Improving Mine tech concept

[Emperor's Child]

I was looking over the sweet mod data files today and had an idea that may add a little interesting twist with mines I’d thought I’d share with y’all.

Right now the way mines work is that they just can’t be found (or in the case of the sweet mod, they can only be seen after you reach a certain level of scanners).

That got me to thinking: Wouldn’t it make sense that as your scanner technology improved, their ability to detect cloaked objects should also improve, and the mines themselves should also improve with their technology.

My general concept is this:
Change the mine defined in vehicle size so that it does not have any inherent cloaking capability.

Next you would add either a mod or a component that does have this cloaking capability, and define a series of them that improve the cloaking capability as the mine technology improves.

Minor logistical consideration is that if you made this a component, you would have to adjust the size of the standard mine hull size to accommodate it without giving up any warhead space.

Also, you would want to have the highest level of mine technology just able to defeat the highest level of scanner technology. So, in a game with stock levels of scanners and mines, you could adjust the mines so that level 1 mine technology would give you level 2 EM cloaking capability, level 2 mine tech gives you level 3 cloaks, and so on.

How this would play out is that as you advanced in scanner technology, you will be able to detect minefields that have older mines with less advanced cloaks.

I think that this would not be too hard to do and would not be unbalancing. It would make more advanced races much less likely to run into a minefield, giving them an advantage, but not in a way that would unbalance the game.

Thoughts?

[Fyron]

I like this concept. It is currently implemented in Adamant Mod, and I think it works well. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Emperor's Child]

Great minds think alike!

[Suicide Junkie]

P&N had some of the heaviest mines be detectable with gravitic sensors.

The biggest problem with mines, though, is the all-or-nothing-ness of it:
Either you bring enough sweepers to clear any field with no damage, or you forget/lack tech and your fleet gets vaporized.

Tossing minesweepers in the trash, and then reducing mine warhead damage and/or mines-per-sector limits is a better way to go.
Thusly, when you place mines, they:
- WILL do some damage
- WON'T wipe out decent sized fleets
- WILL slow those fleets down while they repair the damage.

You can even set things up such that players will have to place their mines not just stacked way up on the warppoints, but spread across a number of sectors around the warppoints and planets.

The armored fleet with repair ships will still get through, but they will be slowed down to a sector or two per turn while they plow through your mined territory.

[Fyron]

It is also fun to include mine warheads with a variety of special damage types. Only shield generators, only engines, etc.

[rdouglass]

Imperator Fyron said:
It is also fun to include mine warheads with a variety of special damage types. Only shield generators, only engines, etc.



IIRC the one thing I didn't like about special damage mines is that for instance, a stack of 100 engine damaging mine can be 'cleared' by a measley frigate. Frigate enters mine field, first mine detonates. Mine damages engines but ships till remains. Second mine detonates, ship still remains. Third mine detonates, etc. etc. upt o all 100 mines. Sure the engines on the frigate are gone but so is the minefield.

Now if it could be 'fixed' so that 1 ship detonates ONLY 1 (or even like a max of 5 mines) then these specialty mines could be a lot more useful. But also, like many things in the game, that is a 'hard code' issue and not 'fixable' by a mod.

</$.02>

[Suicide Junkie]

Just mix some normal warheads in with the mines.

Problem solved http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Fyron]

I believe that should no longer be a problem in 1.91. It was fixed when the mine algorithms were changed to prevent a high structure component, such as a colony module, from causing all mine warheads that did not do enough damage in one hit to destroy it to not detonate. If no engines are left, no engine-damaging mines should detonate. I have no idea what happens if you mix warheads on the same mine unit, however.

[Hunpecked]

Suicide Junkie writes:

"You can even set things up such that players will have to place their mines not just stacked way up on the warppoints, but spread across a number of sectors around the warppoints and planets."

The whole problem with the concept of "mines" in a space game is

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. -- HHGTTG

Now with enough mental gymnastics you might be able to rationalize effective minefields around "choke points" like warp points or planets, but in interplanetary space, forget it.

[douglas]

If you redefine "mine" as "prelaunched missile", it all depends on how good its sensors are, how fast it can move, how stealthy it is, and how far away it can be and still do damage. A really big one-shot laser powered by a bomb, with good sensors, stealthing, and engines could be a major hazard even in space.

[Suicide Junkie]

Exactly, though.

It would be silly to place those mines randomly, but if you lay them two or three sectors deep around your warppoints and/or planets, the enemy will hit some on their way through. A small percentage of the total to be sure, but that is a good thing.

[Phoenix-D]

Hunpecked said:
Now with enough mental gymnastics you might be able to rationalize effective minefields around "choke points" like warp points or planets, but in interplanetary space, forget it.



Assuming they're like terrestrial mines. Given that they have IFF, I doubt they are.

What a lot of SF does is make "mines" basiclly missile warheads attached to senstive passive sensors and a short-burn missile engine. They detect a ship, wait until its at its closest point, and then intercept it.

[CovertJaguar]

In Adamant its not exactly easy to amass enough minesweepers to deal with really large fields. Even at a fairly high tech level your minesweeper ships can only sweep about 6-8 mines per ship. With a 100 mine maximum that's about fifteen minesweepers, a small fleet in and of its self. That can be a significant investment even for a large empire.

[Hunpecked]

Re: Mines as missiles or one-shot beams.

Correct, a "mine" in SE IV would have to be something like that to have any hope of damaging even something as "big" as a multi-megaton vessel. Now consider the distance over which the "mine" would have to act:

Assume a solar system with diameter 39 HAU (HAU is a "Hunpecked Astronomical Unit" equal to 100 million miles); this is about the orbit of Uranus in the Sol system. SE IV displays a star system on a 13x13 grid, so each side of each square is 3 HAU.

Assuming movement is limited to a distance 1.5 HAU "above" and "below" the mean plane of the planetary orbits, a ship/fleet would traverse a series of "space cubes" 3 HAU thick by 3 HAU long and 3 HAU wide. Now divide each cube into 100 columns (10x10) with a square cross-section (mines are limited to 100 per cube, so each column must have a mine to guarantee one "hit" on a ship passing down the column). A column is 0.3 HAU on a side, with a center-to-edge distance of 0.15 HAU or 15 million miles; this is the mine's minimum radius of action. Actually, the columns should be circular in cross-section, which means a mine's target radius would have to increase to overlap its neighbor's.

Of course in SE IV a fleet always hits a minefield, no matter how sparse, and it hits every mine until either the ships or the mines are gone. This means a mine's radius of action is at least half a cube side, or 150 million miles (in this example, anyway).

However, this doesn't translate to the battle map, where a mine would immediately "hit" an enemy ship (with better-than-Talisman accuracy) when dropped. Thus SE IV contradicts itself, which isn't surprising when one tries to make the terrestrial "mine" concept work in space (which is REALLY REALLY big). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

In reality, the space analogue of a terrestrial mine is a ship. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Suicide Junkie]

The combat map uses a totally different time scale.
And these are very much not like terrestrial mines.

Plus it is all abstracted.

Mines could perhaps be made to work like in SF. You'd probably be happier, and I suspect most people would be happier except when defending with mines http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
...Ships flying around in combat, getting hit by mines as they launch missiles and blast away with DUCs. Could be quite nifty. Maybe for SE 5 or 6

[Kana]

I really think SJ's concept is intriguing...mines as a nusance/net, more than and end all destructive problem. I guess with some damage, and other damage qualities (crew, engines, weapons), this would make mines an interesting strategic problem. I guess a percentage of mine interception will not be part of SEV...I don't remember seeing it on the list...maybe some of the beta testers can mention it to aaron...

Kana

[Phoenix-D]

"This means a mine's radius of action is at least half a cube side, or 150 million miles (in this example, anyway)."

Given that the mines are 10 KILOTONS in size..that's not entirely unreasonable. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Of course its all quite abstracted. I can imagine a SE623622565616 where everything is simulated in total detail.

I can also imagine that requring more computer power than exists on the planet today to compete the movement of one ship. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
Tossing minesweepers in the trash, and then reducing mine warhead damage and/or mines-per-sector limits is a better way to go.


I considered doing this for Fantasy Empires (mines were various forms of angry wasps), but...


The armored fleet with repair ships will still get through, but they will be slowed down to a sector or two per turn while they plow through your mined territory.


... I thought this would be too prevalent and too annoying of a tactic. In games with larger maps, several systems would probably end up having every sector mined, and trudging through such a system would be an exercise in frustration. If there was a way in simultaneous games to tell your fleets to "drop damaged ships" as they progressed, then maybe this approach would work better.

Come to think of it, though, maybe if you made mines really, really expensive. Like 20k minerals per mine. That might discourage mining everywhere just because you can.

[tesco samoa]

problem with mines is that they hit cloaked ships which sucks... So this can ruin elaborate cloaking systems...

I really wish mines could not hit cloaked ships...or that mines had a level of cloaked ships they could detect and hit....

[spoon]

I really wish mines could not hit cloaked ships...or that mines had a level of cloaked ships they could detect and hit....


That would be cool. Can somebody suggest it for SE5 if mines work the same way...

[Hunpecked]

Suicide Junkie writes:

"The combat map uses a totally different time scale."

Yes, a scale that nevertheless allows for mines to be launched, detonated, and swept.

"And these are very much not like terrestrial mines."

Amen.

"Plus it is all abstracted."

No argument there. It's just that the abstraction is wrong. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Phoenix-D writes:

"Given that the mines are 10 KILOTONS in size..that's not entirely unreasonable." [range of 150 million miles]

OK. I scatter my mines along the orbit of Mars and I've covered all 4 of Sol's inner planets plus most of the asteroids. In battle, my 10 kt mines greatly outrange my 60 kt heavy ship mount APBs, and they NEVER miss (despite lacking the 10 kt Combat Sensors my primitive ships require to hit at long range). Plus, as tesco samoa points out, my undetectable mines can "see" and hit cloaked ships before the rest of my forces have the tech to even detect them.

As I implied in my earlier post, such contradictions are reduced (but not eliminated) if mine effectiveness is limited ONLY to choke points. In fact, some day when I have more experience with Space Empires I may try creating a mod with NO mines; besides increasing "realism" it should help the AIs against human players.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main thing is not to get too wrapped up in "How does it work".
The only important thing is "How does it play".

Stock mines are fairly sucky.
Leaky minefields are fun http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[dmm]

Maybe mines, being only 10 Ktons and containing no living beings, can travel via super-trans-warp drive or something like that. Or maybe they are placed in some sort of parallel universe where distances are different.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/confused.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/stupid.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Hunpecked]

Ah, that explains it. Thanks. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif

[El_Phil]

Once again SJ proves his 'King of Leaky' credentials! I'm expecting him to develop 'Leaky research' any time soon.

[Suicide Junkie]

Leaky research would be a great feature for SE5.

[tesco samoa]

well that its... i am going to toy with the idea of making mines an advanced research trait that costs 500 or 750 points to get access to mines and all layers and sweepers...

That should limit mines in games....