Proportions shell armor and ... minesweeping armor?

[JLS]

Thanks Pete, good advise

[JLS]

Try reducing mine warhead strength by a factor of ten or twenty for starters.

So as in P&N, ships will tend to get hit by mines, but fleets won't be directly annihilated by them.

SJ, any advise. So that I may start off with my best foot forward?

[ September 07, 2003, 15:50: Message edited by: JLS ]

[Suicide Junkie]

The idea I like best is to eliminate sweepers entirely.

Then you can reduce warhead damage, and play with the mines-per-sector limit.

Say, 10 mines required to kill a ship, plus mounts to double damage at 3x the cost, or 5x damage and 10x cost, say.

With a limit of 100 mines per sector, you'll force the defenders to spread out their fields across the whole system, and the attackers will normally lose at most 10 ships. (Home-system defenses will likely involve the more powerful mounted warheads, and do much more damage)

Scouts and small Groups of ships will be slaughtered, but large fleets will merely be slowed down in their advance while they wait for repairs after every movement. If you're lucky, you may even take out the repair ship and force them to turn back.
You could also counter-attack while thier defenses are weakened.

The main point is to have no sweepers, and weaker (probably cheaper too) mines spread out across the system. That way all the mines don't go up at once, and all the ships don't have to die.

[ September 07, 2003, 19:35: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Grand Lord Vito]

Now this system make sense

SJ, you still keep the sector limit to 100 or is it reduced to 10?

[ September 07, 2003, 23:53: Message edited by: Grand Lord Vito ]

[Suicide Junkie]

You need the limit to be at least 50.
The mines will be fairly small and should be able to take chunks out of most of the ships in a fleet. When each mine hits a random ship, you should end up with a gaussian distribution, so most ships will have some damage, a few will be untouched, and a few will be severely hit or destroyed.

1) There should be more mines than ships unless the defender was surprised, or isn't relying much on mines.
2) The damage of a single mine should be small enough that a typical warship can shrug it off. 10 or 20 kt worth of armor with stock settings for everything else, perhaps. Adjust up or down depending on overall weapons damage / defenses strength in specific mod.

[JLS]

SJ, what would you recomend the warhead strenght be?

[Suicide Junkie]

I believe I mentioned 10-20kt worth of armor as a good starting point.
Halve that if you get two warheads per mine.

[ September 11, 2003, 12:05: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]