Question, Armor and mines

[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 ]

[Fyron]

Remove the repair ability from Space Yard components.

[dumbluck]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Remove the repair ability from Space Yard components.

Oooo, this has potential. SY components have no repair ability, and Repair bays are only mountable on bases. So you have to build repair bases during campaigns into enemy territory; repair bases that would have to be defended or scrapped (and then built all over again). The only other option would be to build colonies in enemy territory, (which has it's own inherent risks involved, ie. population captured by the enemy. Reduce the build rate of the SY components so that such bases take, say, 5 or 10 turns to build....