SEIV Fleet Strategy Question

[douglas]

If you're not sure you have enough sweeping capacity to clear an entire minefield and your sweepers are expendable, then it might be a good idea to send them in alone ahead of the main fleet. If there is any mobile defense, however, this will generally get your minesweepers destroyed unless you give them a lot more combat equipment than I usually do. If you keep your minesweepers in the main combat fleet, all sweeping will take place before combat and with the combined sweeping ability of all minesweepers at once, so your warships will still be protected if your minesweeping capacity is up to snuff. Meanwhile, your warships will be able to protect your minesweepers in the ensuing battle and you won't be forced to wait a turn (assuming you're playing simultaneous movement) to find out if the field was fully swept or not. Plus, that turn spent waiting gives your opponent a chance to launch any mines he had in reserve.

Note: In stock, no minefield can have more than 100 mines and it's pretty easy past the very early game to get enough minesweeping capacity to handle that. Once you have enough minesweepers in a fleet to sweep 100 mines, that fleet is almost completely immune to minefields. It is theoretically possible for multiple enemy empires to stack minefields in the same place, to a maximum of 100 per empire, but this is pretty rare even in multiplayer and will never happen with AIs.