[ Suggestion ] Low attention mines

[chibiphoenix]

In low attention mines don't seem to work.

I was thinking... for sectors such as Faulty Logic, they could be treated as a hazard? In certain zones, ships just get periodic damage?

[Feloidea]

Honestly I don't like mines at all. The implementation in the game in general is just bad (and I mean, objectively bad). For the player they're essentially useless unless you're doing some cheesy station bombing with them because otherwise there's no even remotely consistent way to use them. In combat, absolutely useless. Out of combat as a zone denial, absolutely useless because there's no way to actually set up a minefield and they don't work OOS which defeats the entire purpose of passive zone denial in the first place. Just drop some lasertowers, they actually work and scale great with numbers.

It's like they were designed purely to be annoying for the player (looking at you, mines in locked crates!). That and the recovery missions where you just shoot the mines around a stranded ship (and even there the mines can be annoying to deal with if you don't have accurate weapons since they're so small you can easily miss them).


IF there was a way to automate the setup (and re-setup) of actual minefields via commands/behaviour AND they worked OOS they might be somewhat useful as a zone denial tool (though honestly they'd have to become even cheaper considering the absurd quantities you'd need for a halfway sensible minefield in a 3D environment and using anything but FF mines would be stupid as you'd constantly be blowing up neutral or allied ships). The only other way I see mines being useful is if there was a ship that could literally use them as ammunition and just yeet a stream of mines at for example a station to dismantle it.

Even as an environmental hazard they don't really work because how would you do that? Would it just auto-generate mines in a bubble around the player they'd have to manually dodge as you fly around? That work somewhat thematically IS but is really just a cosmetic thing to do because obviously you'd avoid all of them because otherwise you just explode and game over. And OOS, would it just randomly deal instances of damage to any ships within the hazardous area? That would just be a death sentence to any S and M ships flying in the sector/area, perhaps even L ships depending on how aggressive the RNG is at applying the damage and how much it deals.

[NightIntruder]

Low attention = no visual rendering, no bullet calculations, no collision detections. So yeah, mines won't work.

I'd rather see mines being improved in a following way:

1. Player defines the minefield the same way he defines a plot for a a station, as 3-dimensional box which becomes also a trigger zone when treated as "low attention".
2. Player defines mine density of such minefield and allocates minelayer which lays mines according to chosen pattern until the task is done, or tasked ship run outs of deployables.
3. OSS zone denial functionality of minefield bases on very low probability of hitting a mine based on mine density within chosen pattern and whether ship travelled through the minefield or not. The probability can rise if said ship:
[*] travels fast
[*] is engaged in combat
[*] is under-crewed,
[*] is seriously damaged (sensors malfunction simulation),
[*] its captain is inexperienced.
4. Once a minefield is discovered by a specific ship, his captain knows the zone and avoids it (if possible) or fly different route on the next occasion. Similar to "dangerous zone" exclusion in custom travel rules.
5. The knowledge about discovered minefields are shared within a fleet (or whole faction).
6. Minesweeper can be tasked to clear known minefields if they've been laid down by an enemy/hostile faction.
7. Laying minefields is treated as an hostile act towards a neutral faction under some specific circumstances (consideration for diplomacy expansion).
8. Laying mines whenever satellites, stations and ships are absent within specific range is considered as concealed, so cannot be attributed to the faction of which a ship had done it. Said absence has to be persistent throughout the whole process.
9. Yeah, mines need to be much cheaper weapon, too. I agree.

Obviously, this approach has some cons eg. the need of specialized vessel - a minelayer and a minesweeper. But it could be two-in-one type of a ship, could be an alternate version of already existed ship, too. There are more considerations to the whole approach, as well. Just my 2 cents.