Mines made this game unplayable.

You COULD use scouts.. they make mine clearing an easy job. just send an scount to discover the mines and some long range ships to kill mines

Glass is half full attitude, I like that - however, I agree entirely with the OP, since installing the beta Entrenchment, I hardly play the game now, because the sad fact is, for me at least (and quite a few others I suspect), that over-spawning of mines has rendered the game no fun to play.

Scout ships are fine, but in order to combat the over-spawning of mines, you need at least 50% of your fleet on minesweeper duty - and spending most of your time waiting for the mines to be neutralised is not my idea of fun - but, each to their own.....

Never mind, been having fun on Left 4 Dead until this game is fixed.

i must be missing something, because whether i send scouts to them or not and can see them, i am not able to target and fire on them with any ship I have.  And they all say "invulnerable".   The only way I seem to be able to destroy them is to make ships pass over them and blow themselves up lol

never mind... i figured it out

I suggest that you should not play against Advent or Vasari AI. Only play against TEC because they don't spam mines.

I agree to a point. The game is not unplayable, but there should be a dedicated minesweeping unit. The only problem balance wise I've had with mines is that I take 3 drone hosts completely equipped with mines, fly up to a starbase (which isn't as suicide as it seems), and undock all of my mine layers. As soon as my mines are out they instantly explode and leave the Star base with less than 100 hull left. It's also extremely easy to use that technique on capital ships, only you can lay the mines and lure them in instead of running up.

I really like the concept of mines, because it stops you from just rushing from system to system. However the mechanic how you deploy mines and how are able to clear them out should have a work out.

My idea of laying mines is not having the ship autocast it every 5 secs, but rather mark a certain area in the gravity well and have it lay an impassable dense minefield.

Clearing out mines is so difficult because the scouts have such a short detection radius and you have to micro manage alot to clear out mines.  Usually i have carrier group on the edge of the gravity well hold position. Then i move the scouts manually close to the mines. As the scouts pull the mines out of phase space the strike craft move in and clear the mines.

If you put scouts into your fleet its just not working because the detection radius is to small and the scouts position in the middle of the fleet instead of the outside. Strange because i would think scouts should build a screen arround your fleet like destroyers build screens arround convoys (like in WW2). Same goes for Flak Frigates btw.

Forming a fleet of scouts to clear out mines does not work. Even if you set the scouts on auto attack mode, the wont attack mines unless they are within their special sensors range. Even though mines are visible on the gravity well overview the scouts wont move to mines on auto attack mode.

That brings me to the point, should mines be visible? If you make mines invisible so just scouts can see them this might also solve a performance issue. (If it is coming from displaying thousands of mines).

It should be the other way arround, you should be able to send scouts on minsweep duty where they automatically search a gravity well and pop mines when they encounter them. This could be an ability button like the "auto scout". The other possible option would be to increase the sensor range from 4000 to 8000 so they can cover more space.

For more diversity a dedicated minesweeper unit could be implemented.

Just my 2 cent.

i like the idea of a special minefield deployment zone, for instance, not at the edge of the gravity well, but a bit back, and not all the way back to the planet, sort of like an asteroid belt, that way, your fleet (or scouts or whatever) can jump in safely, but cant advance further without being anihalated. then if and when you do manage to clear a corridor for your fleet, you can move in and do what you are supposed to instead of micro managing mine-sweeping ops until you are practically in the atmosphere.

i mean, look at it realistically, in real life, if you were to put thousands or millions of mines in orbit around your planet, to the extent that they surround your own bases and ships, it would interfere with your own ships moving between trade ports and refineries... so... the logical thing to do would be to put a band of mines at a couple of million kilometers out, and yeah...

so, long story short, i think there should be a special mine laying field not on the outskirts of the GW, but a bit further in, and not extending all the way back to the planet

on a secondary note, i have a small fleet of 5 Kodiaks and 10 scouts to clear out mines, works about 75% of the time, but then again, if they jump straight into a minefield or are attacked by overwhelming force while clearing a space for my fleet to come in, then bam, just lose alot of credits for nothing.

all this said, though, i think mines are a good idea,  just had a vasari AI do a very human tactic and move two fleets from two diff planets into one of my systems, if it wasnt for the mines and starbase, i would have lost my planet, and left the rest of my empire open to attack, so... its up to Stardock etc to decide

You can?? I'd appreciate, if you could tell us, how you can do that and play the original one...

Go back to Impulse under MyGames and there is an Uninstall option for Entrenchment.  After uninstalling you will need to reinstall Sins.  Just don't install Entrenchment again.  I and a couple friends have already done this and it works.  Problem with mines is being addressed so not such a problem.  But mini-dumps from patch is a problem.

Just tested Entrenchment and played a good 1 1/2 hours before getting mini-dump.  I looked at memory usage and game was using 1.6 Gb at the time per Task Manager.  Wonder if the game is using too much memory and that's what creates the m-dumps.  Thoughts?

away from mini dumps, i think this thread is *resolved* due to the overworking of the mine system

The advent are the BAIN OF MY EXISTENCE!!! They don't just spam mines. Thier light carriers are virtually indestructible, the first to run and the Ai builds them in bulk!

I remember in an interview on X-Play the developers were talking about the mini-expantions each building on the other. The first one would be for defensive and the seconed one would be diplomatic but they did not say what the third one would be. So now ya it is difficult to break a solid blanket of mines but they could add somthing later to help with that.

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