Question, Armor and mines

[LGM]

If you goal is to make mines a delaying factor, change them to be a special Satellite hull instead with a special weapon (for Satellites only) that is a very long range Engine Killer with Cloaking factor. Zip there engines and you will slow the fleet down. Of course, normal weapons would be able to shoot down the Satelitte/Mines, but Minefield combat would be a nice addition. I suppose the problem would be they could avoid them and refuse to close range (except at warp points they would have to run away).

I have often wondered how you can mine a three diminsional region anyway. In space, your frontage is a plane, not a line. On oceans or land, you can go around (or fly over mines, then you are in a three universe where mines reside in a two diminsional universe). However, if you are on foot, going around will take considerable time. When laying a minefield, you have to consider a few things, how much frontage you want to cover, how dense you want the mines, and how deep the minefield extends. If you maximize frontage, you loose density or depth, thus you reduce the size of the hazard zone or decrease the odds of a hit. It would be really nice if mines had a chance to hit based on density. Something like % of a hit = Mines x 99 / (Mines + 98) for the first ship (1% for one mine, 50% for 100 mines). Divide by two for the second ship (in the same fleet), divide by three for the third, etc. This would allow fleets to have ship ordinal 1 be the lead ship. If we really want to get it right, we have to factor formation into mine field triggering. Column formation is much safer for moving through potential minefields than battleline. However, column is not very good when you encounter enemy ships. My intuition tells me that my formula should probably square the Mine factor in the denominator, which would require a much bigger constant on the top to get the percentages back up to 1% and 50% for the extremes. Linear equations are so much easier to solve though. 1% is probably way to high a probabliltiy for 1 mine though. Think of a 20x20 square plane and you move your fleet single file through one of those squares. You have a 1/400 chance to hit a mine if its range is its own square. If its range is 1, 9 out of 400. If you have 100 mines with range 1, each covers 9 squares, so you need about 33 to cover the whole grid. That means, moving single file, your fleet should detonate at most 3 mines out of 100. The other 97% are still undetected. Minesweaping is methodical and should take lots of time. Lets say that space mines drift around a bit, to fill in the wholes, so you cannot remember the path through. If they drift fast, you ought to be able to detect the buggers.

[geoschmo]

Yeah, but I don't want to think about it that much.

[Baron Munchausen]

Note: You can mod direct-fire weapons for mines. I've done it and seen them work when deployed in combat much like satellites, but I never tried to lay those types of mines and see what happens when you cross into their location in strategic movement. Will the mines fire their weapons? Or will they fire and then ram like 'regular' mines even if they don't have warheads? Or will they just ram without using their direct-fire weapons? Would be really cool if they would fire their weapons but not ram. Effectively a bunch of 'ambush' satellites. Normal sats will just let you pass by when they are cloaked.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by LGM:
If your goal is to make mines a delaying factor, change them to be a special Satellite hull instead with a special weapon (for Satellites only) that is a very long range Engine Killer with Cloaking factor. Zip there engines and you will slow the fleet down. Of course, normal weapons would be able to shoot down the Satelitte/Mines, but Minefield combat would be a nice addition. I suppose the problem would be they could avoid them and refuse to close range (except at warp points they would have to run away).

I have often wondered how you can mine a three diminsional region anyway. In space, your frontage is a plane, not a line. On oceans or land, you can go around (or fly over mines, then you are in a three universe where mines reside in a two diminsional universe). However, if you are on foot, going around will take considerable time. When laying a minefield, you have to consider a few things, how much frontage you want to cover, how dense you want the mines, and how deep the minefield extends. If you maximize frontage, you loose density or depth, thus you reduce the size of the hazard zone or decrease the odds of a hit. It would be really nice if mines had a chance to hit based on density. Something like % of a hit = Mines x 99 / (Mines + 98) for the first ship (1% for one mine, 50% for 100 mines). Divide by two for the second ship (in the same fleet), divide by three for the third, etc. This would allow fleets to have ship ordinal 1 be the lead ship. If we really want to get it right, we have to factor formation into mine field triggering. Column formation is much safer for moving through potential minefields than battleline. However, column is not very good when you encounter enemy ships. My intuition tells me that my formula should probably square the Mine factor in the denominator, which would require a much bigger constant on the top to get the percentages back up to 1% and 50% for the extremes. Linear equations are so much easier to solve though. 1% is probably way to high a probabliltiy for 1 mine though. Think of a 20x20 square plane and you move your fleet single file through one of those squares. You have a 1/400 chance to hit a mine if its range is its own square. If its range is 1, 9 out of 400. If you have 100 mines with range 1, each covers 9 squares, so you need about 33 to cover the whole grid. That means, moving single file, your fleet should detonate at most 3 mines out of 100. The other 97% are still undetected. Minesweaping is methodical and should take lots of time. Lets say that space mines drift around a bit, to fill in the wholes, so you cannot remember the path through. If they drift fast, you ought to be able to detect the buggers.

In the new patch mines will NOT attack if they have a 'special' damage type and the ships do not have any components that would be damaged by them. So, you can make effective 'anti-engine' minefields if you want to.

The coverage problem is why all mines should not be able to attack all ships that enter a sector. We've been proposing various 'probability' schemes for years now. I suggest that you send these ideas to MM directly. The more people he knows are unhappy with the way mines currently work the more likely he is to finally change something.

[ August 15, 2002, 23:20: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[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.

[Q]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Note: You can mod direct-fire weapons for mines. I've done it and seen them work when deployed in combat much like satellites, but I never tried to lay those types of mines and see what happens when you cross into their location in strategic movement. Will the mines fire their weapons? Or will they fire and then ram like 'regular' mines even if they don't have warheads? Or will they just ram without using their direct-fire weapons? Would be really cool if they would fire their weapons but not ram. Effectively a bunch of 'ambush' satellites. Normal sats will just let you pass by when they are cloaked.

WARNING: ONLY SPECULATIONS, NO TESTED FACTS AHEAD

I think mines do not "ram" ships, because for ramming you have to move which is not possible for mines, but they explode and do the damage. And they always are destroyed by the explosion. The entire minefield damage is managed differently as a combat by SE IV. So I doubt very much that direct fire weapons would work as direct fire weapons in mines.
Another specialty of mines is that they skip shields. So if you put warheads with "engines only" damage, the damage should be done skipping the shields (in contrast to the combat effect now with the new patch) but also skipping armor because the damage is specific to engines only. That might be quite dangerous mines!

[Crazy_Dog]

For me, the best combination is the probability of sweep and various types of mines.
Right now, the mines only do standard damage.
I'm thinking about mines that destroy engines, shield generators (emp/ion), master computers (virus), eat resources, cloack systems, etc.
With various types of mines and only a % acuracy in sweep, the minefields can be real dangerous...

Right now if you can constroy a sweep with 20 level V sweep, the minefileds are no more

[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.