How About This: Mines Kill ALL!!!

I thought about this as well - then you would use mines to effectively close off phase lanes or set up nasty traps that a fleet without a spotter would be unaware of.  However, it struck me as odd that if the technology existed to jump between stars that the species wouldn't also be able to build in some sort of basic friend/foe recognition system in mines.  Of course, we also wouldn't hear ships exploding in space, so who am I to nitpick? 

Another thought would be if your ships traveled through your own mine field, they would destroy the mines simply by having these huge ships run into them (without the mines detonating).  That seems like a better compromise to me.

The other problem with making mines damage your own fleet is your own trade ships would be decimated or decimate the mine field over time. (especially in your own sectors)

Making trade ships immune (if they aren't already I haven't paid too close attentio tbh) would fix that issue nicely.

Why should trade ships get free passage through a mine field? They're made to block off ships. Cargo carriers are ships.

I agree on the friend-or-foe sensing business... by the time you're starfaring, you'd think you'd be able to prevent your own mines from blowing up in your face.

But for the sake of game balance, perhaps mines *should* damage all ships.   If you make the AI smart enough to navigate *around* (or take the time to destroy/sweep) detected mines, mines become much more practical and much less worth spamming.   Minefields then effectively block (or dramatically slow) traffic along a certain path, but if you overdo it you trap yourself and paralyze a planet.

Or if friendlies don't trigger detonations, the detonations could at least "splash" onto all units nearby.  I have suggested in an earlier thread that this might be a good way of clearing gravity wells saturated with mines... if there's a dense enough mine field, the detonations could splash onto other nearby mines setting up a chain reaction.   This should discourage people from placing mines too densely, or all around their orbital facilities or regular shipping lanes.

Mainly because you currently lack the ability to designate trade routes to your trade ships.

If I could tell my trade ships route x if a no fly becuse I put a minefield in the way it'd work nicely. However becuse they lack the brains to fly around the mine fields (in that they would have intel data on where they were placed so would naviagte around your own fields) one would need to give them immunity, or script in the ability to define trade routes.

Mines are disposable self-destruct munitions, so it would make sense to make them as simple (and cheap) as possible, which would rule out any IFF system, also it would heavily discourage mine spam on colonized worlds. I like the idea. (On paper, atleast)

I would argue that any "friendlies recognition" would expose the mines to the enemy because some type

of energy would be used to transmit a signal and recieve a "disarm" signal.  Certainly as sophisticated as

the ships are at this point in history, they would have figured out a way to detect this signal as an indication

that mines are about. 

as for cargo ships, the AI (and you) shouldn't be foolish enough to place mines where you can visibly see

cargo ships going. 

I would also like a default auto placement for mines where you are asked "would you like to place mines

around X structure?"  Or, "would you like to set mines at in/out phaselane?"

Something like this.

I posted on an other thread that there should be a "chain reaction" in a dense field of mines.  Debris from the first explosion sets off additional explosions, and propagates outwards.  It should die out randomly.  I agree that this should damage any nearby friendly ships/structures.  A small gap in the mine field would be created.

The mines should also slow down all ships.

I don't agree. The mines are phased out of normal spacetime. You can actually detect them(read see them on your game) but not interact with them at all aside from the scout's ability to de-phase them. At that point you can blow it up.

Therefore, there can not be any possibility of a chainreaction, because the other mines are still in their cloaked mode and invincible.

The solution here is to automate the scout's behaviour. When he is not on a scouting mission, just park it in a gravity well with enemy mines and he should automatically start to go and destroy those mines one by one without any additional player micromanagement. You can create a fairly effective mine clearing force of a dozen or so scouts and they can clear out any mine fields quickly enough, but not too quickly. The mines are still doing their job of delaying the enemy, it takes time to disarm them still, just not the player's attention as well.

^ to quote star wars: "no ship that small has a cloaking device"

and star trek: "she's got a cloaking device on her that cost us a lot."

mines with cloacking devices?  see where I'm going with this?  they have the tech, why not just put them on

all of their ships and structures?? 

The vasari can phase out their missiles but it needs research that the other 2 races haven't mastered. However a missile and a statonairy mine are a tad different, so it should be easier to phase out a mine compared to a missile, but both of them are much smaller thatn even the smallest ships. I can only guess at exactly how phase space works but i assume that the overall mass of an object and maybe even the amount of energy contained within it have an effect on how easy it is to phase out. Capital ships obviously have more mass and more energy than smaller ships, thats why it takes longer for them to make the jump. Mines have almost no energy in them besides whats needed to phase out and they don't move, so it shouldn't be that hard to phase them out.

Instead of the mines broadcasting a signal all about, because that would give them away, I assume that allied ships would broadcast a signal at the mines and the mines would just receive the signal. I know that that isn't that hard to do, my tv does it, I push a button ona  remote and it turns off.

^  you can also take an alien remote and point it at the tv and run codes until said remote turns the TV on/off.  Therefore I suggest, ships could braodcast random waves until they click the mines.  How is this possible?

Just ask scout ships: they already can do this.  Pitty the given races haven't just put said device on a bigger

ship which also has the firepower to take out what it just discovered AND can take an occasional hit just incase

the system fails and a mine DOES go off.

I didn't feel it was nescasary to go into specifics and exactly how the mines would work, but seems it was needed.

I assume that instead of a general "don't blow up" signal the mines would probably need a password of sorts. Again, its not really that hard. So allied ships would have to broadcast something like this, "Bravo9445-T64Zeta, Temprorary disarm, Standby. This message would need to be on the right frequency and directed at a specific spot on the mine, and it would need to be done to every single mine in the area.

Notice the 3 parts of my little message. The first part is a password, that would only be known to people of certian levels of security clearence. The second part is the comand sent to the mine, you could also ask the mines for a status report, to self destruct, to phase in or out, or to rearm themselves. And last we have Standby, which means that the mines should be waiting for another command, in this case an order to rearm after the allied ships have passed through.

The password itself could change to another preset password every hour so some one would have to know the entire list to trick them into disarming. Different minefields would have different passwords, infact even different mines could have different passwords. Also you would need to know the location of every mine to be able to disarm them all, information you wouldn't have unless some one gave it to you. And finaly like most websites if you imput a wrong password 3 times in a row it could lock down for a certina amount of time.

id be happier if the mines were just taken out of the game, at this point i can not even stand to play the game anymore with the mines the way the are

wile I can't stand those that want the mines removed I leave a gap that is open so the the enemy has to run into the defenses and waiting star base with out any other way out or around

your logic is based on forgetting that scout ships somehow are able to DEFEAT your logic ALREADY!!!!  Now if they could just share their technology for "code breaking" to their bigger bretheren everything would be golden.  No need to explain any of your ideas because scouts have rendered them moot.

i think it'd just make things more frustrating if your own mines killed friendly units, as for your comments about real world mines sins is set like what? 1000 years or sumin in the future, I think it'd be a bit odd that such advanced races that who can construct giant ships an send them instersteller distances wouldnt be able to design a recognition system that could tell their mines not to blow up their own or allies ships

I agree with the post above me, making mines blow up in everyone's face will just be annoying. Plus, mines are so annoying at the moment that having to worry about your own mines would be horrible.

my goal is to force the AI to use mines less. 

We should be careful making smart mines that can identify enemies and disarm remotely.

I would think mines are there to slow or damage all ships passing through, as mines should not accept anyones word that they are friendly or not. If a mine can accept commands then anyone can command it. surely they have hackers in the future

Now I have a quad core cpu which should be enough to handle mine spamming. Even overclocked to 3.6GHz mines slow my rig to a crawl. I know its still beta but perhaps the mines can be redesigned.

I heard another post around here somewhere about making the mine field an object. instead of setting individual mines you could tell the ship to deploy a mine field and give it health and possibly upgrades like other units.

I love Sins and can't wait for the next update!

so many ideas, when all we need is a cap per gravity well, I dont see why that wasnt implemented in the first place

Maybe because there is more to fix here than just the cap?

The more ideas the better for IronClad.

aye their probably are but a cap would have prevented so many problems in first place, particularly the mine spam grr

personally I'd be content with them if they were capped

EDIT: now i think about it it would be nice if the ships didnt have to be right on top of a mine to set it off, they'd be more effective if they had a proximity detonation, or even have that as a researchable extra, obviously not a massive proximity otherwise scouts couldnt detect them without going boom but something to make them more effective

Another thing about mines I was thinking about lastnight, the Z-axis.  Can I go over or under them?  Doesn't seem like you can in 2-D, but this is a 3-D game, though I seldom play that way.

Wow, I never thought of that. You, sir, are a genius!