Question, Armor and mines

[Baron Grazic]

Couldn't you reduce the mines per sector down to say 10, and then remove the Mine Sweepers completely?
That way, going thru a mine field would be risky, would stop large concentrations of them, and would give you the ability to lay them in strategic places in-system. It would also give more incentive to build larger mines, something I never do.

[capnq]

With the new patch fixing the mines per sector limit and the damage accumulation problems I am afraid they are totally relegated to the early game, if they weren't already.

Would you consider Turn 112 to be early game? Because that's the most recent turn in my v1.67 PBW game in which mines significantly affected the turn result.

[Q]

IMHO mines are useful even in the later game because it forces your enemy to build and maintain minesweepers.
This is also my biggest argument against the "armor-mine" modification Geoschmo proposed: minesweeping component are only useful to sweep mines, nothing else. There is your decision how much resources you want to invest to be protected against minefields. Armor however is most useful in (almost) all combat situations and therefore you just end up with an increased importance of armor compared to shields.
I still think one more line in the vehicle.txt file for mines as:
"Probability to be cleared = 100"
would be great and not too difficult to implement.
If the value is lower than 100, some of the otherwise cleared mines will be missed by the minesweeping and will damage your ships.
Then you could make higher mine levels useful.
At the moment I gave small and medium mines in my mod lower cloak levels and therefore they can be detected by higher gravitic sensors. But besides that I don't see any reason to use larger mines now.

[geoschmo]

I don't know Q. It just doesn't seem all that hard to me to build and maintain 5 or 6 LC's and include them in with my war fleets. Especially since once I get BC's I suddenly have a lot of LC's laying around to retrofit to minesweeper duty. At 100 mines per sector it just really isn't that hard to counter mines in the mid to late game. And it's TOO hard to counter them in the early game IMHO. They are an impenartrable wall, putting a crippling obstalce against any sort of early game wars. And then suddenly you throw a switch, and they are useless.

Your suggestion for settings.txt would certainly be better than the current situation. However it is beyond my power to implement. Baron has been asking Malfador for a long time for a chance based system for minesweeping and it hasn't been done. His suggestion was much more involved than a simple settings.txt entry. It allowed for differences from race to race in sweeping proficency.

You point about minesweepers having only one use and armor having more than one is valid. My ideal would be a combination of Baron's ideas, and an ability for minesweeping components that allowed them to be destroyed as they sweep. Then you could keep the warhead damage levels high. You could have the sweepers protect all the ships in the fleet, without having to armor every ship. But you would still require the fleet to stop after a few minefields and repair themselves. But all that would require hard code changes.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by capnq:
Would you consider Turn 112 to be early game? Because that's the most recent turn in my v1.67 PBW game in which mines significantly affected the turn result.

Well, that doesn't really prove anything except there are exceptions to every rule. If the players are careful mines should be almost irrelevant by that point in the game. I have a PBW game on turn 140 where I am getting ready to take a guys homeworld with a fleet full of LC's and DUC's. But I wouldn't try to tell anyone DUC's are a viable late game weapon in most cases.

About the only use in the late game for mines would be to heavily mine the other guys territory. This would require some time to setup and either doing it under cover of a treaty, or by having cloaking devices, which can also be defeated. It is possible to do, but even then it's more of a nuisance than anything else. Sweepers are so cheap you could simply have a few stationed in each system to ferry ships around.

Geoschmo

[Q]

I basically agree with you Geoschmo that mines are too powerful in the early and too weak in the late game. I just think the difference is not that enormous.
The minesweeping components to clear 100 mines cost alone 10000 minerals. Therefore the cost to build and more important to maintain a sufficient number of minesweepers can be important. And if you find this still too cheap, it can of course be modified and increased.
The changes MM made in the Last patch with new mounts/damage types gives me hope that the mine suggestions could be realized too in a future patch if we continue to ask for it.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Q:
The changes MM made in the Last patch with new mounts/damage types gives me hope that the mine suggestions could be realized too in a future patch if we continue to ask for it.

Oh yes. I agree totally. And I love asking for stuff.