Mines... They actually get worse as you research further.

An example of why the Balance mod came to be.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Yeah, there are lots of little details like this that don't seem too well thought out....

Thank god for the modders...

OMG, am I whining????

Bad Java....

Javaslinger

This problem also exists with the current version of the Balance mod.

The problem is that there are no usable mine components of size 1.

Mines have armor slots, but no type of armor is kegak for them.

the mine size increase like the hull size increases of ship and base hulls could be read as some degree of miniaturization of the internal component and warheads are not the only thing one might want to put in a mine I could think of putting say stealth armour in a mine to make it harder to sweep or perhaps or something like that. At the moment the extra tonnage sounds useless but who knows what creative use could be made of it

Mines in the Balance Mod only increase in cloak level, not in size.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I can't figure out myself what the point of better mines is. A mine with 4 warheads is swept just as easily as a small one with 1 warhead, so it seems to me to be simpler just to build lots of small mines. By the time you have researched large mines anyway your opponent should have a few minesweepers in any substantial fleet making them useless. 100 large mines will do more damage than 100 small ones, yes, but they're swept just as quickly, so it's only of any use if your opponent is running around with unprotected fleets.

Edit: Hang on, how did I wander into a graveyard?

HeY KWOK!!!

I ws thinking about this a while ago and came to the conclusion that it'd be best to have mines steadily DECREASE in external size, IE cargo space used, while increasing in internal size, or space for warheads. Of course improved cloak level as well.

You can't have a unit take up less cargo space than its size.

Now that sector limits are being enforced, the benefit of larger mines is that they deliver more damage. For example, 100 large mines deals out more damage 100 small mines.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

It is still pretty useless. If you have large mines, your opponent likely has good mine sweepers. Since they know they only need to sweep max 100 mines, they can prepare for that. And 100 mines are easy to sweep, three mine sweeper components at high level cears the 10 mines in sector after sector.

Mines will be most effective early in the game, and decrease in efficiensy later.

I also have problem with mine warheads:

The mine warheads increase in price and damage way too fast and slow respectively. Because mines are so easy to sweep, there is no real reason to develope a minewarhead past first level, because you must have have lots of them. At least that is how it feels to me.

well you could always try not using them... and watch as you lose many fleets in flames...

True, but you can use mounts or Get_Empire_Tech_Level for miniaturization of warheads as you advance in mine tech, achieving the same effect...

I personally like the minefield system in PvK's original Proportions Mod for SE4... each mine unit represented an entire field of mines, and as such they were 10 times bigger, but the sector mine limit was reduced by a factor of 10 as well. You could put more onto a minefield unit than just warheads, too - every minefield required a minefield controller (akin to a drone computer core), so larger mines were beneficial not only in that you could cram more damage into a sector but also that you wouldn't need as many controllers per X amount of mine tonnage. You could also put stealth on the mines - it didn't come built-in, though I don't think you actually had to research cloaking to get mine stealth. Additionally, as you researched mine tech, not only did you get larger mines but you also got SMALLER mines. (level 1 mines I recall were 100kT; level 2 you could choose from 120kT or 90kT...) I forget what the purpose of those was, though - I think it was either that the smaller mines were drastically less expensive than the larger ones, or that the smaller mines got built-in stealth while the larger ones didn't...

Of course, the disadvantage to this system is that if there are only 10 mines max in a sector, that means that it takes only 10 frigates (or fighter groups!) in a row to "sweep" the mines by just running into them, no matter how much damage each individual mine does. I think Proportions made units immune to mines via the settings.txt options for doing so, though... I wish there were some way to force unit groups to NOT consolidate, though, so you couldn't have one "stealth mine" stealthing a whole group of unstealthed mines!

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

If your opponent uses standard mines, you can clear them simply by sending your biggest toughest dreadnoughts in first. Damage is done Shield>armor>internals in SE5. So a heavily shielded ship will simply shrug them off.

@Kwok/Ekolis: I'm gonna have to look at that hull expansion thread again to see if it can work with units.

Mine damage is reduced by shields in SE5? Interesting... they automatically skipped shields in SE4 (presumably since ships raised shields only for combat)...

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

It's only for Standard mines but yeah. I think this is because Mines are coded as part of combat. You initiate combat BEFORE the mines go off. The combat window doesn't popup unless there's something more than mines though.

Speaking of mine sweeping. How does a mine sweeper sweep a sector clear of mines when it dies 2 seconds after arriving through the warp point? There should be some sort of time required to sweep mines instead of it happening automatically as the ship enters the sector. I don't know about yours, but my sectors are pretty big.

On the note of damage, now the damage types have been changed, the special mine warheads are now worth while.

Yeah they kinda failed against shields before.