please help me balancing mines and making them more useful

[tesco samoa]

set the max units per space to 1000 or 5000

that will increase the power of the mine

[Alneyan]

A random idea concerning these mines. It would revolve around using the often unused damage types of Security Stations Only and Boarding Parties (or other such Damage Only types). You would have mines with two kind of warheads, one dedicated to destroying the "minesweepers" and the other ones able to take down the other parts of the ship. (Engines, weapons, internals...) "Minesweepers" would instead be armoured structures able to withstand a few hits from the anti-minesweepers warheads, and many other warheads hits.

Technically, we would have the following:
- Minesweepers: Armour ability, a rather important amount of hitpoints (depending on the strength of the warheads), Security Station and Boarding Parties value of 0. Engine and Weapon decoy abilities if needed.
- Anti-minesweeper warhead: A portion of the Minesweeper hitpoints, Security Station only damage. These warheads are here to destroy the defences of the ship, and not to deal any damage to the ship itself.
- Anti-engine, anti-weapons warheads, if wanted. Little damage done, enough to take down at least one such component per warhead, but you would need a lot of these to bypass the minesweepers.
- Anti-internal warheads, here to take down the inner parts of the vehicle. It would be a Boarding Parties only warhead, and these internal components would get the Boarding Parties ability as well. (O as a value)

The drawbacks of this are the following:
- Your ship will be protected by some armour from these minesweepers, but you might choose to add some maluses to reduce their use as an armour component.
- More of a problem, I am not sure if these special damage types do bypass the armour, besides the Engines only damage. Using a leaky armour system should prevent this from being a problem however.
- Above all, you cannot use the vanilla system of Boarders/Security Stations, as they would get targetted by these mines. It may be possible to work around this however, perhaps by using some of the other less used abilities. (If Only Resupply Depots and Only Spaceports worked on components, they would be perfect candidates for these dummy abilities. I wonder if it would work though)

I am not sure if I made much sense, as this idea just stroke me and so it is only a rough suggestion for now. Still, if you find any interest in this complicated scheme, or any other fail besides the ones above, feel free to point these out.


More on topic, I guess it also depends on the scale of your mod. Would you like long battles, where you cannot possibly hope to win the day in a single assault? Should it be possible to launch several offensives at once, or should a given Empire only focus on a single one unless it has a *lot* of resources available for numerous minesweepers?

Obviously, strengthening mines will have an impact on how the game will be played, since mines are mainly used as deterrents in the vanilla game. It isn't common for an Empire to gamble and go on the offensive without enough sweepers, and so mines can seldom destroy many ships. Still, they can delay this offensive if the opponent things they will be present. (You don't actually have to use mines in the vanilla game, just make *them* think you are using them. Easier said than done obviously. )

However, increasing the maximum limit could have the side effect of making attacks much less common, since you could not know what size of minefields you could expect. Perhaps removing the cloaking ability of these mines would help to check the numbers of warheads waiting for you at the other side of this wormhole, as there would be quite a difference between losing a few ships to rogue mines, and a whole battlefleet of a hundred warships, bringing the wrath of the Righteous Empire against its perfidious foes and... Erh, I should stop raving.

[Ragnarok-X]

Alneyan,
thanks for extensive post, i like the idea, just one problem:

Since im using the devnull mod as the base for my own mod, the leaky armor system is not implented.

I need to know, do WARHEADS with damage types engine only and weapons only IGNORE components with the armor ability or does armor ability components get destroyed first even when hit by mines ?!?

I guess i will have to add leaky armor system though

[Suicide Junkie]

"Only X" damage types all skip armor.
Unless the armor has ability X, of course.

A big question is whether it will get hit first of those components with ability X.

There is also a problem with adding boarding party ability to lots of components, in that they'll all be destroyed during offensive OR defensive capture attempts.

[ April 08, 2004, 14:37: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Alneyan]

Incidentally, are stronger components much more likely to be hit than ones with less hitpoints when it comes to the special damage types? We could even have a Leaky "Minesweeper" by going this way. (Which would make sense, as minesweeping cannot possibly work all the time, can it?)

Thanks for pointing out this problem with the boarding ability SJ. Unfortunately, it doesn't leave many other decoy abilities besides these two "Resupply Base Only" and "Spacesport Only". I will give these a try to see if they would work on ships.

As they do not seem to work for ships (which makes sense, but I was daydreaming), a workaround would be needed, such as making up a very good reason for the sudden destruction of these minesweepers once the ship Boards another/is boarded. Either that, or using another decoy ability, such as the Shield Generator Only if you do not plan on using it.

However, as special damage do *not* stack, will a special weapon try to take down a vulnerable component while the others cannot be destroyed? Imagine four sturdy engines with 100 hitpoints, and a much weaker one with only 10 hitpoints. Would a Ionic Disperser with 50 damage destroy the weak one, or would it target the bigger ones, even if it has no hope of breaking them? It might be a solution if it is the former, albeit a very rough one.

[ April 08, 2004, 15:26: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[Spoo]

You could give the minesweeper componets the only X allowed per ship ability. If you could have only 1 stock minesweeper V on a ship, then it would take at least 20 ships to clear a stock mine field. And/or you could make the sweeper componet huge (say 200kt), so that you would need to build a large number of specialty mine sweepers. The problem now, IMHO is that you can sweep a full minefield with just one or two speciality ships.

[Suicide Junkie]

However, as special damage do *not* stack, will a special weapon try to take down a vulnerable component while the others cannot be destroyed?

Actually, that's a good question...

For regular damage, if the mine dosen't destroy a component, it was changed so that the damage stacks with the next warhead.
That fix may work for Only X damage types, at least for mines.