Re: Mines could add a lot of game depth
As I proposed below, I'm afraid that once they started going off at all they would still keep going boom until you ran out of either mines or targets. Given the interpretation that they are one-shot bomb-pumped weapons, you could give them a % chance to hit which is less than 100%, though. In fact, you could make "to hit" loss due to ECM and size of the target vs the "to hit" add from small combat sensors in the mine part of the equation. Even so, either all the mines fire but it is not enough to kill all the targets, or all the targets get killed before all the mines have fired (or, rarely, the Last mine kills the Last target).
The only way to end that is to change the assumption to one of a big bomb with a proximity fuse. They are assumed to be far enough apart to avoid fratricide, which means you could get lucky and get through the minefield without triggering one. Everything I wrote before would still apply about where mines can be placed (at warp points or at planets), because space is still too vast for there to be more than a remote random chance of anything coming in range out in the middle of nowhere. However, any time a ship or fleet does something which can trigger a minefield(approaching the planet, using the warp point), there would be a separate % chance for each ship that it triggers a mine. The chance would go up with the number of mines, probably maxing out at 99%. Each ship would separately go through this determination, and until/unless a mine is triggered you don't know there is a minefield there. For planets, it would take more mines than for a warp point for each incremental improvement in the chance of hitting a mine, because the mines (in tactical combat) would be evenly distributed among all squares adjacent to the mined planet.
For simplicity, you would assume that ships are going too fast to stop or change course if somebody in the same fleet hits a mine, so if a fleet goes through a minefield they all undergo the determination in some random order. However, after every detonation the % chance of hitting a mine would be adjusted for the new number of mines for the remaining determinations. For simplicity you would also assume no ship hits more than one mine per minefield transit. Cloaked ships would still be immune unless sensors in the mine can detect them (if they can't be detected by the mine, the mine doesn't know to explode).
Mine sweeping would also be a % chance based on the number of mines which are there. If a minesweeper transits a minefield (in ignorance or just taking its chances), the minesweeping component has no effect and the minesweeper takes its lumps. If it didn't work that way, even 1 minesweeping component on board would make any ship mine-immune. To sweep mines, the minesweeper would have to use the order to sweep mines. This would expend one movement point, and result in each minesweeping component having a % chance to detect and destroy 1 mine (that number would go up with levels of minesweeping component). What the chance is would depend on the number of mines present, just like the chance of hitting a mine while transiting the minefield. You'd never know if you got them all... To prevent being able to sweep mines at a higher rate in tactical combat than in strategic motion, each minesweeping component could only be used once per combat (reload time of 30).
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