Pacifist / paralysing mines

jimbob55 · #1 February 5th, 2001, 11:31 PM

I am fairly sure that mines take damage from the shields. I've had enemy ships waltz through my somewhat heavy minefields and take no internal hits whatsoever (not organic races). The ships had about 1500 shields, I thought they were taking the hits...

OK, if shields aren't active in minefields, how about armour skipping mines... muwhahahaha. I'd have to make them REAL expensive or big, or both.

Jubala · #2 February 6th, 2001, 07:09 PM

I said before and I'll say it again, special damage mines do not work regardless of what damage you make them do. Since the ship will not be destroyed by them the mines will just keep going boom until they are no more. The reason for this is that mines go boom until there is no more mines left or no more enemy ships to go boom on. So mines that only destroy a specific part on an enemy ship will keep going boom until they are all gone even if it's just against a pitiful little escort because the pitiful little escort will never die.

Baron Munchausen · #3 February 6th, 2001, 07:19 PM

quote:
Originally posted by jimbob55:
I am fairly sure that mines take damage from the shields. I've had enemy ships waltz through my somewhat heavy minefields and take no internal hits whatsoever (not organic races). The ships had about 1500 shields, I thought they were taking the hits...

OK, if shields aren't active in minefields, how about armour skipping mines... muwhahahaha. I'd have to make them REAL expensive or big, or both.

Now that might work. It's not an 'exclusive' damage type like ionic disperser, it WILL destroy the ship -- and faster than normal mines! The way to test it, I guess, is to put just one or two mines with this warhead in a sector and run a ship with enough organic armor to take the hits through it, if it's destroyed -- or at least some internal components are damaged -- you know the armor was skipped.

This w ould be a logical tech for crystalline races. Hmm, I wonder if there's a good component picture for a 'shard warhead' in the components directory...

dmm · #4 February 6th, 2001, 08:23 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Jubala:
I said before and I'll say it again, special damage mines do not work regardless of what damage you make them do. ...mines that only destroy a specific part on an enemy ship will keep going boom until they are all gone...

Yeah, but supposing you were willing to live with that limitation, would they work at all? I mean, if you mined your entire system with just a few in each sector, would you keep taking out one enemy ship's engines each time his fleet moved? So he'd either have to leave a trail of crippled ships or else stop and repair them? Sounds like a nice delaying tactic to me, and would be immune to heavily shielded "minefield busters" which take out entire regular minefields.

dmm · #5 February 6th, 2001, 08:28 PM

quote:
Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
The only problem with building shield-busting mines is that shields are only on during combat. So shield-depleting mines would be useless (outside of combat).

Are you sure about that? Somebody else posted (on another topic, fairly recently) that a great "cheat" for busting through minefields is to make a ship with enough shields to handle the bLast from a single mine. He claimed that the shields regenerated after each mine, so such a ship could take out an entire minefield.

jimbob55 · #6 February 6th, 2001, 09:54 PM

OK, my idea was a warhead that did shield only damage or skipped armour. You can mount 4 warheads on a large mine, so make it 3 heavy shield killers and one regular warhead.

Or 2 regular warhead + 2 armour skipping warheads. With the damage FAQ somewhere the damage to the armour should get stored up until it either does more than 150 damage (to destroy the armour) or it just disappears..not sure.

Engine damage mines could be deployed in every sector of a system. This would wittle (sp?) down a fleet. If the armour + shield skipping mines were used at the warp point you could reduce or eliminate the minsweepers capacity to make the rest of the smaller mine fields effective....
A trail of immobilised vessels mark a path through your outer systems just waiting to be captured.....

[This message has been edited by jimbob55 (edited 06 February 2001).]

Zanthis · #7 February 6th, 2001, 10:26 PM

IMX, your shields are at full strength for each mine hit. I *believe* you also get all your OA regenerated (haven't been organic in awhile). But it is certainly true that any extra damage (damage from a single mine that does not kill a component) is lost between mine hits.

So, if you had 155 shields and a single piece of stealth armor (150 damage resistance), you can get hit by unlimited 300 damage mines (only 145 gets through, which can't kill your armor).

On the plus side, Crystalline Armor gives you no special protection against mines. Since its ability only effects the second and subsequent hits in combat, it acts as just plain 150 damage resistant armor against mines.