Question: Mines vs. Colony ships

[Weson102]

AI opponent's colony ships are not being damaged by my mines, what gives? Is this a bug?

[BeeDee10]

The problem arises from how damage is calculated for ships in SEIV. When damage is done to a ship, a random component is selected to recieve it. If the damage isn't enough to destroy it, then the game keeps track of how badly damaged it is and future attacks continue to hit that one particular component until enough damage accumulates for it to be destroyed. If a component is only partially damaged when combat ends, that partial damage is discarded; at the end of combat each component is either "destroyed" or "intact", nothing in between.

As far as I know, each mine detonation is counted as a completely separate "combat" against a ship. This is the key to the colony component invulnerability. Colony components take 200kt of damage capacity to destroy; with low mine/explosive tech levels, a single mine isn't capable of doing that much. So each mine explosion partially damages the colony component, and then the colony component's partial damage is discarded before the next mine detonates. Once mines become powerful enough to do more than 200kt of damage, colony components can be destroyed in a single blow and this problem goes away.

A simple way that comes immediately to mind to correct this is to lower the damage resistance of colony components; change them from
Tonnage Structure := 200
to something like
Tonnage Structure := 100
and they should be fragile enough for any single mine to destroy easily. I don't think this will cause any balance problems, since nobody should be risking colony ships in combat if they can help it anyway (psychotic Rage Collective colony ships excepted, of course)

I may be misremembering something about SEIV's damage system, BTW, so if my suggestion doesn't work it's my bad.

[capnq]

Even if the colony ship is shedding the partial damage between mine explosions, it still should be taking damage sometimes to the other components smaller than the colony module. Are your mines not detonating at all, or going off without harming the colony ships?

Another possibility: if you have a treaty with an AI, its ships won't set off your mines. The only way to prevent an ally from planting colonies in your systems is to colonize all the usable planets yourself first.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Sinapus]

It's an old problem. Colony modules have 200kt structure and mine warhead I do only 100 damage. Since mine attacks are run as separate combats, the colony module never gets destroyed. Or something like that. Essentially, you end up with a colony ship with everything, or almost everything except the colony module destroyed.

The temporary fix is to either lower the structure of colony modules to 100 kt, or change the research files a bit so the AI always researches Explosive Warheads 3 before they get ahold of Mines lvl 1.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Even if the colony ship is shedding the partial damage between mine explosions, it still should be taking damage sometimes to the other components smaller than the colony module.

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The problem is that larger/tougher internals get hit more often than the smaller/weaker ones. The colony module is 20x the size and strength of the engine components, so you'd need hundreds of mines to get a lucky hit on something other than the colony module.

The opposite is true of armor, though. There the smallest/weakest components are hit first, most of the time.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 18 June 2001).]

[capnq]

quote:

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The problem is that larger/tougher internals get hit more often than the smaller/weaker ones. The colony module is 20x the size and strength of the engine components, so you'd need hundreds of mines to get a lucky hit on something other than the colony module.

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I'm pretty sure you don't need "hundreds" of mines, because I recently had a convoy fleet of two colony ships and two frigates encounter a minefield; the frigates were destroyed, and both colony ships lost a control component, several engines, and a cargo bay. I don't think my opponent had the time to deploy hundreds of mines.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"