EBITAD EBITAD

What is with Homming mines?

▼

What is with Homming mines?

from Sins Forums

The ai had placed over 70 homming mines in an empty but well traveled grav well.  As my scouts travelled through the grav well the homming mines tracked them down and destroyed them.   A few minutes later my fleet shows up with some new scouts and procede to eliminate the mine field with strike craft, lrms, and ogrovs.  The mines never budge.  Just like any other mine field.

Is the mine's ability to detect the scout less than the scout's ability to detect the mine?  The scout then knows to stay out of the range on the mine's detection radius to allow for easy mine clearing?  Or is there some other reason?

 

120,675 views 33 replies
Reply #26 from Stardock Forums Top

the advent mines dont get placed on the equators plane, so ships wont often enter the critical zone, it being above or below them

Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting godoggo, reply 25
I believe EACH can put in 150, making a possible total of 450. But, I'm not sure, and anyone correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: that actually doesn't make much sense, since then all the different factions would be affected by eachother. So, it may be just a plain total of 150.

Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure it's 150 per player per gravity well.  Thus, you could have up to 1500 mines in a gravity well, if there were 10 players.  Not that anyone would survive to lay down the last few mines.

 

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top

the advent mines dont get placed on the equators plane, so ships wont often enter the critical zone, it being above or below them

The equator plane is kind of just a 'zone' ships stay in most of the time, and most of the time structures an ships will not be exactly on the equator.

 

I think it would be cool if you could move away from the equator line. Some defenses would have to be altered surely, but having the gravity well be spherical, and having a 3rd axis of movement would be friggin cool.

Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Deceiver_0, reply 3


I think it would be cool if you could move away from the equator line. Some defenses would have to be altered surely, but having the gravity well be spherical, and having a 3rd axis of movement would be friggin cool.

I know that you actually CAN move in the z axis, you just have to hold a button when you do it. I don't think it affects firing arcs though, it's mainly just to get out of being completely surrounded by ships.

I have noticed that the mines do lay themselves above and below the gravity well though.

Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top

You have to manually bind the z-axis key. By default it isn't available. The z-axis isn't particularly useful, however. You could use it to jump over enemy mines by jumping at a much higher elevation than normal, but there's not much point when you can just jump to a point the enemy hasn't covered yet by clever jump tactics.

Reply #31 from Stardock Forums Top

Okay, just ran into weird homming mine behavior again.  Advent gravwell, 150 homming mines.  They had to be cleared.  Turned off the scouts auto probe.  Allowed the scouts to attack mines on auto and they got slaughtered.  Either the homming mines had greater range than the scouts or the scouts failed to stop outside the homming mine's range.  I think this is a bug.  I ended up taking the planet, mines still worked, building gardas and basically sent them on suicide missions to ram the mines.  Much faster than suicide scouts. 

Then without provocation, with about 50 or so mines left, they just all deactivated.  My ships could run around and overtop the mines and they would not detonate.  I wonder if after so many minutes of isolation the mine field goes to sleep?  Could it be culture?  Anyway, they are easy to kill but it was a long and tedious process.  Not fun. 

I suggest either the scouts have an increased radius for their mine sweeping ability, or stop prior to entering the homing mines detection radius.  A big antimine cap ship abilty would be neat also, an aoe ability for the Akkan would be cool.

 

 

Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting DrazharLn, reply 5
You have to manually bind the z-axis key. By default it isn't available. The z-axis isn't particularly useful, however. You could use it to jump over enemy mines by jumping at a much higher elevation than normal, but there's not much point when you can just jump to a point the enemy hasn't covered yet by clever jump tactics.

the thing with z-axis control, is that even if you turn it off, it has a tendency to make your ships go all the way up or down the sphere of the planet's well.

Quoting KerrekCruiser, reply 4

Quoting Deceiver_0, reply 3
I think it would be cool if you could move away from the equator line. Some defenses would have to be altered surely, but having the gravity well be spherical, and having a 3rd axis of movement would be friggin cool.
I know that you actually CAN move in the z axis, you just have to hold a button when you do it. I don't think it affects firing arcs though, it's mainly just to get out of being completely surrounded by ships.
I have noticed that the mines do lay themselves above and below the gravity well though.

Actually I believe the distance fire both up and down is the spherical extention of the firing range on a plane

And sometimes, when I use the homing mines, they don't even work even with a large attack fleet

Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting EBITAD, reply 6
Okay, just ran into weird homming mine behavior again.  Advent gravwell, 150 homming mines.  They had to be cleared.  Turned off the scouts auto probe.  Allowed the scouts to attack mines on auto and they got slaughtered.  Either the homming mines had greater range than the scouts or the scouts failed to stop outside the homming mine's range.  I think this is a bug.  I ended up taking the planet, mines still worked, building gardas and basically sent them on suicide missions to ram the mines.  Much faster than suicide scouts. 

Then without provocation, with about 50 or so mines left, they just all deactivated.  My ships could run around and overtop the mines and they would not detonate.  I wonder if after so many minutes of isolation the mine field goes to sleep?  Could it be culture?  Anyway, they are easy to kill but it was a long and tedious process.  Not fun. 

I suggest either the scouts have an increased radius for their mine sweeping ability, or stop prior to entering the homing mines detection radius.  A big antimine cap ship abilty would be neat also, an aoe ability for the Akkan would be cool.

 

 

My experience with this suggests that instead of being a bug, the scouts auto-attack on mines is unreasonable. It chooses a mine in the middle of the clump to shoot at, so nearer mines go and track the scout down. In essence, I would like it to be fixed, but I wouldn't quite consider it a bug. I have no idea about the deactivation, though. Maybe you were above them?