[geoschmo]

Darn, well that nixes that idea.

I am trying to come up with a way to bring mines back into the game a bit. With the new patch fixing the mines per sector limit and the damage accumulation problems I am afraid they are totally relegated to the early game, if they weren't already.

What if we lowered the warhead damage, and eliminated the minesweeping components? That would certainly change things, no? Since mine damage is applied randomly across the fleet you would not know which ships were going to get hit. You would have to armor everybody a little bit, or take the chance on your critical ships getting their armor blown away and taking real damage.

You could still have minesweepers in a way. Heavily armored ships that you sent in to soak up the mines, but you'd have to send them in unsupported, as we do in real naval anti mine operations.

This would be murder in games though of course unless you reduced the damage for each warhead. That's the key. A small fleet could get wiped out if they were stupid enough to not have armor, but a big fleet would not. They would take damage though. They could not run minefield after minefield. They would have to take it slow.

Geoschmo