Entrancement opinion thread, what can people suggest to make it better?

Kudos on a good thread with possible substance OP.

I'll echo the OP

- Be able to set a maximum number of mines in a gravity well in increments of 5.

- Set a maximum number of mines per player.

- Make it so that once the limit is reached the mines first placed will despawn (or blow up), when new mines are placed

- Adjustable strength for mines ranging from Very Deadly to Annoying. Annoying = Not enough to kill off an entire fleet of ships and thus leave your planet completely undefended, but still strong enough to tip the battle into the defenders favor.

- A tactical structure that sweeps mines in your own systems at a very good pace. EMP beams from a turret gravity well radius to prevent Vasari mine raids at my planets(I hate you all who does that... with a passion!)

- Make mines completely invisible.

- Make a mine sweeper ship that detects said invisible mines and sweeps them. Make current process of mine sweeping easier and less of a pita.

- Make mines in stars decay over time, due to the rather inhospitable environment. EMP, solar flares, etc.

I have no coding experience so I have no idea how difficult these things are to implement, but I would wager that the easiest and simplest solution would be:

- Have an option to turn both mines and starbases on/off at game options screen.

- Starbases need more firepower. At the moment they are great at defending against small harassment fleets but no use against larger fleets. I almost always play with large fleets on, and I haven't tried small fleets but I would guess that starbases are hard to destroy with small fleets.

Well the mine issue has been pretty well explained so i wont bother with it.  Here's some suggestions from playing around with each empire for a pretty brief amount of time, only in single player.  Alot of this is aesthetic type stuff.

TEC-

• The glowing effects at the top of the TEC starbase keep appearing on the sides of the starbase.
• The icon for Civilian and Warfare research seem to be mixed up
• Because the voice for the siege frigates was reused for the new torpedo cruisers, they sometimes mention bombing planets.  I understand resuing the voice but it should be possible to remove the specific phrase about planet bombing

Vasari-

• There needs to be some kind of effect in between the segments of the starbase, it looks silly with just empty space.  Put some energy tendrils in there or something.

Advent-

• Change the name of the Security tab in research to Sanctity.  it sounds more spiritual and maintians the word pseudo-rhyme
• I noticed the AI build a lot of scouts for some reason.  It happened toward the end game and there weren't any other races left so Im not sure if it affects them but i dont see why it wouldnt.
• Make the homing mines destroyable when they are tracking

Like i said i have not played too extensively (I only got the beta the other day) but these are just a few small things I noticed.

I noted that star bases, etc are not in the post game statistics or achievements.  I'm sure they will add that. 

Hey everybody.

Merry Christmas! (or whatever else you celebrate)

I haven't been able to play the beta for Entrenchments yet, but I thought of something while I was playing Sins of a Solar Empire today.

Has anyone noticed that pirates keep attacking after all bounty has been rewarded? I just think its a little odd.

After all, these pirates are actually mercenaries. You pay them, and they kill people.

Along this train of thought, most mercenaries don't go beyond the call of duty. What I mean by that, if mercenaries stop getting paid, they stop killing people.

I think if the money runs out, they should turn tail and go attack someone else.

I don't know. I just find it weird that pirates will wipe out a planet for 250 credits, they'll do the same job if you pay them 100000 credits.

I don't know how to code so I don't if implementing this wouldn't be worth the trouble.

Anyways...

Thanks for your time and a merry christmas to all =]!!!

Another thing.  None of a starbases' construction or hangar options are available from the empire tree without specifically selecting the starbase.  Normally if you have a shipyard or hangar defense in orbit, you can access all of its construction options just by selecting the planet, but when a SB is upgraded with any of those functions it has to be selected specifically.

Starbases should be in end-game statistics.

Sheild upgrades should effect starbases.

The new units should have their own unique qoutes.

Starbases need a range boost.

There should be a cap on the number of mines per gravwell. Mines should also be invisible.

Scouts should detect mines across a much wider area.

I strongly disagree with this idea. Thats like saying we should have an option to turn off carriers.

I agree. I also think that it is stupid how pirates seem to be braver then the enemy military. Pirates never retreat even if they are outnumbered 10 to 1.

Pirates should retreat if outnumbered. However, they should come back before long if there is still bounty on the player.

In SupCom, there was an option to turn off and on all units (if I remember correctly), even super units.

The reason why I suggested this, is because people were complaining that the mines make the game longer.

Not only do they make it longer but it also increases the potential for lag, so for purely performance wise reasons mines should be toggleable, and adding an option to turn on/off capital ships is actually a pretty cool idea now that you mention it. If you would like to play with, you play with, if you'd like to play without, you can play without.

I thiunk it would much better to simply balance mines. Make it easier and faster to destroy them and have a limit per gravwell.

I agree that turning anything off is a bad idea.  It made sense in Total Annihilation and SupCom because there were more units in total, but in Sins there just aren't enough different units to justify turning any of them off.  There hasn't been a single balance update yet, so give them a chance to actually tweak the new defences before complaining they should be removed entirely.  Mines are easily fixed by putting limits and improving detection.  They should also remove the 'invulnerability when undetected' thing.  It just leads to problems with the homing mines.

Starbases require a lot more work so that they're viable in smaller games, while still being an uber defence when fully upgraded.  Right now they don't justify the huge expence they require.

Mines are annoying.  But thats what they are ment to do.  Having mines disapper is a bad idea.  Mines just don't do that.  You put it some place and it could go off year and years later.  Every now and then you still find mines from WWII.  

I think some kind of mine sweeper class ship would be something to consider. A dedicated mine sweeper friget that is only good at clearing out mines would be nice.

I don't think anybody asked for a complete removal of mines, but an option to toggle them on and off for each game.

I have only been able to play as TEC for now but the level 2 wepon upgrade for the starbase says "extreme range missile" and it really dosnt appear they have any more range then the basic attack of the starbase...... and it think that they should have a little more range on the missile attacks. when i try out the other 2 sides ill post back

otheriswe keep up the awesome effort stardock!!!!!!!!!

I don't see why we need anything more than a simple cap on mines per grav well, and some improvements to mine-clearing abilities and AI mine avoidance.  Seems like that would solve all of the issues aside from the use of minelayers as offensive suicide weapons, which probably needs more balancing as well.

I do think that improvements in the mine patterns are needed too.  They need to be much more precise.  This would also mean we'd need fewer mines overall to create effective barriers.  This needs to take the z-axis into account too.

I'd like to be able to see the SB weapon ranges like I can for turrets and such too.

I was playing a game as vasari the other day and I noticed some of my mines were randomly detonating themselves.  There were no enemies present, and it seemed to be happening in the order I had placed them.  By the time I noticed it happening, the first planets I had mined up were completely empty of mines despite there being no enemy invasions for quite some time.

I agree with the cap on the mines.

Starbases need to be stronger and able to attack more than one target at a time maybe add sheilds to it.

Hangers need to do more damage maybe get rid of turrets and make them an add on to the hangers. Nobody uses

turrets for defenses anyway.

+1

Oh but you can, the shortcut key to see the range of any unit was mouse over it and hold ALT I believe. 

On another topic,

Mines don't need to be weaked or limited just raise the anitmatter cost for the vassari mine ships to 50 or something so they can only lay a mine every 2 mins to stop it being used offencively.

Also they should add a minesweeper unit for each race that will easily remove mines (kinda like how the TEC construction frigates build them it would de-fuse them in the same manner/style)

I would love to see a rebalance of the upgrade costs on the starbases. Personally I'm a little weirded out by the idea that adding a huge array of weapons and firing equipment (tier 1 gun upgrade) costs just as much as say, opening up the docking bays for trade ships (tier 1 trade upgrade)

I dont' own the beta but I have followed threads and know the new units.

One thing i would like is pirates to keep increasing in strength and be you know useful beyone 1 hour. After that they're attacks and lack of shield mitigation makes bounties over 10k useless. I'm pretty sure that with shield mitigation a vasari main frigate and take out almost every pirate ship alone. That and their lack of significant strike craft bothers me. All it takes are 4 carriers to take out even a large pirate fleet. I think there should be mile markers such as if so much bounty was put out. (Example: 100,000 credits= pirates sending a cap ship every time) Pirates are good early and sometimes mid game but other than that their bases are jsut nuesances that are easily eliminated when the games get tough.

I would like to see all the structures with defences and a weapon platform with all the weapons of that race you are playing including cap ships weapons .

First thing I would do is limit mines to 5 per sector. 

Secondly I would tie Starbases to Colonizable planets/ asteroids by linking them together.  By linking together I mean if a planet or asteroid has a starbase in the same zone the starbase would play as a planetary shield.  By doing this you would have to take out the starbase prior to being able to attack a planet.  I would also make it so starbases are capable of shooting at stuff no matter where it is in the sector and have no limitations on its range if you phase into a system you can be attacked as soon as you enter.

Beef up hull points on capital ships along with shields so they dont die to fast.  This will balance out some since Starbases will have unlimited range on a cap ship.

Lol, Entrancement, or Entrenchment...

Make vasari ships better and more expensive. Advent ships should be even. TEC SPAM-A-LOT. I want to see this balance. Where one vasari ship is even with 3 TEC. 2 vasari would be as good as 3 advent. That type of balance.

3 things I want to see

-a limit on mines

-increased range on starbases

-lower costs on starbase upgrades