Question, Armor and mines

[Q]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Note: You can mod direct-fire weapons for mines. I've done it and seen them work when deployed in combat much like satellites, but I never tried to lay those types of mines and see what happens when you cross into their location in strategic movement. Will the mines fire their weapons? Or will they fire and then ram like 'regular' mines even if they don't have warheads? Or will they just ram without using their direct-fire weapons? Would be really cool if they would fire their weapons but not ram. Effectively a bunch of 'ambush' satellites. Normal sats will just let you pass by when they are cloaked.

WARNING: ONLY SPECULATIONS, NO TESTED FACTS AHEAD

I think mines do not "ram" ships, because for ramming you have to move which is not possible for mines, but they explode and do the damage. And they always are destroyed by the explosion. The entire minefield damage is managed differently as a combat by SE IV. So I doubt very much that direct fire weapons would work as direct fire weapons in mines.
Another specialty of mines is that they skip shields. So if you put warheads with "engines only" damage, the damage should be done skipping the shields (in contrast to the combat effect now with the new patch) but also skipping armor because the damage is specific to engines only. That might be quite dangerous mines!

[Crazy_Dog]

For me, the best combination is the probability of sweep and various types of mines.
Right now, the mines only do standard damage.
I'm thinking about mines that destroy engines, shield generators (emp/ion), master computers (virus), eat resources, cloack systems, etc.
With various types of mines and only a % acuracy in sweep, the minefields can be real dangerous...

Right now if you can constroy a sweep with 20 level V sweep, the minefileds are no more

[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Raising the mines per sector limit does nothing substantial to the problem except delay it a few turns. Raise the mines per sector limit and now instead of four LC's with sweepers , I need eight, or ten, or what ever the limit is. Geoschmo

Or, if you get really crazy with the mine-per-sector limit (i.e. 1000 mines per sector), 40 LC's with sweepers... I think THAT would be prohibitive, even for some of the more experienced players. Granted, you could start using larger ship hulls, but it still requires a lot of sweepers (200 sweeper V components, to be precise); that's a lot of dedicated mine sweeper ships.

[Baron Munchausen]

The problem with raising the mines per sector limit is that it makes mines potentially invincible. All you have to do is pile enough up in one place. We need some sort of uncertainty in actual effect for both mines and sweepers. Keep emailing MM.

[geoschmo]

Raising the mines per sector limit just makes the current problem worse. It makes mines that much more devestating early, and they are still jsut as irrelevant once you get enough sweepers to deal with the maximum possible number.

[Askan Nightbringer]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Once the player gets to the point where they can build and support enough sweepers mines become irrelevant to the attacking fleet. It's all or nothing. Your fleet will roll through field after field with no pause or concern from the mines. I want you to have to take your time. Not to stop you completely, but to make you take your time when going from planet to planet. I want to make wars in the late game be campaigns instead of just an inexorable drive from planet to planet towards the heart of the enemy empire.
Geoschmo

Mines aren't the only way to acheive this. Repairing is critical for the roll to victory. Without repairing then every combat has a chance of slowing or halting the advance.
If you could only repair components at bases and planets then the end game would be a campaign, with the invading player's fleet whittling away or him spending time colonising, building bases or waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
This gives the defender more time to build ships and planetry defences might be useful.

Askan

[Q]

Originally posted by Askan Nightbringer:

quote:

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Originally posted by geoschmo:
Once the player gets to the point where they can build and support enough sweepers mines become irrelevant to the attacking fleet. It's all or nothing. Your fleet will roll through field after field with no pause or concern from the mines. I want you to have to take your time. Not to stop you completely, but to make you take your time when going from planet to planet. I want to make wars in the late game be campaigns instead of just an inexorable drive from planet to planet towards the heart of the enemy empire.
Geoschmo

Mines aren't the only way to acheive this. Repairing is critical for the roll to victory. Without repairing then every combat has a chance of slowing or halting the advance.
If you could only repair components at bases and planets then the end game would be a campaign, with the invading player's fleet whittling away or him spending time colonising, building bases or waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
This gives the defender more time to build ships and planetry defences might be useful.

Askan

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You are absolutely right about the enormous importance of repair. But your idea to restrict repair to bases and planets is extremely easy to implement: change the allowed vehicle types for repair components and space yards from bases/ships to bases only.
There are however major problems with this modification: 1.) You could never build bases outside the orbit of planets and therefore remote mining and ring-/sphereworlds would be impossible.
2.) You could not repair ships that have lost their engines. Human players would have to send killer ships to destroy these wrecks but the AI would be lost with this problem.

[ August 18, 2002, 06:42: Message edited by: Q ]