Question, Armor and mines

geoschmo · #1 August 14th, 2002, 04:55 PM

Say you have a fleet with no sweepers that hits a minefield. I know that each ship that takes damage will take damage to the armor first, but if you have a ship with armor and a ship without, will the armored ship always take mine damage first? Can you have a ship with no armor in the fleet and have it be safe as long as there is enough armor in the fleet to account for all the mines?

And if you have different kinds of armor, is there a certain kind that will take damage before other kinds of armor?

Geoschmo

Baron Munchausen · #2 August 14th, 2002, 06:09 PM

Each ship is dealt with individually. You can't protect another ship except with mine sweepers. I guess that armor works in mine combat like it does in regular combat. The smaller armor will tend to get destroyed first. Someone will have to test if Emissive Armor is effective against mines. I presume that it is, but haven't verified.

geoschmo · #3 August 14th, 2002, 06:37 PM

Darn, well that nixes that idea.

I am trying to come up with a way to bring mines back into the game a bit. 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.

What if we lowered the warhead damage, and eliminated the minesweeping components? That would certainly change things, no? Since mine damage is applied randomly across the fleet you would not know which ships were going to get hit. You would have to armor everybody a little bit, or take the chance on your critical ships getting their armor blown away and taking real damage.

You could still have minesweepers in a way. Heavily armored ships that you sent in to soak up the mines, but you'd have to send them in unsupported, as we do in real naval anti mine operations.

This would be murder in games though of course unless you reduced the damage for each warhead. That's the key. A small fleet could get wiped out if they were stupid enough to not have armor, but a big fleet would not. They would take damage though. They could not run minefield after minefield. They would have to take it slow.

Geoschmo

sachmo · #4 August 14th, 2002, 06:47 PM

Well Geo, that is my understanding of what a minefield is supposed to do. The point isn't so much how much damage it does, but how long it slow your enemy down to allow you to...ehhh, "prepare a surprise for him!" The damage done is just a side effect, but if an enemy fleet is bearing down on you, just one little minefield on either side of the wormhole buys you at least two turns, right? Maybe? something like that, anyway. Or am I totally misunderstanding you?

geoschmo · #5 August 14th, 2002, 06:54 PM

Well Sachmo, that is what it's supposed to do, but my point is that once you reach the tech that enables you to easily sweep 100 mines it no longer does that any more. Mines then become totally irrelevant, execept to catch an oppponent totally by suprise in a place he is moving ships without sweepers. Your attack fleet can roll through minefield after minefield and ignore them as if they weren't even there. At that point, they might as well not be.

If mines always did some damage, though a much smaller amount, eventually you would reach the point where your fleet was degraded to the point where continuing would be unsafe. You would have to stop and repair your armor, or build more "sweepers" to replace the ones that were destroyed.

Geoschmo

mottlee · #6 August 14th, 2002, 07:04 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by geoschmo:
my point is that once you reach the tech that enables you to easily sweep 100 mines it no longer does that any more. Mines then become totally irrelevant, execept to catch an oppponent totally by suprise in a place he is moving ships without sweepers. Your attack fleet can roll through minefield after minefield and ignore them as if they weren't even there. At that point, they might as well not be.

If mines always did some damage, though a much smaller amount, eventually you would reach the point where your fleet was degraded to the point where continuing would be unsafe. You would have to stop and repair your armor, or build more "sweepers" to replace the ones that were destroyed.

Geoschmo

That is IF you have enough sweepers to cover ALL your fleets and the bad guys access points

LGM · #7 August 14th, 2002, 07:15 PM

Why not just increase the 100 mine limit? Isn't that possible in Settings.txt?

I would also suggest for your mod that you increase their cloaking factor with each tech level (3,4,5) for Mines 1-3. You might as well do away with Medium and Large mines, because people will want to build more of them faster to fill a sector more.

Baron Munchausen · #8 August 14th, 2002, 07:17 PM

Mines as currently implemented in the game are just too crude to 'improve' in any meaningful way. If MM would just implement some formula for a limited number of mines to attack each ship rather than ALL of them we could do something useful. If mine sweepers would then have a real chance to hit/miss the attacking mines we'd have something vaguely realistic.

Stone Mill · #9 August 14th, 2002, 07:24 PM

We could look at it another way...

Avoiding mines should also have more to do with the pilot. Perhaps reducing mine damage by the fleet and ship experience %

Just a thought.

geoschmo · #10 August 14th, 2002, 07:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Mines as currently implemented in the game are just too crude to 'improve' in any meaningful way. If MM would just implement some formula for a limited number of mines to attack each ship rather than ALL of them we could do something useful. If mine sweepers would then have a real chance to hit/miss the attacking mines we'd have something vaguely realistic.

Right, but what I am pondering is an attempt to come as close to that as possible without the hard code changes whcih I cannot do. Mine damage is random already, what this idea does is allow for that damage to get through to the ships. By armoring your ships you can protect them, but you don't really know which ships are going to take the damage. There is always the chance that a critical ship will take more than it's share of the damage and cause your fleet problems.

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. It's still just a race. The mines always win until you reach sufficent sweeping tech, and then the sweepers always win. This would reduce their strength early, but keep them in the game later as well.

Yes, changing the cloaking of mines is something else I am considering. It just doesn't deirectly relate to the damage and sweepeing, so I didn't bring it up.

Geoschmo