please help me balancing mines and making them more useful

[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.