After playing around with the beta a hell of a lot I decided that before I gave any feedback on the new features I would go through & see what I could do with my limited modding knowledge, so that I would have an informed opinion on what could be done to fix things.
My first topic is mines, now I'm really not to concerned with the damage of mines or how the different types of mines work, personally I really enjoy the variety but I know there are problems with that. I'm more concerned with fixing what is obviously broken & getting feedback from the forum community.
There are two big issues with mines at the minute, the first is that they're pretty much invincible since they keep switching between invulnerability & not, even when a scout is parked right next to them. My first thought was for scouts' auras to apply a debuff to mines stopping the use of their abilities, that way the constant invulnerability buff they apply to themselves through AbilityHideMine would be stopped & they couldn't reapply it until the scout moved, however I realised the problem with this before I even started work on it, a mine with no abilities can't asplode, so scouts would be immune to them, not exactly what a lot of people on these boards (myself included) want.
So my next thought was to make the scout aura something that didn't end when the scout moved away, but instead changing the buff...target of the mine detection so that it lasted maybe 30 seconds, after all, if you're informed of the location of a mine through the sensors of your scouting party you're not going to forget it immediately... so this kind of makes sense. Anyway, at the same time I was concerned that it was not only the lack of a duration on the scout aura, but also a problem with the mines' cloak ability too, so I changed both things at once, changing the mines' cloak from a passive to an autocast ability which also has a duration & cooldown, but will typically be on all the time unless you turned autocast off. This worked like a charm, the mines stay detected for the FULL 30 seconds, giving a fleet plenty of time to destroy them, while at the same time still doing their job of slowing fleets down. It's now possible to destroy mines, but you're going to have to manuver your scouts through all of them & have your ships more closely & carefully behind, it's easy to miss a few with the small range on scouts. The change I made to the mines' cloaking might be redundant, I'm not entirely sure since I haven't tested it without that change, but it's not a huge, game changing thing to be honest.
Okay, with that solved it's on to game breaker number 2 with mines, the SPAM! Seriously, it's a big issue when the game lags out & becomes unplayable just because there are too many mines on the map, so the obvious solution is to make there be LESS mines on the map. Now some people have suggested adding a cost to all mines, but I wanted to try something different so I messed with expiry times to make it so the mines disappeared after a while. This was easy enough with Advent & Vasari mines, they already have an expiry timer that you can change since they are just like any other spawned unit (missile battery, bombardment platform, etc), but currently they are only set to expire after TWELVE HOURS @.@ Changing this does affect the way they work, admittedly, if you give them timers of anything between 5-30 minutes you can't use them for totally fortifying areas anymore, but let me explain how it does actually work. The thing about Vasari/Advent mines is that you can make them all currently for free, & while assaulting a planet, this gives a different feel to them, making them more offensive mines & in this sense a short timer like that works, you can attack an enemy & give them a hard time without crippling their phase lanes forever, you can block them for a little while though, or force them into temporary choke points which is still very handy. But aren't mines mainly for defense, you ask? Well yes, & in this case it's STILL not a big loss. If you want to use mines for defense you'll be keeping a ruiner or an advent hanger in your grav well anyway, so when your psidar picks up enemies jumping at you, just get to work laying some mines, it only takes a hanger or two ruiners a few moments to set a nasty trap for an enemy jumping into the grav well, but it prevents you from setting a fleet destroying minefield of DOOM on your doorstep.
The TEC mines are a little more difficult to work with admittedly, & since they cost money I believe they should be given a bit longer of a fuse, maybe 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on things I will explain later, & the fact that they actually take time & resources to build. But nonetheless anyone who has seen unfair NPCs fortify asteroids with more than 500(?!) mines as TEC knows that something still needs to be done to stop them. A tactical slot cost could work, but it limits your other defensive options, not really the aim of the game here. So costly mines on a timer isn't fair... & tactical slots isn't fair... but they still need to be limited to stop ridiculous amounts of them clogging up a grav well & lagging up larger maps. My choice was to go for the timer option, but the difficulty with that is TEC mines are structures, not spawned units, they have no expiry timer. What I did instead was to create an extra ability which served several purposes. Firstly it applied a buff to them with an OnDelay instant action of MakeDead, with the delay being pretty damn long, like I said, I think 30 minutes to 2 hours would be fair as if you're sticking defenses somewhere, if it doesn't get attacked in that space of time they're probably wasted, if it was really that important to defend the place I'm sure some Vasari player would have used Kostura ambushes to get an easy entry anyway. This pretty much fixes the problem aside from the cost, the only thing I can suggest about that is to add another delayed action, maybe something like EarnResources, so that you get back a percentage of the cost of the mines when they die.
Well that's just my 632 cents, what do you think everyone?
