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?

[Baron Munchausen]

Very good, Lintman! This is such a close duplication of a post that I made to the beta forum a couple days ago that I wonder if you read it. I hope that beta testers and regular customers expressing the same thing about mines will finally convince MM to modify them just a teeny bit! The one major observation which I made that you didn't is that the "economics" of mines are flat. It's smarter to use small mines because several small mines will destroy a large ship, but a single large mine is wasted on a small ship. So it's more effective and efficient to use the small mine forever, no matter how far up the tech field you go, because mines start out at maximum effectiveness unlike any other technology. We need to change that by just such measures as you have described: Limited cloaking ability for early mines, and a sliding scale of effectiveness for mine-sweepers according to the relative tech level of the sweeper and the mines.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 27 November 2000).]

[LintMan]

LOL! That's funny!

No, I hadn't seen your post; I'm not a beta tester so I can't access those forums. I'd love to see it, though.

I'm glad someone agrees with me at least!

I didn't mention it below, but I actually did notice that the small mines were more economical. That was one of the reasons I suggested adding new mine components that would decrease mine's detectability (rather than just different mine types that were less detectable)- It would encourage going up to larger mine sizes to be able to fit that extra stuff.

[Elmo]

A friend and I suggested to MM that mines were too powerful. However I believe they feel that mines are OK as they are, so we just tweaked the files as a quick fix. A small mine now only holds one warhead in our game and we doubled the sweeper component capacity to sweep mines at each tech level. Instead of sweeping 1-2-3-4-5 mines the components now sweep 2-4-6-8-10 at each level. I agree that sensors should be able to detect mines in some fashion and it shouldn't be that hard to implement.

Elmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Elmo:

Yes, I have done the exact same modification on Mine Sweepers in my custom techs. This helps some, but the different relative effectiveness against different tech levels of mines cannot be achieved with available game abilities. I hope that we will see some sort of additional flexibility on mines in the future, but many players like the 'certainty' of mines as a defense and it will probably have to be something small and settable so they can keep their infallible mines that can turn a system into a closed fortress.

I've been thinking about how to implement varying levels of mine stealth in the techs. A "cloaking device" for mines would require supplies to be consistent with the ship Version. If you extended "stealth" armor to be more effective and then justify a 'stealth' coating for mines (a "small" armor, bascially) you might unbalance other aspects of the game by making cloaking too easy and pervasive. On the other hand, it seems absurd to allow a more effective stealth armor only for mines and not for ships. Or does it? Maybe you could say that mines don't contain active power sources (engines and such) and so can use a better stealth armor? You could create a 5kt "mine armor" in the mine tech field and have increasing levels of effectiveness. Then the mine "hulls" themselves could be changed to "normal" units without inherent cloaking abilities. The small mine would just have room for one warhead and the cloaking armor. Hmmm... maybe this is doable.

Now... if we can just get a real "to hit" probability for mines instead of this demolition charge effect that we have now.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 28 November 2000).]

[Jubala]

I just want to throw in my support for changing mines like Lintman (and others) suggested. Or at least adding the possibility to do it with the textfiles. As it is now it's just absurd.

Just how do mines detect ships anyway? Do ships actually sail into the mines (yeah, right!) or are the mines "seeking" in some fashion? I tink the size and maybe speed of a ship should also affect the probability to hit. An escort would have a better chance of getting through then a Dreadnought. Would add incentive to use smaller hulls throughout the game. Having speed affect the probability to hit might not be doable as ships don't have speed per se, only movement points.

Anyway, I agree something has to be done. It just seems plain weird any ship entering a sector will just go seek out and hit the one single mine there. Could make sense coming through a warp point. Probability to hit should be somewhat higher when coming through a warp point come to think about it.

Thinking of sweeping, it also seems a little weird the sweepers actually find all the mines. Makes sense as they work now, but if all our whishes make it in I think it should be possible for the sweepers to miss a couple of mines. The less mines that are left in a sector the harder they are to find and you can never be absolutely certain you got them all unless you sweep the sector thourogly for quite some time. Some probability of mines left value would be good to have in that case, accesed some way via the blue rectangular signifying a known minefield.

What if there's enemy mines and friendly mines in the same sector? Gotta be mighty hard to just sweep the enemy ones. What then? Sweep them all?

[dmm]

Good thoughts in this topic. Some of mine:

I think that if a sector is mined, then NO ships should be able to go through without risk. (How do the mines tell friendlies from unfriendlies?) That would make mining a warp point a double-edged sword, so to speak.

Alternatively, let's assume that the mines use some sort of secret code that lets friendlies pass through unharmed. OK, then that code should be susceptible to Intelligence Operations. And, at a deeper level, the code that lets the mine owner change the pass-through code should also be susceptible to Intel Ops, so that one could "steal" a minefield. (And the previous owner wouldn't know it until his ships enter and go BOOM! Hehehe ... how's that for poetic justice?)

Another thing: mines should attack all ships in a fleet evenly, or maybe according to size. They shouldn't gang up on the ships one at a time, destroying some while leaving others unscathed. Just how smart are these mines anyway?

A question: is it possible to clear a 200-mine minefield by sending in 200 fighters (on a suicide mission, obviously, but they don't have to know that)? That would be radical but effective. Plus it would be a good way to get rid of malcontents.

[Shadow99]

Actually even modern mines can use IFF (identify friend or foe) signals to turn off mines while they are in the area... I've always assumed each race had it's own IFF frequency and that's included with the basic sensors they give the ship... It actually relates to a mod of techs/research/ship creation I've been playing with (requiring astrogation systems aka sensors = # of movement pts. on vessel)...

I'll put in my vote for adding a mine % to hit similiar to a weapon % to hit with smaller hulls getting a bonus to avoid & larger vessels having a penalty to avoid though... As well as to the thought that warp pts. should make it harder to avoid enemy mines...

Oh and I'd suggest using a system to figure chance to be hit like this: # of mines (in tens) increasing like this... 10 (5% to hit), 20 (10% to hit), 30 (15% to hit), etc. with bonueses & penalties related to other factors (ship size, warp point, mine is a seeker (though this requires redoing mine construction as it is), mine is cloaked or sensors reistant (same as Last), & ECM/Armor/shield type of ship)... I think it's at least a workable system & gives an edge to larger mines (with cloaking, seeking, & sensor resistance), smaller ships (bonus to avoid for size & ECM/armor/shield), while penalizing larger ships unless you make a grand effort in hull, ECM, & shield design...

Oh on a side note I'm moding my game to include dif shield types similiar to what was done with armor levels (so their are scanning resistant, dmg. absorb, % defense adjust (like ECM), & built-in cloaking types which is why I list them as sometimes offering bonuses against mines...

I've said enough for now, take care...

[Commander G]

Mines ought to have an exponential function for missing. Miss Chance = (.95) ^ Number of Mines. That way, there is always a chance of making it through the minefield. Hit chance = 1 - Miss Chance.

However, I think Mines ought to be eliminated completely. If they are so easily hidden they must not have a propulsion system, in which case they must have a gravity shield to prevent them from being dragged into the nearst gravity source (their sun). Suggestion: Only allow them to be placed in squares with Planets or Astroids. Warp Points have no gravity source to keep them there, so they should get dragged to the sun, unless we are assuming the Warp Points are orbiting the suns even though graphically they are not represented that way. Apparently in the SE universe planets are either glued in space or all orbits have equal cycles. (Only game I've seen with good orbiting physics is Malkari, but the game usually crashed within a couple of turns).

If we do assume that mines orbit with the solar system, then avoiding them should be simple, just move your ship out of the orbital plane by a few mines (up and over). Mines are in my opinion are a weapon system that only makes sense in a two dimensional universe. If they have propulsion, why not make them robotic ships that seek targets rather than waiting to be hit.

[Commander G]

I forgot to add. Take out mines and you take a little edge off of defense making the game more interesting. "Best defense is a good offense".