Defending a Wormhole.

[Alneyan]

dogscoff said:
They prevent cloaked ships from sneaking through your warp points- you can't sweep while cloaked.

Armour, even the standard Stealth/Scattering components, should be enough to soak up all the damage from regular mines. It probably wouldn't be so good against seriously beefed up mines (not the most important field of research normally), so that brings me to the second point.

Just send in a suicide sweeper right before your fleet, and you will go through the mine field unscathed (well, except for that one ship). Of course, it gives the game away, but you should be past their defences by now, and can start wreaking some havoc.

Third point is, of course, that cloaking is unlikely to do you much good beyond the early game. A lone satellite can detect everything cloaked in a system, can be deployed everywhere, and is dirt cheap (a ship/base component would work just as well, but I'm a miser). The best sensors come from the Advanced Military Science area, so they tend to be researched rather quickly. They wouldn't work in a red nebula, but you wouldn't be protecting anything in that sort of system.

On an unrelated note, mines do work fine in those red nebulas, if you would like to be notified when someone is sneaking by there... and it's always fun to blow up damaged enemy ships pulling out to the 'safety' of the nebula for repairs.