| Author |
Mines |
Fluttershy
Fleet Admiral
Joined: September 24, 2011
Posts: 778
From: Fluttershy
|  Posted: 2012-04-20 01:48
There's like one ship in the whole game that uses mines to any effect, the UGTO command dread.
In general, mines seem to be painfully useless.
I took a Scarab, dropped a full salvo of them in the path of a supply ship.
It brought them to about 70% armor, and no hull damage.
Tried setting up mine fields around commonly used paths, it barely scratches the ships that plow through it.
Tried setting up mines with friendly ships enclosed, barely did a thing to attackers, most flew around them, even though i spread them out.
Trying to use mines in combat usually just gets your aft armor blown off.
I'd like to hear your mine-laying success stories, because the performance I've witnessed so far is pretty uninspiring.
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Kenny_Naboo
Marshal
Pitch Black
Joined: January 11, 2010
Posts: 3823
From: LobsterTown
| Posted: 2012-04-20 02:30
The Scarab's mines were nerfed due to it becoming too effective in the hands of some pilots. Back in 1.5x, a bunch of Scarab pilots worked in conjunction with Kluth dreads and brought many Uggie dreads and stations down.
Case in point, my old Scarab, with 5 mines dispensers (now there're 4), and 8 x AWM could knock off 30% armor from a UGTO station in one salvo. When we laid 3 salvos at the other end of a gate, any enemy cruiser that went through it usually found itself either dead or near death.
Any post battle damaged dread or station would be instagibbed by those mines.
As a result, some players QQ'ed about it.
... and got their way.
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DiepLuc
Chief Marshal
Joined: March 23, 2010
Posts: 1187
| Posted: 2012-04-20 05:24
Compare with Brood and Command Carrier, Command Dread has too many projectile weapon, and 3 mines are not suit it.
I would love if mines are yellow objects, like resource, so that PD won't automatically destroy them. That will make mines useful.
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Gejaheline
Fleet Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 19, 2005
Posts: 1127
From: UGTO MUNIN HQ, Mars
| Posted: 2012-04-20 06:52
Got to admit, mines could use some love.
It's VERY tricky to get them right, though.
The first factor is the medium that DS operates in.
Mines are generally used to shape the battlefield, usually in a defensive manner. They're deployed to slow the enemy advance across a defended area, to focus the enemy into choke points, and reduce strength and morale through random attrition. Naval mines are similarly deployed to restrict enemy movement, particularly when entering or leaving ports and harbours. The main benefits of mining is not the damage inflicted per se (although a single mine will typically destroy or cripple a ship, vehicle, or person) but the effort required by the enemy to remove or avoid the mines. For example, mining a port might only sink a single ship, but the port may be entirely shut down while its approaches are swept. On land, the enemy may know of an enemy minefield in front of their defensive positions and thus be discouraged from attacking since a defended minefield cannot be easily swept and charging headlong would result in excessive casualties.
We're in space. There are no choke points, no varying terrain types, and no high ground. There aren't really any defensive positions to defend with mines, and there are no ports with limited access areas that can be easily mined. While DS is two-dimensional and thus makes mining slightly more feasible, it's only really practical to mine something effectively by enclosing it in a big circle of mines.
This leads onto the second issue; quantity and dispersion.
Even on land and sea, it takes a lot of effort and resources to lay a practical minefield. Truly huge numbers of mines are required to cover significant areas, and they must be evenly spread across the mined area.
DS minelaying ships lay rather small numbers of mines; if memory serves the UGTO Command Dreadnought has three minelayers which can each drop, what, eight mines each per salvo? They're also limited to dropping two salvoes at any given time, which gives you 48 mines in a relatively concentrated pattern. As anyone who has tried to lay a minefield with these will attest to, you usually end up with six concentrated strips of mines at your disposal which isn't really enough to surround anything more than your own ship.
Next point: Clearance.
Even if you manage to get enough people together to mine, say, a gate, it's laughably easy to clear away mines. They don't have any electronic warfare and they're usually visible from a long way off, making it a relatively simple matter to turn on your point defences and have them explode from a long way off. Since the AI ALWAYS has all of its beams set to PD, they're particularly adept at sweeping mines. Since I mentioned earlier that the difficulty of sweeping mines is one reason why they're a viable device in real life, this severely hampers their roles in both damage-dealing and area-denial roles. If you know an area is mined in DS, you just switch on your PD and plough straight through.
Finally, damage.
This is one of the nastier parts of balancing mines, and it has rather a lot of similarities with some issues with missile damage.
Essentially, mines work in real life because hitting just one mine will most likely destroy or cripple an enemy unit. You can gamble on getting lucky and not hitting one, but you're dead if you do hit one so you have to stop and sweep them if you don't want half your force to die before reaching the enemy. This also lets you scatter mines more thinly and cover a larger area because you don't need to hit one unit multiple times before it's out of action.
The concept of a one-hit kill weapon in DS, however, isn't entirely desirable.
On the one hand, the odds of hitting a mine combined with how easy it is to sweep them necessitates, just like with missiles, that each individual mine SHOULD do huge amounts of damage just to be viable weapons.
On the other hand, one-shot weapons you never see or dodge before you explode and lose prestige will REALLY annoy players. Similarly, you get the supremely cheesy situation where people will simply drop mines directly on top of you and you can't do anything about it because they can't be shot down before they deploy their payload. This tends to penalise smaller ships, because you can't really dodge an explosion and small ships will be auto-killed by anything that is designed to really hurt big ships.
So, ideas. Some of these could probably (and should be) combined.
Scattered deployment. When deployed, mines are given a fairly high velocity in a random direction (or a pre-determined pattern). They slowly decelerate until stationary, producing a more scattered field that covers more area and won't be detonated all in one go if a dreadnought runs into them. This would allow players to create a hazardous area without essentially having to lay a string of mines in a line right in front of an incoming enemy.
Proximity activation. Mines have a big explosion and detonate when enemy ships are nearby instead of when you run into them. Would make them harder to PD but would also be really horrible to poor scouts. I would combine this with some of the more exotic ideas below.
Homing mines. In order to increase the kill-zone of a given mine, mines would slowly home in on the closest target within a few hundred GU. Combined with proximity activation this would make larger ships significantly more vulnerable to mines since their giant hitboxes would attract more mines. Smaller ships would have less trouble because they could outrun the mines and won't attract so many at once, although over time they would find themselves in the middle of a shrinking ring of mines if they weren't careful.
Directed warheads. Instead of exploding, mines would consist of a one-shot weapon system that is fired at the first target to come within its activation radius. This would allow minelayers to "tune" their mines for specific targets by choosing which type of warhead is fired. A big, slow, WTFPWN torpedo could deal with large ships, while a lighter beam weapon or cannon could be used for hurting smaller ships. I am in favour of this one particularly because it allows smaller ships to make use of their survival mechanism of evasion when faced with anti-dread weapons, instead of just exploding in an orgy of area-of-effect attacks.
Stealth mines. While this should be standard to an extent, I'm not hugely in favour of mines that can't be detected without more than one or two ECCMs because of the sheer cheese value in being one-shotted by something you never saw. If mines were particularly stealthy, their damage output would likely have to be nerfed to the point where the effort spent deploying them would be worth less than the effort you would spend just shooting at the enemy. Of course, this sucks from the point of view of making mine sweeping at all difficult (unless you're using nothing but EADs with no ewar, in which case you all deserve to be mined until you cry).
Cluster mines. Essentially, each diamond represents several mines, so they can be PD'd multiple times before they're destroyed and they can detonate multiple times against enemy targets.
Mine dispenser. Instead of laying mines, the minelayer deploys a PD-able device that creates an area-of-effect damage effect around it that represents the minefield it's spewing out. Destroying the dispenser destroys the entire field. Like planetary defences, it would have different effects against multiple ships of different sizes.
Feel free to discuss, but categorically no promises; the devs have a lot on their plate and minelayers probably aren't that high a priority.
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Blackjack [DBL]
Grand Admiral
Faster than Light
Joined: February 25, 2011
Posts: 344
From: The land of venomous reptiles.
| Posted: 2012-04-20 08:01
Wasn't the mine spawner idea discussed but put on a backburner? Currently the mines disappear after a certain amount of time, a more permanent dispenser would make placement in more strategic locations possible.
IF we're planning to stop dumping in the nose, we could make it need some time before there's enough mines to be a threat.
[ This Message was edited by: Loyalty *TO* on 2012-04-20 08:07 ]
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Pantheon
Marshal
Palestar
Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 1789
| Posted: 2012-04-20 08:32
The dev team have plans to fix mines - but its some ways down the list, and in no way finalised, so you'll have to wait I'm affraid.
You've also brought this up before, Flutter.
Locking thread.
[ This Message was edited by: Pantheon on 2012-04-20 09:16 ]
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