Mines and sweeping

Mine Sweeper components stack, so if you have 5 mine sweeper components that can sweep 5 mines each, your ship will sweep a total of 25 mines. As you reckoned, you'll need several Mine Sweepers to overcome your enemy's mine field.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Is mine sweeping or sending suicide ships more efficient? In one of my games where my opponent used extensive mines I just retrofitted some of my older frigates into heavily armoured ones and just smashed through.

Surely it depends largely on just how many mines your opponents has laid down ? If it's just 100 mines on a single warp point, then you will probably have no need to the mine sweepers after getting rid of the mines. But if your opponent has laid down MANY sets of 100 mines at MANY warp points, then surely a fleet of mine sweepers is the best course of action.

It depends on how much of a devious b*stard your opponent is. He sounds like this might not be the only set of mines you may need to defuse.

Long term you deffintly want to start building some minesweepers indeed. If he has a stack of 100 at your door, you can bet your ass he has more of those fields around. Why stop with 1 field?

Sending ships to just have the minefields explode is far more costly then buliding a couple of sweepers.
I think about 8 sweepers can take out nearly 150-200 mines? But that all depends on the configuration you use.

You can always retrofit those ships later if you don't need 'm any more.

~Myrath

Would depend on the mod I guess. In IRM, the different armour system and my habit of trying to max out armour means I hardly notice mines as I run into them. The AI (with extra custom bonuses) are practically guaranteed to have a mine field on all their planets (along with every unit imaginable) yet my fleets don't care about the mines (they do notice the drones though).

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Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

In a game against AI I did want to sweep some mines. So I built a minesweeper with three seperate "Sweeper" components. It should be able to sweep 3x 42 mines.

However, if I encounter a minefield, only 12 mines are swept. The rest remain, but strangely, do not cause any damage to the fleet (a couple of attack ships to obliterate the odd planet).

I am using SEV 1.35.

Can anybody guess what is happening or is this a bug?

I recently noticed also that my minesweeper didn't clear all the mines from a planet. Upon closer inspection I found that I had cleared all the mines on the first sweep. The planet had mines in cargo and it immediately launched all its mines in cargo as soon as I had swept the mines it had in orbit. ( not quite turn based as it launched them while it was still my turn )

To reduce the need for minesweeper ships, I'll place a minesweeper unit on each ship I build. The combined fleet will have decent sweeping abilites and adding a dedicated sweeper or two will complete the capability to sweep 100 mines.

For emergency sweeps, fighters in minimal configuration (no weapon or armor, 1 engine, cockpit) are efective. If launched in 1 fighter groups, becose mine eg. capable of doing 500 damage will spend itself on 10 structure fighter (these numbers are NOT real, i made them up).