[Psitticine]

I agree with all that plus I'd like to point out how much more interesting it'd be if you didn't know for a fact that a minefield is gone once you made it through. As it stands, if you survive, you must have had all the mines blow as you moved through.

Logically, all you'd know is that you cleared one path and if the mines drift about at all, it'd close up again before another fleet could pass through it. Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting as well as realistic to not really know if a minefield is gone until the minesweepers had been through?

A reasonable fix might be to have a percentage of mines able to "engage" an opponent. The higher the overall number of mines, the higher the density, so the greater number of mines would be found along any path cutting through the field. Even if the auto-hit for mines is kept, adding a random varience to this percentage would still generate some, well, randomness.