"1) Create a toggle-able ship behavior to avoid mines. This makes the area around a mine a no-man's land, like the area between the surface of a planet and the region ships can traverse. If a player really wants to ram the minefield, he can just toggle off this setting."

This would be useless unless you had scouts in the fleet since they are the only ones who can see them...

"2) Give scouts a toggle-able minesweeper behavior, which causes them to automatically travel to reveal a mine in the local grav well when their current move orders have ended."

You don't need this when theres the explore autocast ability, its essentially the same thing.

I do agree with the SB constructor that is really annoying when theres no queue

Windmage - thanks for your input.

1) If the mines are invisible, this behavior would have no effect. But when visible - and they very often are - such a behavior could save a lot of tedium. It certainly couldn't hurt.

2)  It's hardly the same thing - explore autocast sends the scout to another gravity well and is useful for keeping your intel up to date and scouting the map at the beginning. Minesweeper autocast keeps the scout in the gravity well and is solely useful for taking some of the tedium out of clearing minefields after a battle.

I don't believe you should be able to just tell your ships to avoid mines.  That's a little unfair, since without having to make any effort, you nullify a minefield's effectiveness.  It would be like implementing an "avoid turrets" ability where ships would never approach within a turret's firing range.  Players should have to manually avoid mines.

However, the minesweper ability for scouts makes perfect sense.  Currently there is no unit for removing mines efficiently.  If the scout, which contrary to popular belief is in fact armed, had a "search and destroy" function that sought out mines in a particular gravity well and then detonated them, it would make scouts useful beyond simply saying "there is a mine, please do not step on it."

You're absolutely right about the starbase constructor, too.  I did the exact same thing and ended up having to decommission the resulting base because there was no cancel button and the damn thing was in the wrong gravity well.

The torpedo cruiser's weapons do need to not be an ability.  Even with just five of them, they were hard to manage, especially in the heat of battle.  Miraculously, none of them died; I kept the same five cruisers for the whole game.  One other thing about them is that the damage from their torpedoes seems not to take effect sometimes.  Has anyone else noticed that?

Great expansion so far!  Won a game as TEC, and plan to try all the other races, too--just to maintain competitive advantage, of course.

While I don't necessarily agree with you Slinky that mines become inneffective with that ability - since all the ability does is automate what you would tell your ships to do anyway - I do agree that it would take all the fun out of it. You build mines to make enemies go boom.

So I stand corrected. Changing ship behavior probably isn't the answer; changing mine behavior probably is.

There are a lot of ways to de-clunkify a lot of the aspects of mines (I'm thinking TEC mines here):

Making a more numerous/denser minefield with much weaker mines reduces the punishment of straying to the edge of the field while making laborious, hair-raising navigation of the field by passing between the mines impossible. Less micro with no serious game change!

I agree with tkins that invisible mines are really the way to go. Then fields aren't about denying space; a strategy could be to try to build your base defenses to channel the enemy fleet into your mines. You could de-activate the auto-detonation and wait for the enemy to be fully surrounded, then ... boom. "Say, didn't I leave a fleet somewhere around here?"

Now that would be cool. Provided you could change the behavior of all the mines at once, which I don't believe is possible right now.

In another thread, someone (sorry; don't remember who) spoke of giving capital ships mine-detecting abilities. This makes a lot of sense as scouts are spectacularly fragile. But allowing cappies to see mines right off the bat would make scouts pointless. A happy medium - add a tech that gives cappies limited mine-detection range, vastly inferior to that of the scout but enough to keep the fleet from being totally helpless in the absence of scouts.

Huh, does anyone know if your own exploding mines damage your fleet if it is too close?

Only 1 game so far.  Loved the SB, hated the mines.  Had one "empty well" beween him and me (uncolonizable).  There were uncountable mines there, right where you warp in.  Literally, I'd say 1000+ easy.  And having ALL mines show up on the list on the left was just crazy; even stacked in 10s, the list scrolled down forever.  There has to be some kind of limit on minefields.

I think scouts should just auto shoot/kill mines; minesweapers; that would solve a lot.  Not just one shot one kill, so you'd want about 5-25 in your fleet to sweep safely.  As it is now, I really dislike the mine combat, and the horrible clutter on the screen.  But that's what a beta is for I guess.

I agree, having your fleet sitting in your own minefield without being harmed is not really fair, but having the mines do full damage to you would certainly also make you too vulnerable to "suicide scouts" (espl with minesweeper ability)...

"ha, twenty scouts against my 3 caps and supports in my minefield... eh.... run for it !"

Maybe have the "friendly fire" damage be not 100%, but 33% (actually your ships really should know where the mines are and can avoid these better)

LoL

So we got Sins RUWANDA, Africans spilling mines on my corn fireld, verion now.

I do like the idea of having another support ship do the de-mining, on the tec i would add it to hosinkos since they do produce robots.

The auto-avoidance would have its benifits as the would be able only to go where you want them,but if the fleet has to traverse the mine field i would like to see them forced to slow down.( I have creates a planet with mines all the way around the grav well and many pirates fly straight through faster than they can detonate, meaning they dont always set them off.)

Lots of great responses.

Shadow_of_Light, your post makes a lot of sense. It's just annoying to watch your ships die to mines because you didn't (or in some cases, in spite of your best) annoyingly micromanage.

lamdaman: Good post. You touch on an issue that runs, perhaps, a bit deeper.

Advent mines are a bit different; this post adresses TEC and Vasari mines. 

ANNOYING MINE PLACEMENT MICRO:

As this thread has established, mines are about denying area from an enemy (unless a future builds makes invisibility an option). So what's important about a minefield isn't how densely the mines are spaced or whatever, its about where the edge of the field is. In many cases, you can make a completely hollow minefield and it will serve the same purpose. All that matters are the mines on the edge.

So the TEC circular pattern of mine placement is wasteful. Meanwhile, the Vasari system, which allows you to create lines of mines (a method more appropriate for the way mines work in Sins) is clunky and annoying, requiring repetitive queued move orders.

PROPOSAL TO FIX ANNOYING MINE PLACEMENT MICRO:

For TEC, there are two widely different solutions. The first is to make the minefield spread about 5 times wider than it is now.  Essentially, this would just contaminate a huge area instead of making a small area intraversable. The downside - placing mines would have minimal strategic interest.

Probably a better solution: players should be able to click where they want a mine wall to start, then click again where they want it to end, holding shift to queue up bends in the wall. Above the mouse, a tiny popup should show the forecasted cost of the wall.

Mines will be placed along that line as loosely as possible to ensure no ship can pass through it safely. To make the wall stronger (to avoid ramming from heavy cruisers or cappies) the player can simply place another wall on top of the first.

Voila! TEC players can now, with a minimum of pain, place mines intelligently.

Vasari is a bit trickier. Their current mine-spam method has its uses, such as laying mines in an enemy grav well while the rest of your fleet keeps the foe occupied. But for everyday minelaying, a method similar to that of the TEC should be an option - making your cruisers travel along the construction line pooping out mines AT REGULAR INTERVALS.

finally got around to trying vasari and I can understand now what you mean, and also the issue with mine balance. here is what I suggest:

make the vasari (and possibly the advent, however they work) version work the same way as tec. it is an ability, it has to be manually selected, it costs something and it places a small field of like 10 mines where you want it.

that way, you don't have to run around like crazy, you don't even have to designate a specific area, you just click a spot and around there it will place those 10 mines. it also gets around balance issue, bc now, given enough time, a single vasari minelayer can lay dozens if not hundreds of mines and it would never be a cost issue. you'd still have mobility to place it in any grav well, but t would be easier to use and harder to abuse.

as for hard caps, I don't know. I mean somewhere there has to be an end as to how many mines one can lay. it could work via each field being more expensive than the previous or a hard cap or sth.

This discusion sounds simular to pirates; some like them, some really disliked them.  So, I hope they will at least put a toggle, Mines/No Mines, just like pirates.  That's one sure way to please the "Underminers".