Makes Minefields Great Again

[ramius3443]

I was inspired to come up with this idea after reading through the latest doomstack thread, and saw one of the suggestions being using ultra lethal minefields attached to fortresses to deter large fleet concentrations.

My idea is not intended however to end or fix doomstacks, rather it is to bring minefields in line with their equivalent Sci-fi counterparts (think the Astroid Belt in Empire Strikes Back, or the minefield the Federation put up around Deep Space Nine) and at least try to make defensive strategems viable.

Without further ado:

Practical details

1. Detach minefields from stations all together, and establish them as independent entities in their own right.​

Reasoning: stations are hideously expensive and unworkable, and it is too easy to guess where minefields might lurk if they remain attached. The biggest problem however is that the mandatory gaps between stations prevent contiguous minefields and true area denial.

2. Make minefields deadlier. MUCH DEADLIER. I am not proposing one-shoting BBs here, however entering a minefield should incur significant damages to all ships (damage reduced by evasion). Capital ships without escorts (see #5) should avoid them like the plague. Ideally, more ships more damage.​

Reasoning: Currently minefields arn't feared and are just a minor nuisance. In order to make it worth building them, they should present a real and credible threat to fleets so as to encourage minesweeping or concerted efforts to evade them by all but the most OP fleets.

3. These minefields should: A. Be stealthed until discovered (like now), B. Be configurable to allow mines to be placed in spheres or bands, C. Should be allowed adjacency.​

Reasoning: the mainpoint here is to allow players to design their minefields to their strategic preferences, and be allowed to cover as much territory as they can afford to. Stealth for the obvious reason that if the enemy can see them, they will go around.

4. Mines shall damage ALL ships that pass through them, friendly, neutral, enemy, or monster. No exceptions. Hopefully pathfinding can be improved so that the AI doesn't run into clearly visible and avoidable minefields just because a transport drew them into battle.​

Reasoning: This and cost will ultimately be what limits minefield spam. Sure, block off your capital system if you wish, but nothing will get in or out. This also will have the neat effect of forcing the player to establish cooridors to allow their ships passage. An observant enemy player can see this and guide his ships through the gaps, thus negating all the expenditures. On the other hand, this also allows for "No man's land" systems to emerge, which would be especially interesting for Hyperlane games.

5. Destroyers and maybe corvettes can equip weapons and modules to detect and clear out minefields. These should be short range implements, and rather slow too. Alternatively PD weapons can be subbed in for this purpose.​

Reasoning: It would be an utterly broken system if minefields just sat there in perpetuity and couldn't be disposed of. This gives an attack ample ability to break through, but this will take awhile and be very visible to the defenders, allowing reserves and such to be constructed or mobilized.




Overall Goals

It is hoped that minefields will ultimately enable defensive strategies to work, by giving the defender the ability to trade resources and space for time allowing fleets to be repaired, refitted, and rebuilt to face the oncoming enemy. This also has the effect of creating more militarized border systems (to help stall major invasions), and hopefully creating something akin to a front line: as the attacker can only safely advance as far as they've cleared up the mines. Any other actions would be risky but doable, except for mass invasions of capital systems on day 1 of a war, which is stupid anyway. Large enough power disparities will still allow the attacker to just simply overwhelm the minefields or run the gauntlet, however evenly matched total wars will drag on for awhile.

There are drawbacks to this system: a fine balance will have to be struck on how much minefields should cost, to prevent massive spam (every system a fortified system) but still allowing strategic placements to be viable (if it was only economic to build a couple minefields in an important system, they would be far too easy to evade.) Another major problem will be AI pathfinding: how to prevent ships from just running into them willy nilly and blowing themselves apart will be a challenge both for your own fleets (unless you obsessively micromanage flight paths) and the AI, who in all likelyhood would probably need to be given massive damage resistance in minefields to prevent the player from laughably abusing it.


Thoughts?

 

[Chilled Legumes]

I like the idea of minefields, but i think you're underestimating how badly the AI would react to it. The pathfinding system wouldn't be too difficult, but i'd bet anything the end result would either look like the AI is incompetent (running their fleets into minefields all the time), or omniscient (rarely doing it, sweeping all mines super effectively, etc), either making minefields OP, or useless. AI tends to be kind of black and white in these types of situations.

With that said, I feel like space-based games like stellaris and homeworld have always suffered from the lack of terrain. Anything that would encourage the creation of front-lines, or something similar, to spice up the wars is good in my books, and at least worth looking into.

 

[Secret Master]

2. Make minefields deadlier. MUCH DEADLIER.

I'm not even sure minefields are causing damage at all.

I posted a thread a while back, because I was wondering where in the Hell the damage was listed in combat results. It's not listed anywhere as far as I can tell.

If we had more data on them, we could make a determination on what they are actually doing right now.

 

[Wyrm]

Besides minefields not causing much damage, they vanish into thin air (space?) if the station they're surrounding is destroyed.

 

[Jorlem]

It is hoped that minefields will ultimately enable defensive strategies to work, by giving the defender the ability to trade resources and space for time allowing fleets to be repaired, refitted, and rebuilt to face the oncoming enemy. This also has the effect of creating more militarized border systems (to help stall major invasions), and hopefully creating something akin to a front line: as the attacker can only safely advance as far as they've cleared up the mines. Any other actions would be risky but doable, except for mass invasions of capital systems on day 1 of a war, which is stupid anyway. Large enough power disparities will still allow the attacker to just simply overwhelm the minefields or run the gauntlet, however evenly matched total wars will drag on for awhile.

How would this deal with non-hyperlane empires? Wormhole and warp can just skip right past your border systems to your core worlds.

 

[aea]

Do minefields as they're set up now even make sense? Space is absolutely massive. The chance of running into a mine should be almost zero unless they are active mines which have guidance and targeting, and those should be easy enough to identify from enormous distances and destroy or evade. Unless of course they happen to be placed on a subspace snare.

The one possibility I can envision is mines being used to supplement a fleet (or station) by trying to overwhelm the attacker's point defense with swarms of cheap mines coming from every direction. They should be absolutely useless unless paired with a defensive fleet, serving as force multiplier, but not an area denial tool.

So when I think of "space mine" I'm actually thinking more of a dormant missile floating in space that becomes activated when it has a target.

Another possibility is to have "stealth" mines set up around a planet which would serve as a major hindrance to landing armies, possibility requiring dedicated mine-sweeping in space on top of destroying planetary fortifications. Better yet, they could remain hidden even when a planet is taken (but not ceded in peace negotiations), denying the attacker the ability to build any space-based infrastructure.

 

[Wyrm]

I think about the mines that exist in the X-wing games that are basically a small laser-cannon floating in space, targeting anything that gets in range.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Minefields only make sense if you know where the enemy is coming from. In this game you generally don't for non-hyperlanes outside the earliest phase of the game because jump ranges are long enough that quite a lot of stars and therefore entry vectors are in range.

 

[Dalinski]

Minefield would be so much fun.

Perhaps a defence/attack/utility module is used for the sweeping and a Cruiser based module used to lay them. Perhaps they could have a density and give players and the AI the option to barrel through them any way which is another way to clear them

Minefields could also do different types of damage, speed reduction, ship disablement, reduced range.

Perhaps they can increase threat as they block galactic trades lanes.

 

[Dalinski]

With that said, I feel like space-based games like stellaris and homeworld have always suffered from the lack of terrain. Anything that would encourage the creation of front-lines, or something similar, to spice up the wars is good in my books, and at least worth looking into.

Thats pretty much it, the fact that it could create terrain in space makes it all the more appealing.