Some thoughts on mines and mine sweepers

[LintMan]

It seems right now that mines are a bit unbalanced, especially vs. the AI.

The biggest part of the problem as I see it is that mine sweepers are so fragile/ineffective: If there are more mines than a sweeper can handle in a turn, it gets destroyed by the rest of the mines. So in an otherwise unguarded sector with a 100-200 mines, you need lots of sweeper ships, with multiple sweeper components, at a fairly high tech level, in order not to lose all your sweepers in the process of clearing the mines. And since it's impossible to detect the number of mines in a sector, you can only guess how many sweepers will be needed, and if you're wrong, there goes your whole sweeper fleet.

You can create badass minefields just by getting minefield tech level 1 (and the fairly cheap explosives techs), but to clear the mines with any efficiency, you need to get all the way up to mine tech level 5, which is godawful expensive. (I think level 3 alone costs 400K RP).

The first part of my suggestion is that instead of mines automatically damaging any ships entering the sector, there could be a percentage chance that any given ship moving through the sector will be hit by mines. (If a ship was hit, it would take damage from all the mines until it is destroyed or there are no mines left). The percentage would be fairly small if there was only one mine in the sector, but would rapidly increase as more mines were added, and max out at, say, 95% chance with 200+ mines in the sector. This would always give ships a chance to make it through and make minefields less of a certainty on sealing off borders.

Further, I would make mines more detectable, say by level 1 scanners at first, but then at higher mine tech levels, new mine components would let mines go up to level 5 undetectability. A ship with sufficient scanner levels would be able to pass through the minefield with a reduced chance of detonating any mines (say, half the normal likelihood of triggering the mines).

The other part of my suggestion is that mine sweepers should be relatively "immune" to triggering the mines - say, only 1/5 the normal chance of detonating them. (Think of the wooden-hulled boats the US Navy uses as mine sweepers). So you could send a sweeper into the minefield, and it could gradually over a number of turns clear the field, clearing however many it can per turn.

So if you don't want your enemy clearing your minefields, you'd need to back it up with some satellites or a base or some ships to take out the sweepers.

To prevent getting cheap mine immunity by just throwing a single sweeper component on every ship in a fleet...
- A special mine sweeper hull could be required to get the immunity (again, think of wooden-hulled sweeper ships today)
...or...
- The sweeper component could be made large, say 200K (but it does 5x-6x the # of mines), so it's too big to want to put one on every ship in a fleet. Or it could be a separate, bulky component (gotten from the mine tech tree) that provides the mine immunity that would also be necessary in addition to the sweeper components.
...or...
- Make it so only ships with the mine sweeper Category get the immunity, and they would need to have 50-75% of their space as sweepers.

It seems to me that changes like this would balance out mines a bit while still leaving them as an effective defense, but it would also give the AI a better chance to deal with them since it wouldn't have to build up a huge "sweeper-fleet" just to take out those massive mine fields human players like to build.

What do you guys think?