Something must be done about mines

from Sins Forums

Mines seem extremely overpowered to me (especially Vasari), but there are some ways to improve balance:

- Make the ship AI smart enough to not run into them.  I don't understand why, if i can see mines, my ship's can't.  Or if they can, why I need to manually give them orders to go around them rather than plow right on through them

- Make mines easier to clear.  They take too long to shoot and it seems as though unless you're targeting them manually, ships aren't very efficient at getting rid fo them.  In fact often they seem to just ignore them until you tell them specifically to shoot them.  My friend spent 40 minutes clearing a mine field manually.  That's not fun at all.

- Make some mine countermeasures.  The last major deployment of naval mines I'm aware of was in WWII, and back then mines blew up anything that hit them.  I can accept that advanced technology would give mines in Sins the ability to identify friendlies, but if that's the case then there should be some way for enemies to fool them.

- Vasari mines are out of control.  Their mines are free.  They can deploy them in zones where ships come out of jump space, which can destroy a fleet instantly without any ability to do anything about it.  They can launch an invasion fleet and deploy a ton of mines in enemy sectors, making it very difficult to fight the invasion fleet.  They deploy mines so much faster than it takes TEC to build them.  Build 10 ruiniers and you pretty much have an instant field that would take TEC a minute to build.

- I haven't tried Advent yet, but my friend tells me those mines are useless because the fighters deploy them instantly upon detecting incoming enemies so all he gets are dense mine fields around his hangars.  

- You could make the chance of hitting a mine very low to simulate the fact that space is 3d even though Sins is 2d, and that cubes the space that you need to mine rather than 2d space, which is only squared.

- Make mines only damage one ship at a time.  Ships in Sins travel on top of each other (Ok, it's simulating 3d)  but mines exist in 2d space so if one ship in a dense pack hits one, they all get damaged.  Fleet formations never really mattered before, but now they do....

- Reduce mine damage.  A pair of mines can destroy a frigate or severly cripple a capship.  That's realistic as far as real world mines go, but it doesn't make sense in Sins where a frigate can survive a direct assault from a battleship for a surprisingly long time.

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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

The gravity well that took 40 minutes to clear was completely inundated with mines. I had 7 level 4 capital ships to start with (Mass Transcendence got them there/synced) and when I finished clearing the gravity well the cap ships were almost level 8 from the experience (divided 7 ways!) This was after the host disconnected as we were mopping up a game, so I was all teched up. I had the 7 cap ships, 12 illuminator vessels (which seem to be able to shoot mines), a line of 5 scouts to spot, and some other ships that may or may not have been able to target them.

I wouldn't really mind if there was some kind of cap on mines, there were thousands in this gravity well (maybe it is what caused the host crash.)

I have been trying to self-limit my mine deployments to 4 or 5 squad clusters in systems I'm defending due to the obvious detriment syncing 23402978 mines has on the multiplayer situation, so to see the AI going nuts with thousands of mines (even during offensive actions) is kind of disheartening.

The problem with the Advent mines isn't that they autodeploy so much as there is no good default action. If you toggle off autodeployment for the Homing Mind Squadron, they become more usable. By default, any scout zooming into your system from an enemy will result in the mines deploying on top of the hangar.. I don't consider it to be a big problem, except that when compared to the incredible swarm of mines those Ruiners spit out (and their auto deployment action!) completely dwarfs the time investment of manually managing Advent mine deployment.

The mines themselves do have some kind of 3d space element, as I saw when trying to clear them, but it only seems to come into play with very large densities of mines.

Edit: To clarify, I like the way the Advent mines work, and I like managing defenses, but it seems like parity of functionality between the races is not even close. I suppose over time, or if I was AI, I could have a ridiculous number of low cost mines as Advent as well though.

It would be great if you could at least detect mines in orbit around friendly planets without scouts... my homeworld was attacked by Vasari and I had to spend 10 minutes mopping up mines (they had Ruiners in their fleet and threw out a hundred or so during the attack.)

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

One of the things that keep poping up is AI overmining.  The Hard AI will mine grav. wells with a rather distressing number of mines. 

The other frustrating thing is some of the changes made to the ship AI.  The ships will return to their original position after being issued a move command right?

Let me offer up a scenario.  A scout and a bunch of light frigs are moved to destroy a minefield.  They then turn around before doing anything and crash through the minefield on their HUGE turning radius.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

only things that need to be done about mines is:

invisible to every ship but scout:

reduced CPU useage

reduce max ammount of mines that can be in one grav well ( should still be possible to deploy alot tho)

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

The more I think about it the more I think that they do way too much damage.  I mean, they instakill ships and -nothing- else in the game can do that.  Sure, they're stationary but with vasari it's easy to drop a million of them and make them impossible to avoid.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Thing is, at least with TEC anyways. Is the mines are only effective as a defensive strategy in numbers. I've seen whole fleets pass thru with only a couple casualties. Until you thickin the field up. I think just an effective counter would work wonders.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Lord_Dark_Cloud, reply 5
Thing is, at least with TEC anyways. Is the mines are only effective as a defensive strategy in numbers. I've seen whole fleets pass thru with only a couple casualties. Until you thickin the field up. I think just an effective counter would work wonders.
End of Lord_Dark_Cloud's quote

 

Just a few casualties?  You should check out my thread - I lost 428 cap worth of frigates and cruisers passing through this 'harmless' minefield.  I suppose I was careless not taking into account the turning radius of massive fleets, but I figured they would do something different to avoid the mines - instead they said "LET'S PLOW THE ROAD!" and just went straight into them like idiots.  Lol, it's kind of funny thinking back about it now.

They're also a great offensive strategy too.  Get a fleet half-full of Ruiners and a couple of Skirantra carriers running repair cloud and Marauders running gravity distortion and you're all set to go to town on somebody else's planet.

The DPS of mines needs a serious nerf.  Their damage is overpowered compared to any other weapon in the game.  Even starbase weaponry can't match the defensive power of a massive minefield.  There should also be a gravity well mine limit based on the size and type of gravity well or planet in that well.  Once more they need to decay or at least have some half-effect measure against clearing them.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

i have an idea!!!

 

DONT Run your fleet into minefield and expect to live, you know mines are there not for you to pickup ;)

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

Even starbase weaponry can't match the defensive power of a massive minefield.
End of quote

That's the problem, really.  Well, apart from them crashing systems and being micromanagement intensive to clear.

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Ships blithely waltzing through known minefields shouldn't happen; it breaks immersion unless we suppose that everybody's devolved into technically-gifted idiot savants.

 

Thinking about mines in space:

- Space is big.

- It is not particularly logical that an expensive space-faring warship wouldn't be bristling with sensors -- detecting various forms of radiation, both passive and emissive.  And since even small objects moving at high velocity might be dangerous, they're going to be monitoring all sorts of things.

- Any sane ship captain is going to seriously scan space junk, if said space junk has a tendency to conceal command-detonated fusion bombs are the like.  And if a mine is using power, it's building up heat which is going to be radiated away at some point.  Given that most space junk should be cold, this should be fairly suspicious even if the mine isn't using any active detection methods, moving, or communicating.

- Ordinance is basically free in the _Sins_ universe, so a paranoid captain has little reason to be stingy with fusion bombs or the like for clearing volumes of space of potentially threatening objects.

- 'Space junk in phase space' might excuse not being able to shoot at it, but is definitely not going to be treated as innocent and something to blithely pass by.  Inert 'safe' objects shouldn't be staying in phase space...

 

As I see it, in most situations a known minefield may cost substantial time and firepower to clear (thus possibly making it worthwhile to go elsewhere -- area denial -- or compounding danger because there's something else firing on you while you're trying to clear the mine.  Think carriers on the other side of the grav well harrassing you with strikecraft while you attempt to clear the field so you can reach them, for instance.).  Actual casualties directly from the minefield itself should be fairly limited unless it's a newly seen field, or a betrayal (known 'friendly' field being command-detonated on you as the owner backstabs you), or where you landed right in it (e.g. immediately being within effective lethal radius upon leaving phase space or wormhole).