Advice on protecting unarmed ships

[PvK]

Originally posted by Joe Cool:
FYI, I ran some tests and it appears that if the sweepers arrive earlier in the turn than other fleets, the mines are swept and the fleets that follow that turn do not encounter them. This seemed to work if sweepers and other fleet start at the same location and sweepers are faster. It also seemed to work if the sweepers were equally fast, but started nearer the mine field. When the sweepers were equal in speed and equally distant, they did not sweep and the other fleet was damaged, at least on the few trials I tested.

I think you may have been lucky, and it is based on fleet age or something else random, unless it has been fixed in a patch at some point. In the past however, I have seen minesweepers not manage to sweep a field simply because there weren't enough in a single fleet, even though they were the same speed and given the same movement orders, and no goofy pathfinding made their course split.

For example, one fleet can sweep 60 mines, the other can sweep 40. They move together, but they run into a field of 80 mines, and get obliterated.

It'd be great if it has been fixed, but I didn't know that it had been... and recently I thought I saw someone else lose a ship to mines when it looked to me like they had ample minesweepers (but that might've been a valid timing thing, I suppose).

PvK