, or if there was a 'near miss' feature in combat and not just clean hit or miss, you could have a wider range of variable effects due to training and not just the flat percentage increase or decrease in chances to hit or miss (absolutlely).
I'd like to see training affect how the crew handles damage to the ship, for example. A 'green' crew ought to be disoriented and the ship disabled for a combat round or two by a major hit, but a veteran crew could just keep right on fighting.
[ June 04, 2002, 21:27: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]