Suggestion for mitigating mine spam

I like the idea of having mines cost a few resources. 10 credits and 5 metal/crystal. That would be nice

I like the idea of densly packed mines "snowballing" It seems like a pretty good way to balance mines. And it would be really fun to build a ton of them in one place and then watch them all explode. The only problem I can see is impementation. The mines are invulnerable until detected, so they can't be damaged by other mines. If you get rid of their invulnerablity you don't need to reveal them, you can just shoot them.

A mine limit seperate from the tactical slot limit might help. I've got a game right now where one gravity well has so many mines in it that I can't even see what is going on. I'm on a pretty good system (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 8800GTS 640MB video) and the system stops my computer dead. If my cap ships would at least sweep the mines it'd be one thing, but they try to fly through them to get at the planet instead and I can't micro it effectively with so many mines up.

The other thing mines really need is a scuttle/self destruct option. I was in a game as the TEC, and their was an Advent right next to me. From my scouts, I learned that they were building a massive fleet to attack one of my planets next to theirs, so I built a ton of mines on my planet. They jumped in, and 3/4s of their fleet was destoyed, and the rest was destroyed quickly after. With their whole fleet gone, I used my fleet to smash all their planets and defeat them. Now I have a planet that still has a ton of mines on it, but it is in no danger of getting attacked. It totally slows my computer down, and I can't get rid of them. You can't scuttle them.

I've scuttled mines as TEC plenty of times.  The problem is that it works just like scuttling ships or structures, and you can only scuttle one at a time.  With mines, they need to let you select and scuttle an entire group.  They should probably add some sort of confirmation dialog for that though.

The need for a limit on mines is obvious, but the ultimate solution will be different for each faction.  TEC will need a fairly high limit, but they can only place mines in their own grav wells, and they can't really use them in any offensive way, as they are built just like any other structure.  Vasari and Advent will require different limitations.

I think mines should be an option (just like pirates have become).  I was playing a game tonight and just had to stop because it was a medium sized map and eventually got to the point where attacking an enemy gravity well became impossible because there were so many mines.  I had a huge fleet and 6 scouts.  This wasn't even enough.  Almost my entire fleet got destroyed.  Then, because there are random ships in the area, my units weren't smart enough to figure out to attack the mines first because they are in the way.  So they bludgeon past them in order to get to the enemy ships and get destroyed.  It's was essentially a stalemate so I just stopped playing.  I'll try the other factions but unless this mine issue is dealt with soon, I won't be playing much of the beta.

The bottom line is mines need to be easier to destroy AND they need to be limited.

There's 3 things you can do with mine-like weapons in RTS:

• Free to construct
• Unlimited numbers
• Can move constructor around

1 or 2 of those at once make for payable games, if you have all 3 at once its MINESPAM time and it all gets hopelessly broken.

I like the idea that Mine Fields slow down friendlies that move past/through them. I also like the idea that mines in close proximity to other mines can cause collateral mine damage when they detonate. I would add the following idea:

Fighters and perhaps Bombers do not set off Mines, or at least they take far less damage, being more nimble and more able to evade sudden hazards. Think of Mines as being made to counter movement of larger starships. Fighters and perhaps Bombers - but especially Fighters - could excel at hunting & killing Mines, as long as they are detected by Scout vessels. This would also add more depth to Fighter units.

I could stomach a minor resource cost per mine layed, although I`ve never really liked that idea. If a cost were to be associated with Mines it definitely ought to be very small... something that has a minimal impact upon operations with a single Minelayer active, but which adds up with multiples operating (the point being not to prevent saturation Mining, but to prevent easy saturation Mining in short periods of time of multiple sectors). I`d definitely implement the previous suggestions first though before tagging a resource/credit cost to the issue.

It apparently doesn't work for me. I select a mine, and the little "scuttle" button is greyed out. The hotkey for scuttling doesn't work either.

The best solution I can think of is to just make it easier to kill mines.  Obviously it can't be too easy, or there won't be any point in building them in the first place, but I suspect that if mines were auto-targetted properly and revealed as long as the Scout is around rather than whatever it is they're doing now, that would solve quite a bit of the problem.

Or perhaps another solution would be to make the Vasari mines, at least, cost more antimatter.  I can't speak for the Advent--haven't tried them out yet in Entrenchment--but the Vasari's mines do seem a bit cheap.  Perhaps something like making the cruiser build a field of mines for a moderate antimatter sum would fix that?  It'd mean you can't place as many because 1) they'd be more expensive and 2) you can't cluster them as closely.

I also liked WarlokLord's idea of making fighters anti-mine, but I'm going to play devil's advocate here and point out that then you can just send one scout around and clear out the mines with zero danger to your actual fleet, assuming you have a few carriers.  Perhaps something along the lines of making mines more like fighters--lower health, easier to kill--would work well.

Then again, the TEC's mines seem fine as is, since they're fairly expensive.  Maybe with a proper targetting system the TEC mines could remain the way they are, and and Vasari's could be treated as fields for placing purposes.  I'll have to test the Advent's over the next few days and see what I think.

tl;dr version: Proper mine-targetting and placing Vasari mines as clusters might fix this.

Are you playing multiplayer or single?  Things don't always seem to work the same between them.

As for making mines an option, I don't agree with that.  It's not the same as pirates.  Pirates are more like a natural feature of the map that can affect all factions equally.  Mines are much more integral to how a faction fights.  Turning them off could really unbalance things.

I do think having some options, like a max number of mines per system and even a max number of starbases per faction might be workable, but I'd still be concerned about balance issues since each side fights differently, so the limitations could affect them in disproportionate ways.

SNOWBALLING? no I dont think this would be possible becuase ALL mines are Phased out. they must be in range of something to detect and must bet set to AUTO if you dfetect it, or can be manually detonated assuming a shiop is nearby. It doesn't even make sense that they would snowball if you think about it.

Cost per mine layed? well TEC has to pay per field already, and I really think that it is FAR too expensive, but I dont understand how you would quantify a cost for mines from a mine layer. I mean I usualyl just make a predesignated path for the layer to follow and let the thing go for the whole game until the system gets attacked. that could add up, and I'm not real thrilled about the prospect of money being drained like that.

No, honestly I think the fix is THIS, YOUR MINES IF DETONATED NEAR YOUR SHIPS OR YOUR BUILDING DAMAGE YOUR STUFF. that way if I'm offworld I can suicide into an NME mine field and destroy anything he has too close to the blast raduis of mines.

As far as clearing mine fields it is very easy for advent to clear using illusions from illuminators. I agree that fighters should excel at mine hunting, but only with the presense of a scout, but disagree about strike craft NOT being able to set them off with general proximity. If I want to suicide my strike craft into mines I should be able to do that more effectively than shoot them. They are expendable and free to create. ALSO I dont see why some strike craft shouls be able to simply fly right thru my mine field without taking any damage. This only encourages carrier spammers.

ALSO does it or does it not defeat the purpose of having phased out mines if everyone can see them without the scout ship being nearby. SEriosuly? come on give me SOMEthing that i can make double blind.

Turning mines off would be a good idea. Medium and large maps are becoming unplayable right now. So would creating a dedicated "kill mines" order, where ships ignore everything else and just kill mines if you tell them to. Something has to be done though, I'm having a blast playing Entrenchment right up until the Vasari mine count gets over 500 per system. Then it's just so slow that I can't do anything.

(I got desperate enough to try hitting the gravity well in question with a Kostura Cannon blast, but that didn't seem to help either. Maybe it should.)

Scouts should reveal a much larger area of mines. The should be a limit on the no. of mines deployed at one time in any given gravwell. Mines should NOT be visible without scouts.

In the case of the Vasari, Ruiners should have a limit as to how many mines they can deploy at a time. Kind of like how the Vulkoras can only deploy 3 seige platfroms at a time. If 1 extra mine is placed, then one mine will self-destruct.

I am still thinking that we just need more powerful antimine-options...

TEC mines taking up tactical slots makes sense.

How about vasari mines requiring support slots (might have the wrong name, I'm referring to your fleet total, with each group of mines costing as much as a frigate to deploy. The deploying ship is basically a mobile factory that can only generate mines.

Haven't played advent yet, so cannot venture a reasonable opinion.

Personally there must be a cap per system on mines.  At their current levels the game can get awfully slowed down when you have hundreds of mines.  I don't care what the backend story explanation is, just limit the amount of mines per system to allow the game to run smoothly.

It works now. I can scuttle them. I don't know why it wasn't working before.

I don't think thats it. Mines get to a point where it slows the game down to a crawl. Antimine options by themselves won't solve that.

Here's a save game where the AI has hundreds (I can't count exactly how many) mines at their home planet. Trying to invade it results in a slideshow. Ships will fly through and get destroyed unless you spam the stop command on them. It's incredibly not fun to try and play.

http://www.hiredgoons.ca/sins/crazy%20mine%20spam.save

It was because of my Flaming Ninjas, Kyroge.

Samurye.

We need a mine cap in addition to better ways to clear mines.  I still think giving the Cielo cruiser some upgrades to allow it the ability to direct fire from the fleet to destroy mines quicker and at greater range, along with scouts as spotters, would be a good solution for the TEC side.  Advent getting some ability for strikecraft to destroy mines quicker would be good too I think.  Not sure about Vasari yet.

This would make them utterly useless.  Nobody would give up a hangar or even a turret most likely for a few mines.  You'd have to completely change the tactical slot structure to deal with this.  A simple cap on mines per system would suffice.  Then you couldn't have people filling a whole grav well with mines and causing slowdown in the game.

I really agree with brad207. That's actually what I envisioned from the beginning (I don't have the beta, so I can't tell exactly) but the ideas he posed really make sense.

I just lost 15 fully upgraded Kodiac Cruisers trying to clear out a mine field of hundreds of them.  I've played three long games so far and lost two to memory leaks and now one to this.  I'm not playing it anymore until this gets fixed.  The memory leak issue might be caused simply by the thousands of mine units and I do mean thousands.

One really simple fix is to turn mines on and off.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

We're not looking for simple fixes though, and that wouldn't be a fix anyway.  They need to be tweaked and balanced, not turned off.

I've really only seen mine spamming being an issue with Vesari-- make their mines cost half as much as TEC for starters or something, the only way I can probably play right now is by disallowing Vesari in the game.

That aside, there HAS To be an easier way to kill a mine field.  I can NOT be expected to sit there and micro manage killing every mine around a planet.  Give a unit some sort of mine sweeping ability-- in WWII the Allies dealt with minefields at times by using a modified tank that spun many heavy chains from the front of it.  The mines would detonate when getting hit by the chains, allowing the tank to clear a path for troops.  We need something like this.