please help me balancing mines and making them more useful

[Alneyan]

Incidentally, are stronger components much more likely to be hit than ones with less hitpoints when it comes to the special damage types? We could even have a Leaky "Minesweeper" by going this way. (Which would make sense, as minesweeping cannot possibly work all the time, can it?)

Thanks for pointing out this problem with the boarding ability SJ. Unfortunately, it doesn't leave many other decoy abilities besides these two "Resupply Base Only" and "Spacesport Only". I will give these a try to see if they would work on ships.

As they do not seem to work for ships (which makes sense, but I was daydreaming), a workaround would be needed, such as making up a very good reason for the sudden destruction of these minesweepers once the ship Boards another/is boarded. Either that, or using another decoy ability, such as the Shield Generator Only if you do not plan on using it.

However, as special damage do *not* stack, will a special weapon try to take down a vulnerable component while the others cannot be destroyed? Imagine four sturdy engines with 100 hitpoints, and a much weaker one with only 10 hitpoints. Would a Ionic Disperser with 50 damage destroy the weak one, or would it target the bigger ones, even if it has no hope of breaking them? It might be a solution if it is the former, albeit a very rough one.

[ April 08, 2004, 15:26: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[Spoo]

You could give the minesweeper componets the only X allowed per ship ability. If you could have only 1 stock minesweeper V on a ship, then it would take at least 20 ships to clear a stock mine field. And/or you could make the sweeper componet huge (say 200kt), so that you would need to build a large number of specialty mine sweepers. The problem now, IMHO is that you can sweep a full minefield with just one or two speciality ships.

[Suicide Junkie]

However, as special damage do *not* stack, will a special weapon try to take down a vulnerable component while the others cannot be destroyed?

Actually, that's a good question...

For regular damage, if the mine dosen't destroy a component, it was changed so that the damage stacks with the next warhead.
That fix may work for Only X damage types, at least for mines.

[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 ]

[spoon]

Originally posted by 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.

A good idea, but not something you can mod in SE4. You should post this suggestion in the "Suggestions for SE5" thread...

[Alneyan]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
For regular damage, if the mine dosen't destroy a component, it was changed so that the damage stacks with the next warhead.
That fix may work for Only X damage types, at least for mines.

I launched a quick test, and here are the results: the warheads do not stack, so a mine with four warheads able to do 100 damage each will *not* be able to destroy a component with 200 hit points. (The same goes true for a mine able to deal 200 damage)

Obviously, the armoured engine was mostly targetted, thus protecting the much weaker engines. (They have been destroyed from time to time though, but adding more mines or warheads only increases the odds to destroy some vulnerable components) So it does seem that the damage done by special warheads do not stack, and the warheads will not go for the weak components when they cannot take down a sturdier component.

[ April 08, 2004, 18:55: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[Alneyan]

A random idea concerning these mines. It would revolve around using the often unused damage types of Security Stations Only and Boarding Parties (or other such Damage Only types). You would have mines with two kind of warheads, one dedicated to destroying the "minesweepers" and the other ones able to take down the other parts of the ship. (Engines, weapons, internals...) "Minesweepers" would instead be armoured structures able to withstand a few hits from the anti-minesweepers warheads, and many other warheads hits.

Technically, we would have the following:
- Minesweepers: Armour ability, a rather important amount of hitpoints (depending on the strength of the warheads), Security Station and Boarding Parties value of 0. Engine and Weapon decoy abilities if needed.
- Anti-minesweeper warhead: A portion of the Minesweeper hitpoints, Security Station only damage. These warheads are here to destroy the defences of the ship, and not to deal any damage to the ship itself.
- Anti-engine, anti-weapons warheads, if wanted. Little damage done, enough to take down at least one such component per warhead, but you would need a lot of these to bypass the minesweepers.
- Anti-internal warheads, here to take down the inner parts of the vehicle. It would be a Boarding Parties only warhead, and these internal components would get the Boarding Parties ability as well. (O as a value)

The drawbacks of this are the following:
- Your ship will be protected by some armour from these minesweepers, but you might choose to add some maluses to reduce their use as an armour component.
- More of a problem, I am not sure if these special damage types do bypass the armour, besides the Engines only damage. Using a leaky armour system should prevent this from being a problem however.
- Above all, you cannot use the vanilla system of Boarders/Security Stations, as they would get targetted by these mines. It may be possible to work around this however, perhaps by using some of the other less used abilities. (If Only Resupply Depots and Only Spaceports worked on components, they would be perfect candidates for these dummy abilities. I wonder if it would work though)

I am not sure if I made much sense, as this idea just stroke me and so it is only a rough suggestion for now. Still, if you find any interest in this complicated scheme, or any other fail besides the ones above, feel free to point these out.


More on topic, I guess it also depends on the scale of your mod. Would you like long battles, where you cannot possibly hope to win the day in a single assault? Should it be possible to launch several offensives at once, or should a given Empire only focus on a single one unless it has a *lot* of resources available for numerous minesweepers?

Obviously, strengthening mines will have an impact on how the game will be played, since mines are mainly used as deterrents in the vanilla game. It isn't common for an Empire to gamble and go on the offensive without enough sweepers, and so mines can seldom destroy many ships. Still, they can delay this offensive if the opponent things they will be present. (You don't actually have to use mines in the vanilla game, just make *them* think you are using them. Easier said than done obviously. )

However, increasing the maximum limit could have the side effect of making attacks much less common, since you could not know what size of minefields you could expect. Perhaps removing the cloaking ability of these mines would help to check the numbers of warheads waiting for you at the other side of this wormhole, as there would be quite a difference between losing a few ships to rogue mines, and a whole battlefleet of a hundred warships, bringing the wrath of the Righteous Empire against its perfidious foes and... Erh, I should stop raving.