I totally agree. I thought some of the mods (especially Sins+) enhanced the game more than Entrenchment has at this time. Hopefully the excellent modding teams will sort this out for us non coders!

a mine sweeper would be good,and a patch to solve the mini-dump issue would be sterling.

M I N E   S W E E P E R!!!!!!!!  Any 3 plus hour game ends up with every system crap full of mines - it becomes impossible to assault a planet without sending 100's of lemmings (scouts) to suicide the mines first.  YECH!

Have you re-read your ships specs yet? The Vasari scout vessels can detect mines so other ships, facilities and strike craft can then shoot them. The same should apply for the other factions even though I've not tested that yet. So there _are_ countermeasures: Just have some scout ships roam the area around your fleet and the mines will be destroyed on sight. Of course there's a lot of manual care to be taken because you can't just command the scouts to search for mines and stop out of the damage radius, but hey -- these are mine fields, they're supposed to be dangerous. I like the feature very much because now there's a cheap way to defend yourselves when driven back hard. AI players don't seem to be aware that they may scout out mines so they keep running into them just fine. ,-)

As for the speed issue, facilities/ships who deploy mines should be built with the ability _not_ being set to auto-use. This would let the user choose when and where to put a mine, thus greatly limiting the overall littering. Before I started to forbid brainless mine-dumping, the game would become so slow that the mines wouldn't even explode when enemies ran into them. Maybe also mines could be limited to a certain number per gravity well. If this number has to be rather low, increase their blast radius in return, so that 50 mines then can be as effective as 200 mines now.

There seems to be a little balancing issue hidden somewhere -- when the game gets slow, player facilities start reacting very slow, stationary defense targeting and firing after long delays, not using their abilities to the fullest, mines don't explode when run into, repair facilities being on strike etc. AI players don't seem to suffer though, they just come rushing in blazing fire. Sometimes all an AI player has to do is dump several hundred mines per gravity well so the human enemy (me!) is out of any chance to fire back and be destroyed although heavily armed and easily outgunning the AI. If the game does slow down because there are too many objects to control, it should be taken care that AI and human players be impacted by equal amounts of slowness. Maybe the game as a whole should notice the load is no longer to be handled, and degrade from real time strategy to near real time strategy - meaning that a minute of gaming may take 70sec then or maybe 180sec even, but in this "stretched" time everything behaves the exactly same way as usual, only slower. Even if it was intended to be like this, at the time being the game doesn't behave in this way, time is being distributed in a way so that human players are at a disadvantage.

I did notice in this context that even though the game becomes pretty slow at times the processor cores are far from being heavy loaded. What's the matter here? The GPU should only care about what to show on the current screen, so there's no reason for stress. The CPUs are bored to say the least. Memory? No swapping occurs and still lots of free mem available. What other factors are there? Any suggestions?

I'm glad other people are commenting on the mines. I was just playing a fairly large scenario. Was quite late game and the AI was at full tech levels. One of my outer edge planets was invaded by the Vasari. It was a massive battle involving a starbase and several defense systems. It was an epic 10 min battle. My starbase kept on disabling the varsari ships and bought me enough time to get one of my other fleets to the area.

Once my fleet got there and the Vasari started to take heavy losses the AI decided to retreat. I lost my entire fleet with the exception of my capital ships as they tried to chase the Vasari. After the battle there were literally hundreds of mines all over the sector. I had to spend the next 10 minutes moving a little scout ship around and trying to clear all the mines.

Some suggestions:

1.) Some sort of slow moving, vulnerable mine sweeper type of craft. Weak enough that it wouldn't be able to sweep mines in the middle of a battle.
2.) A hard coded limit on the number of mines that can be put down. There should be a time-limit on how long mines can exist if they are laid in an enemy controlled sector. For defensive mines in your own sector no time limit.
3.) Need to do something with the Advent mine drones. I made the mistake of making one of my hangers have 3 squads of mine drones. After a little while, for some reason you will end up with a massive cluster of mines all within a very small area. I suggest changing the mine drones to only exist like a regular squad. Their function would be to attack enemies by crashing into them and exploding. Only after they are destroyed is the hanger allowed to manufactor another squad.

i have the same problem as tking 1966 except mine happens when im running or trying to run a mod specifically the distant stars entrenchment alpha mod any help would be appreiciated

My strike craft seem to attack mines, playing tech I dont know about the other races. if I were to lobby for a change it would be for all ships to gain experience in battles. Not like the caps do where you manually upgrade them but a automatic increase. Like the lt carrier could at first rebuild a bit faster up to having extra strike craft. A scale of cost could determine the rate a ship upgrades, cheap ships would gain xp at a slow rate where expensive ones would climb faster.

Just a thought