Proportions shell armor and ... minesweeping armor?

[Suicide Junkie]

The idea I like best is to eliminate sweepers entirely.

Then you can reduce warhead damage, and play with the mines-per-sector limit.

Say, 10 mines required to kill a ship, plus mounts to double damage at 3x the cost, or 5x damage and 10x cost, say.

With a limit of 100 mines per sector, you'll force the defenders to spread out their fields across the whole system, and the attackers will normally lose at most 10 ships. (Home-system defenses will likely involve the more powerful mounted warheads, and do much more damage)

Scouts and small Groups of ships will be slaughtered, but large fleets will merely be slowed down in their advance while they wait for repairs after every movement. If you're lucky, you may even take out the repair ship and force them to turn back.
You could also counter-attack while thier defenses are weakened.

The main point is to have no sweepers, and weaker (probably cheaper too) mines spread out across the system. That way all the mines don't go up at once, and all the ships don't have to die.

[ September 07, 2003, 19:35: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]