[Karibu]

One thing to make mines better would be so, that when you sweep mines, there would be certain percentual for one sweeper component to sweep a mine. Also so, that bigger minefields are easier to sweep. For example:

1 sweeper component of level 5 has five shots. 1 shot has 10% basic chance to sweep a mine. In this case this component would have 5 shots of 10 percent chance each of them = 1-(0,9^5) = 0,41 mines/turn.

This number would apply in... lets say a minefield size of 50 mines. Now this percent grows linear up to 20% chance when the size of the minefield is 100 mines. This is logic, because more mines in one sector means they are closer each other.

So, lets say a ship, which has 20 components of level 5 minesweeper components goes into minefield of 100 mines. Then it sweeps like this:

1 component sweeps: 1-(0,8^5) = 0,67 mines/turn.
20 components sweeps approximately 13,4 mines/turn.

So, in this case you would need approximately 8 ships (20 components in each of them) to sweep every mine in the field in one turn. Yes, this is a quite many ships, but also mines would have a propability to hit one ship (not automatically, like now). The mine hit propability could be for example 50%. In this kind of minefields, enemy could pass it taking some damage, but it would not sweep all the mines at one sweep like now.

The sweeper components could also become more accurate in upper levels and mines would have better hit ratio when more developed. Sure these numbers I presented needs some refinement, but I think the idea would be great. Mines would be quite more usable and they would have this unpredictable element which they have in real life also. You rarely find all mines in one area in one day (or month, for that matter). You need to inspect the area very closely.

[ April 08, 2004, 18:16: Message edited by: Karibu ]