2.5 Mine Feedback

Mines are going in a good direction. I think they may be to expensive. My biggest problem is how they are used for offense. Using them for offense is a cool idea dont get me wrong I like this but it can be abused bad. Mines need to do damage to ALL entities within its respective range. It makes no sense how an explosion excludes a ship. It is hard to get a scout in to clear mines during a battle with fighters present. It makes things like LF useless against carriers since they can fly them across a wall of mines while their strike kill you and you can never reach them. There needs to be risk for a player who does this. I also dont understand why static mines are more lethal then a homing mine. The homing mine detonates right off the hull. I think the homing range needs increased as well. Doesnt seem to be worth much. I dont see the advantage of the homing mine. Plus its more expensive. The ability range of the homing is 200 while the phase is 650??? On top of it all is that if you use them it takes the place of a strike squad.

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Reply #1 Top

The main issue I'm having with mines right now is just that scouts don't seem to detect them very often. I've got scouts with the fleet, but unless I order the fleet to hold position, send a scout in front of it, then tell it to inch forward, ships just plow through the minefield.

Reply #2 Top

The scouts by themselves aren't that great yet on full automation, they auto-return to their point of origin way too much and themselves never attack mines, which means you still only get small windows of opportunity to shoot at mines if you leave them on auto.

They do better if you put them into a fleet and set it on loose cohesion (depending on the situation, you might want to put your combat ships on hold position so they don't actually move outside of formation). This way the scouts' detection reaches a bit in front of the fleet that you'll be able to shoot down most of the mines before you plow through them. But I still think the scouts' formation rank in the fleet should be moved up to be right behind the front line ships. Right now if you fleet some scouts, they get put pretty much in the middle, between front line and long range/support.

That and they need to shoot mines they detect, otherwise they get confused when you have a bunch of scouts trying to target the same mine and most of them try to auto-return - which is especially bad if you have a fleet for just the scouts and the fleet leader returns :P

Reply #3 Top

The same way scout's autoexplore the galaxy, they should be able to be told to autoexplore a individual well. That way it goes about its business automaticly.

Reply #4 Top

Well, that's what it attempts to do on auto-detection. And a single scout does ok, it goes from mine to mine. But when you throw a bunch of scouts together they get confused. Their priority is detection only, so they don't attack already-uncovered mines and they get confused when the mine they wanted is taken and think they're done, so they auto-return to jump-in and then realize "oh hey, there's still mines up" and restart the cycle.

I did send a set up save and a rather lengthy description of this to one of IC's guys that got back to me on the beta 2 auto stuff, so hopefully it'll still get tweaked a bit :)