They also blow (up) and take your fleet with them.

But seriously i love mines, especially since i'm a Vassari player.

So I have played a few games now with each of the races to check out the mines they have for each race.  The problem alot of people seem to be having is that the computer, especially the vasari will mine up a planet in the 1000's (not hundreds, thousands).  I have seen this in a few games now and the performance can take a dip. There definitly should be a hard limit as to how many mines you should be able to put in a gravity well.  Something in the hundreds not thousands might be acceptable. 

The scout range is terribly small as is the mine explosion radius.  I phased into a good 100 or so mines (vasari) and thought I was screwed but had to be nearly on top of them for them to kill me.   It would be nice to see the scout range increase so you dont need 20 scouts to play mine sweeper.  The range in which the mines explode should be increased as well that way the player doesnt need 1000's of them to do the same thing a few dozen could do.  

One thing that bothers me alot is that ALL mines are visible.  Nothing sneaky or tacticle about it.  Just send a scout in see a boat load of mines and think ah well thats sucks.  It would be cool if the mines were invisible and you needed scouts to umm .... scout them out.  To me it just seems weird that they are just locked down until a scount comes along just so you can shoot them down. 

I think the concept of the mines is a really cool idea they just dont seem to be very practical in smaller numbers as they should be.  I would rather see less more powerful than a gazillion of the little buggers litering every planet.

Personally I think starbases and other static defenses need a buff and mines should just be taken out entirely.

Barring that, limit each grav well to 3-5 fields a piece, which seems like it would be a simple thing to do (but sitll buff the other defenses).

Barring THAT, each side should get a ship, or an ability added to an existing ship (say the fighter defense frigates) to minesweep; that is, if the mines are detected by your scout, the ship can detonate the mines from a distance, within a certain radius.

As it stands, mines are far more annoying than cool and strategic.

Instead of a hard code limit why not have the host enter the max number of mines that can be placed in a gravwell in the game options?

I played Ench.Beta twice against Vasari (Hard AI) and Avdent (Hard AI) (I was TEC) and both times I ended up leaving because of mine spam. Now I am back to vanilla Sins. I dont like mines, specially in huge numbers because I prefer to fight fleet vs fleet battles and not fleet vs mine horde.

I quite like the idea of making mines 2-3 times more powerful, and then have every race lay 1/2 to 1/3 as many.

They'd still need some other work, because that wouldn't solve the whole problem, but it's an interesting start.

Yep, mines suck, remove them. Star bases are great idea and well done. 

If you dont kill the comp AI in the first hour of the game, its almost guarenteed to crash / lag out due to 10million mines. I absolutely refuse to play vs the Advent comp AI - those friggen homing mines are a total joke - both defensively and offensively. Its bad enough the AI makes 100 carriers with 200 fighter/bomber spam, now they also spam 10billion mines.  Can only really play vs the TEC comp AI seeing as it cant completely spam them and not offensively.

Mines make me want to remove Entrenchment, but i love those Star Bases, Vasari with the clear advantage atm.

If this not-yet-purchased-beta observer might make a suggestion -- if the modeling of individual mines is bogging down performance, perhaps abstracting them would be a logical solution.  Instead of attempting to achieve 1:1 representation of individual mines, denote regions as minefields (spheres, 3-D sectors, the details don't particularly matter) with volume, density and mine type.  Denser fields take longer to clear (assuming the use of point-defense-type methods and not 'massive explosion' volume-clearing methods) and have greater probability of dealing damage if entered or quickly moved through without clearing.   'Safe' motion through dense minefields would have to be quite slow.  Given that the game can currently highlight regions (typically indicating range of effect) when buildings are selected, I hypothesize that perhaps this should be tractable, and would avoid imposing oddly artificial constraints that make little sense *except* for system performance.

This would seem to be a fair compromise.  Not even the _Combat Mission_ series attempted to model mines one-to-one; for quite some time they did not model people one-to-one either (squads were typically represented by up to three 'people').  And -that- series served a *very* simulation-focused crowd featuring people cheerfully dragging up statistics to debate the frequency of usage of tripods for Bren rifles or for the distribution of types of small arms among crewmen, if memory serves -- never mind more mundane details like exact armor thicknesses or angles thereof.  (If memory serves, one of the players actually *wrote a book* on the armor penetration of various types of ordnance.  These were serious people.)

Also well i dont know how tec or advent mines work i see that the vasari mines need some help hiting ships on the Vertical axis (Z?) since in combat ships go all over the place but when your laying a mine field the ships tend to fly right on the grave wells plane out of combat anyways.(havent tryed laying them in battle)

hmm i agree with the idea of restricting the amount of mines in a grav well ive only bin on the beta a few days and it looks like the AI uses way to many of them its just completely unbalenced and over the top, they dont allow  you to spam guass cannons so why spam mines? .

it also makes more sense, i mean in real life for example if you had trade ships floating about would you litter the trade lanes with explosives? (i know it doesnt have an effect but it feels weird littering trade lanes with so much explosives)

What do minefields have to do with ships or squadrons?  Why would that make anything even remotely better?  What would making them cost tactical slots do, aside from making them totally useless or causing a complete revamp of the number of tactical slots a system needs?  Why would any of that be better than a simple cap per grav well?

If you want it to look undefended, then don't build any defenses and just use mines.  Simple.  Making them use tactical slots would make them worthless, as there is almost no situation where they would be worth the slots more than hangars or repair stations.  You haven't explained why a cap would be a worse limitation.  The solution will probably be different for each side, but I'm thinking primarily TEC here, as their mines are probably the least useful at the moment, but quite expensive.  A cap, along with the fixed cost, should be more than sufficient to stop the spamming and performance issues.

It's not free for TEC.  Mines are pretty expensive.  Even in SP games, I only put them where I really need them, and I'm not spamming 1000 of them in a system.  Even my most heavily mined systems (there are 3 in my current game on a medium map) have less than 200 each.  Vasari probably do need some other limitations.