I first of all that enemy mines should be completely invisible until they are revealed by a scout's sensors. This should take some of the memory use down. Now if you are vasari or advent that just ain't so. Drone hosts and Ruiners especially spam mines at incredible rates. (Still seeing your own mines or an ally's will make no difference in this case when one of these factions) One way to help get rid of mines faster is to make their blast radius about 3-5 times bigger and nerf their damage by about a third. This way ships will detonate WAY more of them. I have seen way too many mines not explode when ships have flown right by them. I know there is the z-axis issue of placement and they may have flown "under" or "above" them, but still....the radius is just too small and mines have to be spammed to knock fleets out which isn't hard to do as vasari.

Now if you take into consideration those two suggestions still wouldn't solve the problem so the final thing I would suggest is that each faction should have a limit to their # of mines per neutral, friendly, and enemy territory. I believe neutral areas should only 100 per faction and 200 for friendly while only 50 in enemy territory. Or everyone could just have a 100 in each grav well. Regardless there should be a limit per grav well. My system is a beast and it slows it down big time. I have 8 gigs of ram a quad core processor the latest nvidia card and plenty of memory to spare. I can easily run Crysis on full.

Anyway I think my suggestions would work and effectively solve the problem. Granted that there are possibly better solutions out there, but for the moment I think a hotfix implementing these ideas would fix the performance problems. So that's just my 2 cents folks.   Thoughts?