Suggestion on Mines: Make Deployment easier

from Sins Forums

As it stands, deploying mines requires a bit of annoying micro, and makes them harder to use in system defense.

 

What I might suggest is something to make deplyoing entire fields of mines.  Either a "deploy minefield" ability that makes ships deploy a 10x10 array of mines, or something like the Homeworld 2 mine layer system, where a mine layer would deploy and then maintain a set minefield.

 

I'm also curious: are mines supposed to be visible when they're phased out and you don't have a scout ship in system?

3,636 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

haven't played all races, but for tec you build them like tactical structures and there you build them in fields of ten.

the tec ones do seem to have a too narrow actication range imo though. but I'll make a post tomorrow on that.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

What micro are you talking about?  I clicked where I wanted them and they were built.  Done.  As Shadow said, I was also playing TEC, so are Advent and Vasari much different?

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Make sure to turn off autoplacement though. The AI puts mines in some very interesting places... such as the center of my industrial facilities on the side of the grav field leading to my own homeworld...

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Mines also should have a cap (say 5 fields per gravity wheel ?) - just ran in AI planet with 400+ mines... after that my game also crashed (last thing i was seeing while mini dumping was 1,7 GB memory usage on the process, so there maybe is also some memory leak ?!)

Also its very annoying cleaning all the mines manually after taking over an enemy planet - is there some way to clean these automatically (moving my scout to every one is just unneeded micromanagement). Or maybe let mines in enemy territory (but not neutral) detonate after a set time (as no maintance can be done on them).

 

 

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

The tooltip text makes it sound like that TEC mines will damage your own units, but from my very limited play time, that seems to be completely untrue.

The text is something about how it will damage all units in its explosion radius.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Mazuo, reply 2
What micro are you talking about?  I clicked where I wanted them and they were built.  Done.  As Shadow said, I was also playing TEC, so are Advent and Vasari much different?
End of Mazuo's quote

well, I just took a look at advent and vasari research screens and build tabs. it seems that advent use a special type of fighter to deploy mines and vasari use a special cruiser class mine layer. so I guess there are differences. and with those races it may be more micro. I'd have to check it out myself though.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Advent have a homing mine squadron, however if you manually delploy them i have yet to run into a limit(seems something to do with once their set they no longer count as the sqaudron.

As far as the TEC 10 costs 1000/250/100 and use no tactial slots.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

I was indeed playing Vasari.  The cruiser ship has an ability which drops 2 mines where ever the ship happens to be.  If you have the cruiser move from point-to-point with autocast on, it will drop mines (for free) as it travels.  They simply consume anti-matter, so there is a limit to the rate at which you can drop these freebies.  This does mean Vasari can drop mines anywhere, but it takes more micro to defend a system, which is what I'm talking about here.

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Yeah, Advent mines take a TON of micro, since you have to select the fighter squadron (not easy in a crowded gravwell), make sure the squadron is full (8 fighters),  select the location you want them, wait for them to move to that location, then click to activate the minefield.

The squadron then instantly starts being rebuilt by the carrier/hangar, and you do it all over again.

You could let the fighters "turn into" mines automatically, but that's assured frustration.

The benefit to this insane system is that you can fly an entire minefield across any gravwell at strike craft speed, then instantly dump them on a hapless enemy. (Although they do have a slight activation time between fighter/mine.)