proximity mines & mine sweepers

[Taera]

I've been thinking, wouldnt it be more logical if mine sweepers didnt actually destroy mines but allow ships to "see" those mines according to the number of sweepers?

What i mean, say you can sweep 100 mines. Once you enter a mined sector you go to a combat page in which mines with movement rate of, say 10, begin to charge on you to ram. and you can shoot them off. New use for PDC.

Wouldnt that be so much better?
Shouldnt be too hard to implement too...

[Fyron]

That would be cool! Send it to Aaron for SEV! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

[Skulky]

except, wouldn't that make sweepers obsolete? just bring along hella PDC

[Suicide Junkie]

Sweepers would become more like "mine detectors"

[Taera]

skulky - pdcs dont always hit... and besides if there's another fleet there with seekers and fighters and stuff it would be even harder...

and besides again PDC dont have to work against mines... other weapons could though

[Taera]

forgot to tell - mines you cant detect (insufficient sensory = not enough mine-sweepers) still auto-hit you.

[Spoo]

Once you enter a mined sector you go to a combat page in which mines with movement rate of, say 10, begin to charge on you to ram. and you can shoot them off. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I think you could mod something like this. Start with a fighter hull with a large afterburner ability, but no engines. Fill it with kamikazi warheads. You could even add cloaks. The only problems I can think of is getting them to attack when they're cloaked, and the fact that cloaked ships could slip past them. But, I suppose you could consider these "features".

[Taera]

thanks spoo but i meant for the standard mines in the game.

[rextorres]

This might be O.K. against the AI, but it probably would slow a PBW game way too much.

[Fyron]

Fighters get one strategic move even if they have no engines.

[PvK]

I had thought to add something like this to Proportions this summer, but I didn't have time to test it, and wasn't sure how well it would work in practice.

I was going to use a new type of drones to replace mines, and have their abilities go up from inert things with range 1 that you dump enough on a warp point and hope warping enemies randomly start adjacent, to things with speed and defenses and maybe seekers or weapons or slow system movement.

The main problem that I could think of though is there is no way to give any unit the ability to attack cloaked ships, without giving them full sensor abilities. This isn't really a problem though if you don't mind cloaked ships being able to slip past mines.

There are also some issues with regular drone launchers, but basically I think it's worth experimenting, if someone has time to do so.

PvK

[PvK]

Oh, actually, the worse difficulty is that you need to have something visible to your enemies in the sector where the "non-mine mines" are, or combat will never occur. So, you'd want some sort of visible mine or satellite or something, and then you'd have to have one on every minefield, and then rely on decoys for deception.

If we test it and it works really well, maybe we could convince MM to give us a new ability or order for attacking from cloak.

PvK