Mines 2.5

Couple more problematic scenarios:

- Vasari mines being used in large fleet engagements. With many ships on the screen, you won't notice a Ruiner laying mines on top of your ships before it's too late. It's too easy to pull off and there's no downside since your own ships won't even take damage.

- Having carrier spam sit in a minefield while their fighters destroy everything. Ok it only works for Vasari but the only way to get to the carriers would be to bring a scout and clear the minefield. But scouts don't make it when there are fighters around.

I think capital ships should get mine sensors as well. Then they could guard the fleet and deal with offensive mines. That would reduce the usefulness of mines but it could be balanced by making them less expensive. I would like that change. Multiple caps could finally be useful even early game, to counter Ruiners and Drone Hosts with mine squadrons.

Played with Vasari mines some more. A single offensively laid Vasari mine left 20 cobalts with about 30 hull each. A second detonation wiped them all out.

A full squadron of homing Advent mines can probably destroy one cobalt. The power gap between these two is much too big. The Vasari mines have gamebreaking potential while the Advent mines are useless for the cost. I'd imagine the TEC mines are closer to the Vasari but TEC can only do it when they are defending and the constructors are easy to destroy compared to the Ruiner.

I think as a TEC player my mines are useful at the phase lane entrance points.  Other than that you can just change your flight path in the Z axis and fly above or below them.  Now the homing mines and visari mines I sort of do nto like to run across.

Look on the empire tree or on the "enemy" level bar that goes around planets.  By glancing at either of these two displays, it's very easy to know if your enemy has ruiners.  As for finding it in the melee, well its hard to find certain other types of ships sometimes(overseers come to mind, as well as dominas).  Ruiners have low health and shields and die very quickly to focus fire.

I will concede that the Vasari mines are very powerful.  However, this will likely be balanced, just the like anti-structure ships were.  With the 30 second activation time period, all but the slowest ships should be able to clear just laid mines before they activate.  The Ruiner itself does not need to be made weaker. 

I have to agree with Starhound about the Advent mines. I have just played a game as Advent against a meduim Advent AI. After setting 4 sets of mines in 1 system and a few others in other systems I gave up making mines, I found having the extra fighter was of more benifit, and the AI must of as well. I only ever saw about 4 sets of mines trailing behind thier drone hosts and most of them were never deployed against me.

Part of the reason I did this was because after I expanded into more and more GW's I was having to make more and more hosts to lay more mines, consiquently I stopped so as to keep my fleets balanced with a roughly equal number of all different types of ships. I guess the AI was doing the same.

Now you could build heaps of hanger bays in GW's that you own to get the amount of mines that the other races can put in thier GW's, but that would take up to many tactical slots I beleive.

An idea to make this better balanced, would be if the hanger bays could build unlimitted amount of mines (150 per GW I mean). Other people may have a better idea than this but I really do think something needs to be done.

Either way I do think the Advent mines are better than they were.

Well it's worth mentioning that the mines are really easy to destroy during those 30 seconds before they cloak or detonate. That's a really good change. But it's confusing that the explosions look the same whether the mine is destroyed or detonates. I wish there was a smaller explosion when the mines are destroyed.

I still think Vas mines are too powerful or too useful as an offensive tool. It requires much more micro to counter them than it does to lay them the right spot.

A question: What makes you think that just because it is costly to jump into a mine field you know is there, you should have a choice to prevent yourself from taking the damage? What would the game gain by being able to bypass those defenses? Is it based on realism, inconvenience, gamebalance, or something different?

I mean, take your standard science fiction novel with interstellar movement based on phase lanes (by whatever name). Mining jump points is quite normal... as is having to absorb the damage caused. The typical story answer is to either send in your fleet in waves (with the toughest ships and minesweepers/defense craft first) or to have unmanned drones with ECM mimicking other ships go first (in cases where the attacker's ECM is better than the defender's) - in either case, heavy casualties are to be expected as the attacker will be being pounded by the active defenses and fleets the whole time. (The extreme case probably being some of Weber's Terran/Orion novels where attacking a strongly defended wormhole is considered akin to suicide - obviously, something like that wouldn't be a good idea in a real time game like SINS as it would be taking the entrenchment idea that step too far)

I have been experimenting a bit with sending in small forces of cheap ships (scouts/flak frigates) to arrive some 20s before the main fleet against mined areas and have had some limited success. I can't say whether it was truly worth it though - it needs a lot more experimenting.

More on homing Advent mines..

They all detonate on whatever comes into range even if it would only take one mine to kill it. It's far too easy to sacrifice one 200 credit scout to clear 725cred/170met/85crys worth of mines. Or more.

There's some kind of a delay with the detonation / damage that causes the mines to overkill their target.

And I think the Advent mines would be more useful if their trigger range was smaller and the damage higher. If they don't get a big enough blast radius to hit multiple ships.

I agree with starhound. The game has to be balanced. You cant have a few ruiners runnin around planting mines that are hard to see in the middle of battle that can kill all your ships with no way to counter. It is just plain no fun. I like to play advent and tec. It is no fun if vasari gets unfair advantages like this. It makes no diff against the ai cause it will not use smart tactics like this and abuse things but people will. I have lost about 20 disciples in one game because I couldnt see the mines. You are not always able to watch the tree at all times. There is no way to get scouts in there to detect them with fighters present. Maybe against the ai but humans are smart and see what your up to and kill it so he can continue using his mines.

I noticed that too.

one of my points with mines is the following: the size of individual fields is not huge, but it's ok. the result, however, is that you either go all out and mine very heavily or you don't all. placing just 2 - 3 fields is almost useless, you probably have to place like 100 mines in total to reach a mass critical enough for it to be of any use. which gets you into the 8000 credits range. quite expensive. especially considering that they can be cleared.

in a way I think they are balanced, but I think it's the wrong balance. I'd like higher chance of hitting, thus more mines or mines with greater detonation range, but less damage. I know it's not exactly how they would work, but the choice of eiher spending a ton of resources or nothing at all kind of reduces their usability. of course they can be used offensively in tactics, but the 30 sec activation timer (a good thing btw) makes it hard against someone who pays attention.

dunno, just my impression on the whole thing.

The 30 sec is nice but if you dont spot them in time your screwed. Also smart players dont plant mines near ships that will shoot them right away they will plant them like on the otherside of well so you have to disengage and hope you can make it in time.It also means you have to watch everything thats goin on during the battle now at everysec. Even small battles cause all he has to do is jump a ruiner in and plant mines and make your ships run into them. If your dont manually target the ruiner or the mines before they activate your screwed.

Just make mine sensing a power you can buy for your Caps. Add it to a few Capitals for each faction, with perhaps 3000/4500/6000 range sensing, and mabye a fairly low or none Antimatter cost and a low or zero refresh rate.

This makes Capitals still shorter range mine sensors than scouts unless you spend 2 power slots on them. So scouts are still useful for mine hunting, but not required.

Isn't one good use of mines to block up 1 part of a Gravity Well though?  So you can cover most of the GW with your star base and some static defences but it's possible someone could skirt round it so you can mine either side to make any efforts to circumvent your defences take a long time (or hurt badly) and give you time to organise defence.

As far as I know only Flak and Caps target mines during that 30 seconds of mercy you have before your ships get wiped out. LF's, LRF's and HC's can be wrecked by mining them since they won't shoot the mines during that 30s, especially if the mines are placed behind them.

Final suggestion for homing Advent mines:

1) Keep the surgical precision of damaging only one ship. No blast radius. This makes them different from TEC and Vasari mines.

2) Make them scatter around more to cover a larger area. This way less mines will home on the same target unless it goes right into the minefield. And it would be more likely the mines would not waste their potential by overkilling a single target.

3) Make them home in on their target and detonate faster.

4) Double the damage.