[raynor]

Originally posted by PeterD:
Does anyone have an opinion on whether mines
are better in or out of the game.

For their roleplay effect, mines are awesome. But the AI does have some problems dealing with them. If a human player encounters a mine field blocking access to a warp point s/he wants access to, the human player will likely shift production to solely build ships with mine sweeping components on them. The AI does not have this capability. The AI is designed to maintain a certain number of mine sweeping ships in its fleet. As those ships are destroyed, the AI will build more. But it is doing this because it has been coded to always keep a certain number of mine sweeping ships in its fleet and not because it has encountered a mine field.

When the AI bonus is set to low or none, I think the human player can severely hamper the AI players through the use of mines. On medium and high bonus, the AI researches faster and builds faster, and mines are less effective, in my opinion.