How Do You Destroy Mines?

i use a fleet including carriers with a mox of fighters & bombers on hold position near the mines then send a scout to near the mines on auto minesweep, the fighters,bombers & lrfs shoot the stuffing out ofthe mines ,move the scout near the next mine cluster & repeat

harpo

edit the manuals are in the works for entrenchment and for sins download it is a pdf file called manual.pdf

The Flak frigate is pretty good combined with a scout . It can fire on multiple mines and with its high Hp can take a few mine hits too

works reasonably well against TEC and Vasari mines. as far as i can tell you really can't shoot down Advent Homing Mines. they'll ram right into you before you get a chance. clearing mines is VERY SLOW business though, really they're a very good deterrent once they're deployed.

You need to micro the scouts when clearing Advent mines. Just yesterday i cleared about 50 homing mines (which the AI used to cover all his buildings on his homeworld, quite impressive from an AI) with a scout and strikecraft. You need to manually use the "Reveal Mines" ability on the furthest mines, and let strikecraft take them out, before moving the scout. it takes time, but is (almost) perfectly safe. BTW, my race was Vasari.

If you know where the mines are inside a grav well where you want to jump, manually adujust where you ships make the jump into phase space, which changes their arrival point as well.  Jumping into a group of mines is dangerous, stupid and just unneccesary.  Strikecraft, flak frigates and I find illuminators are all good at clearing out mines.  I believe the scout only needs to stop to trigger their detect mine ability, or that's how it works for me. 

Exactly, you need to scout ahead to avoid landing in a minefield. Also, if enemy gravity well is full of mines, set the fleet engament range to "local Area", or even "Stand Ground" to prevent them from chasing enemies to the minefield.

Perhaps I was doing something wrong.

I clustered a handful of Flaks and some Fighters around my 5 Arcovas and sent them in to reveal the Advent homing mines.

I revealed them alright, and even tried to manually target them with the flaks and fighters, but they just wouldn't fire.

I ended up losing all my scouts and half my flak frigates. After that my standard policy has been to ignore the fields during the main battle, and send in a Kol with forcefield and Finest Hour up to soak the mines afterwards.

Vasari and TEC mines are trivial with the above Arcova/Flak/Fighter combo.

I had much the same thing happen to me last night. A force of Scouts and Flaks was trashed by those homing mines because their homing range is greater than my Scouts reveal. Strangely enough midway through using ships of political dissadents all of the mines "turned off" de-phased and stoped homing in on my ships. I have no idea what happened to cause that. There were still active mine fields by that race in other systems, anyone know why the mines in one system shut down but the others didn't?

there are two ways of getting rid of mines 1 send scouts and strike craft or 2 cheap ships as mine foder both are efective

Or, you could ignore them while you wipe out the rest of the defenses, and if its useful, build a starbase and run them over...it can take 50 or more mines without sneezing. Costly, but if the planet is worth putting mines around, you can probably afford a starbase around it late game.

I usually let a cap ship soak up the mines damage. You must make sure that no enemies are nearby, so that you can repair the damage done.

But it is an easy way to "clear" the mines that does not require awful lot of micromanagement. Clearing mines is a pain in the butt.

As TEC, I usually roll a Kol (Adaptive + Finest) with a pair of Donovs (Recharge) and a couple of Hosis for good measure to clear a mine field.  A dedicated ship to do just that would be great though.  I mean, they've got Torps and Stars for the SBs, y not a mine clear-er?

I think I've read elsewhere that once you drop the planet (it becomes neutral), the mines go inactive.  Maybe not the glitch of coming out of phase like someone said but they don't go off when a ship passes through / by.  Don't quote me on it though.

That has been my problem with homming mines, the mines have a greater range than the scout and when start come after the scout the rest of the forces can not shoot it down in time.  Dead scout.  What odes work very well for mines is several lone scouts going into a mine field, then mannually targeting the exposed mines with strike craft, I can not see any advantage of including them in the same fleet as the scout.  This appears to be how the ai hunts for mines.  Unfortunately this is not as effective against homing mines for the reason stated above.

The answer is for the next version of entrenchment to increase the mine detection range of the scouts.  This would make clearing mines without so much micro which seems to be the thread of discontent.  Mines are fun after all, but after the battle, its just an admin chore.

As an aside, last night I was playing Hyperions gate and the remaining ai had built more mines than I had ever seen around the only phase lane into it's choke point, its world's were on the other side of the choke point.  Then it put an upgraded starbase in the middle of the mine field and brought its entire fleet including 4 caps and positioned them just outside the mine field.  It also parked 4 hanger bays on the opposite side of the planet.  There was no way to jump around the mine field.  It was glorious.

I've suggested this in another post, but since most people seem to be pretty unimpressed with the Ruiner, why not give them the secondary role of mine destroyer? they could decloak mines, and then have an anti-mine cannon to destroy them.