About mines

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

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

I prefer Vasari as well and I still dislike them.

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.

I agree.  The mines should be invisible unless they're being spotted by a scout.  We really need to be able to make mines more effective in smaller numbers.  This would mean laying more precise fields that cover the z-axis as well.  The ship AI needs to be adjusted to better avoid detected mines as well, in order to make them both useful and less annoying.

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.

I think mines in small numbers can and are a good part of entrenchment but once the ai starts building those miner ships youl wonder what happened to your comp lol. AS it is now the TEC have the only workable way of setting mines and they would work fine I think if you limited the minefields they could make to 4 or 5 an make them alot more exspensive.

But since were talking mines can I throw out my own mini complaint/ sudgestion that we need to be able to destroy our own mines as advent and vasari so as not to lag the hell outa my comp when i move up the frontlines. Also destroying one at a time is killin me as the TEC an id like to be able to select a group of mines an destroy them that way.

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'd also prefer to see a predefined limit to the number of mines per gravwell, 100 for example.  The current implementation creates a laggy game after a while - too many additional assets to handle?

Additionally, the scrolling asset list (whatever it's called - the one to the left side) is now unmanageable unless I manually collapse each entry (could really do with an option to automatically collapse entries anyway); each planet is limited to groups of 10 and in the case of mines, this can mean I soon face a single planet's asset list taking up all available vertical space.  Any posibility of upping this number please?

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.

It sounds like everyone agrees that mines should be used in smaller numbers to get the job done rather than having bucket loads slowing down all our computers late game.  To compensate for the smaller numbers do you guys think that they should have increased blast radius?  I know if they explode they do crazy damage already but the range seems to indicate you have to literally be on top of them to blow up.

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.

I don't think it would be as bad if, when mines are visible to your fleet, they avoid them except for a mine sweeping ship whos job would be to clear mines while your fleet is fighting.  Right now it involves too much micro management.

If mines are not visible to your fleet, for one reason or another, then yes when they hit them they explode.  But when they are visible your ships should avoid them.

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.

Mines should have lower numbers and bigger range plus a mine/system limit, a resource cost and some AI to control laying them automatically that would start with the jump lanes facing the enemy and work backward.

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.)

Another posibility, most of the complaints seem to be against the AI using way too many mines (though I haven't encountered this myself). Maybe just making the computer AI handle its mine laying better?

However, I also agree that they should be invisible, except to scouts, and that they should also have a longer range. Possibly homing mines for all races, and Advent homing mines can travel farther/faster?

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)

Mines don't need to be removed from the game, nor do they need to be abstracted.  The current implementation has serious issues, but most of those issues can be fixed pretty easily by a simple cap on mines per grav well.  The other major issues are the lack of z-axis consideration in mine placement and behavior, the AI not dealing with mines intelligently, and the methods of clearing them either being bugged or simply too cumbersome.

All of these things can be solved.  There are many ideas out there for solving all of these.  Hopefully after the holiday break we'll hear something from the devs about what their thinking is.

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)

Another really annoying thing about mines is that when you give your fleet a move order, the ships make huge freaking arcs left and right to turn around, driving right into visible minefields. You simply can't take your fleet close to a minefield and move away without half the fleet happily suiciding.

Other than that, the simplest solution to the mine spamming is limiting them to one minefield per ship or squadron. And making TEC minefields cost tactical slots.

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?

Minefields have everything to do with ships and squadrons when it is a ship laying the mines or drone squadrons becoming mines.

As a defensive structure they need to cost tactical slots just like turrets and hangar bays. A mine field cap per grav well would be a much worse limitation. What if I wanted to have a system that looked undefended but is actually heavily mined with all tactical slots filled by mines. A flexible cap is much better than x mines / location.

It's just about balancing the size/cost of the minefields.

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.

How do you know how many mines you get per tactical slot since it's not even in the game yet? If one tactical slot buys me one big minefield that can blow up even a few ships that didn't bring along a scout it's sure worth the cost compared to a single turret.

A hard cap would be bad because after a while every gravity well would have exactly X mines. I can already feel the tedium of microing the mandatory X mines everywhere because it's free. Well much like it is now.

And I don't want a cap simply because I want it to be a choice whether to have 0 mines or 1000 mines. Not defenses + X mines everywhere.

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.