Varied questions: mines, sats, experience

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, mines are a crock. All or nothing for both mine attacks and mine sweeper attacks is completely out of character with the rest of the game. We've been pummeling on MM to fix them since before the game was officially released. No progress so far. I guess you'd have to get hundreds of people to email their rants in to convince him it's important.

Sats in the default game do become less useful as combat sensors and ECM evolve. I've modded my own game to give sats natural defensive and offensive bonuses due to their small size. They can also use the same combat sensors and ECM as ships, remember.

Recommendation: make a special emissive armor for sats, or increase the power of standard emissive armor, to match the damage rating of PDC. Then sats fitted with this armor have to be attacked with normal weapons.

Training: Yes, it's that effective. I rather enjoy it but since the AI is not smart enough to use training it amounts to cheating in single-player games. The problem is (again) the all or nothing nature of so many parts of the game. If damage was slightly randomized instead of exactly what you set for the weapon, or if there was a 'near miss' feature in combat and not just clean hit or miss, you could have a wider range of variable effects due to training and not just the flat percentage increase or decrease in chances to hit or miss (absolutlely).

I'd like to see training affect how the crew handles damage to the ship, for example. A 'green' crew ought to be disoriented and the ship disabled for a combat round or two by a major hit, but a veteran crew could just keep right on fighting.

[ June 04, 2002, 21:27: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Phoenix-D]

"So, someone please explain me why should one bother to build 20 sats when he can build 3 battlestations of much greater stopping power?"

Sats are free after construction, and can be built off-site. Additionally, they can't be hit by some of the large ship-killing weapons (null-space, WMG, missiles, torps). OTOH they *can* be hit by PDC.

Phoenix-D

[Gryphin]

The other advantage of sats:
They can be moved.
They make great Sentenals.
They are great Drone killers when playing against the AI. In the game I am playing now the AI repeatedly throws 2 drones at my sats. cheap sats, expensive ship killing drones.

Edit: many many of the sats were over 30 turns old.

[ June 03, 2002, 21:16: Message edited by: The High Gryphin ]

[Taera]

Well yeah, i've realised the pluses of sats after i've posted, thanks.

[Nodachi]

I've found sats to be extremely effective, provided you use them in combination with something else.
ex: Missle sats are useless in late game right? Wrong! 100 sats with csm's over a planet that has large weapon platforms using massive mount tachyon projection cannons is something to fear. PDC's are great, but only if they can fire!
That's just one example I'm sure some of the more experienced players can come up with more.

Nodachi

[Gandalph]

I am designing a Psychic race now that uses sat's with allegiance subverters at warp points. Imagine coming through a warp point and staring 30 allegiance subverters in the face at point blank range!

[Alpha Kodiak]

Originally posted by Taera:
So the question finaly formed in my brain:
What is the practical use of mines in large-scale games against human players?
Very well. in the earlier game it gives the advantage to the defender.
A little later, even with LCs loaded with Mine Sweepers II can take out minefields relatively easy, given the 100 mines-per-sector limitatioin.
Are the mines any effective?

For the most part, this is true. You can, however, be sneaky about where you put mines. Your opponent isn't always going to have a mine sweeper everywhere he is sending ships.