please help me balancing mines and making them more useful

[spoon]

Originally posted by Ragnarok-X:
What do you think of my changed, do you feel mines are more useful (and more important) feel more okay now ? I think they were fainly underused.

For vanilla SE4, mines fall into the Category of absolutely essential in the early game, and not-so-important in the late game. I think your changes are cool, and give mines a different flavor - but I don't think they will change how they impact the game so much. If I was playing in this mod, I'd still build up a fleet with enough sweepers to sweep the maximum amount of mines before going on the offensive with a large fleet.

Other approaches to mines I know of are the DevNull mod and Fantasy Empires mod. DevNull raises the maximum number of mines allowed in a sector to 500, and mines are swept by Point Defense. I'm playing my first DevNull game right now, so I'm not sure what impact this has (I assume I'm just going to have fleets with at least 100 PD V's...). Fantasy Empire also raises the max # to 500, but reduces the amount of damage a mine (summon insect spell) does (to about 50). My thinking there is that if mines do less damage, you might be more inclined to just try to "soak" it up. Not sure how that will pan out...)

Another idea you might try is to eliminate MineSweepers altogether, and limit the number of mines to like 20 per sector. Increase the cost to build a mine so you can only build around 1 per turn, and have their damage set low enough that it takes around 5 mines to kill a late-game ship, low-armor ship. Or maybe instead of eliminating Minesweepers altogther, attach the Minesweeping ability to a specific hull-type, and make that ship fairly expensive to build...

Good luck with your mod!