please help me balancing mines and making them more useful

[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.

[Karibu]

One thing to make mines better would be so, that when you sweep mines, there would be certain percentual for one sweeper component to sweep a mine. Also so, that bigger minefields are easier to sweep. For example:

1 sweeper component of level 5 has five shots. 1 shot has 10% basic chance to sweep a mine. In this case this component would have 5 shots of 10 percent chance each of them = 1-(0,9^5) = 0,41 mines/turn.

This number would apply in... lets say a minefield size of 50 mines. Now this percent grows linear up to 20% chance when the size of the minefield is 100 mines. This is logic, because more mines in one sector means they are closer each other.

So, lets say a ship, which has 20 components of level 5 minesweeper components goes into minefield of 100 mines. Then it sweeps like this:

1 component sweeps: 1-(0,8^5) = 0,67 mines/turn.
20 components sweeps approximately 13,4 mines/turn.

So, in this case you would need approximately 8 ships (20 components in each of them) to sweep every mine in the field in one turn. Yes, this is a quite many ships, but also mines would have a propability to hit one ship (not automatically, like now). The mine hit propability could be for example 50%. In this kind of minefields, enemy could pass it taking some damage, but it would not sweep all the mines at one sweep like now.

The sweeper components could also become more accurate in upper levels and mines would have better hit ratio when more developed. Sure these numbers I presented needs some refinement, but I think the idea would be great. Mines would be quite more usable and they would have this unpredictable element which they have in real life also. You rarely find all mines in one area in one day (or month, for that matter). You need to inspect the area very closely.

[ April 08, 2004, 18:16: Message edited by: Karibu ]

[spoon]

Originally posted by Karibu:
One thing to make mines better would be so, that when you sweep mines, there would be certain percentual for one sweeper component to sweep a mine. Also so, that bigger minefields are easier to sweep.

A good idea, but not something you can mod in SE4. You should post this suggestion in the "Suggestions for SE5" thread...