Should we have mines on the game.

Did we really need another thread for this? There's already two of them.

Maybe. 

Hmm. I don't think so actually. Mines are rather annoying from players point of view. Invisible balls of damage aren't that fun to fight in a turn based game. I'd rather see something like giant space walls then mines. At least from a gameplay prospective that is. Walls function about the same as mines being a hex denial system, but because you can see them they enter into your tactical planing.

They aren't hex denial system, they hex delaying system. Maybe hex-bocage system - you can get through, but not without "ouch time".

Lol.  I personally really like the idea of them. Love turtling. However, I do understand the drawbacks and think that it would have to be handled well before I would be happy with it.  

With that said, there are three threads on this at the moment so is there any possibility on getting a dev thought to weigh in on whether they are considering adding mines or not?  If it's flat out no, then hopefully we can lay this to rest.

Happy Holidays!

I would rather like automated homing missiles - small self-destruct spaceshipe that I deploy onto one hex and that subsequently attacks fleets that don't have the right transponder-code. A further range-upgrade could allow attacks into neigboring hexes. Point-defense systems or AI-core-hacking would counter this space-defense systems. This would also be some kind of wall because it must not be invisible, just a small automatet ship with a nice payload for my borders... 

Seems like a good fit as a module on a Military Starbase. "Tresspassers will be shot by missiles. Survivors will be shot by lasers."

And relatives will be invaded in the near future. This as part of a military starbase is a far better idea than mines.

God no.

Mines are an automated solution of the old days... one just does not have enough troops to protect all sides of ones boundary, this is where mines come into play, they are deterrent for those that would choose to go that direction to attack you. They were cheap and effect at the job of killing individuals willing to pass through that way.

In modern times, there can be automated defense systems that can accomplish the same job more efficiently / effectively. Automated drones would be a better solution than mines themselves. It appears one would like a drone that sits in a location and looks for a craft and ram the opposing craft for massive amounts of damage.

But this leads to simple solutions by the opposing team. I'm sure every craft would be equipped with anti-asteroid weapons, just to vaporize these objects before they get close enough to do damage (shields would stop many smaller asteroids, but some larger varieties would need a little help to destroy them). Thus, any mine field (which can't be hidden too effectively in space) and can be destroyed immediately upon contact (no real hidden factor, a necessity since the old days of mines. If you can see it, then it isn't effective).

What would be the case is that one would want to build and forget system of deploying drones. Simply put, it would be nice to implement a drone command center that allows the player to build any number of short ranged drones at an upkeep cost for the drone facility and the cost of each drone individually. But the upkeep doesn't increase upon large numbers of drones. 1 Drone upkeep - 5bc, 10 Drones upkeep - 5bc. Of course one could flesh out this idea, but it is simply put that a military starbase would have an ability to create a drone protection grid on a 1 hex radius, where you can produce a number of drones to initiate a battle, to protect an area.

But to the mine question... No. I don't think space explosives are the way to go here.

To me mines are as in "Star Trek" parlance "thinking in 2 dimensions".

In space a 'mine field' makes little sense. Simply from an entirely spatial concept the odds of you hitting any kind of actual mine would be close to zero. Even a turret system you could jsut 'avoid' by doing literally anything, going above below, etc.

Now what would make more sense would be if a turret or mine field were associated more directly with specific resources/planets/starbases/etc. Since I KNOW you're coming for said actual object, it makes a lot mroe sense for me to put mines around that as a defensive/offensive bonus. So I could deploy a mine field around say a mining facility. Perahps this would give me a 'first strike' ability to damage incoming fleets who attack me. Drones could act the same way giving a first strike bonus, and a defensive bonus vs fighters or such. But they'd be attached to a specifc object, not just 'floating in the middle of a hex'

But mines as an 'area denial' concept isn't very practical imho.

I agree it should be easier to mine a planet than your border of space like what this was originally suggested for in get out of my space.

Star Trek had the occasional case where mines could work. The wormhole at DS9 for example was mined at one point, and given that it's a single, fixed point that couldn't be accessed any other way, that was effective. It only actually offered any defense against one side (the ones coming through the wormhole were coming blind into the mines), and even that required a space station to guard the mines from the other side AND the mines to somehow be cloaking and self replicating. Course, if you can make self replicating mines why wouldn't you make self replicating turrets with railguns and just shoot things?

There's really nothing mines can do that drones or long range turrets can't do better, when it comes to space. Given that we know carriers/fighters/bombers are a thing, it seems to make more sense to just let a Starbase house interceptors that can accost anything trying to enter their zone of control instead of laying minefields.

Please no mines, they will simply be too much of a nuisance in this turn based strategy game.

Three words.  Engineered space monster.

All mines conversations are tied to complexity of combats we would have. If no maneuverability, speed, and formations of ships are involved into calculations, then there is no need to use mines, because mines will affect only those.

I've gotta agree with the 2d vs 3d issue. In space, there are no features to serve as chokepoints, so you'd have to liberally seed a full sphere with mines, which would be prohibitively expensive. Even with a several kilometer engagement range, you'd have to have an absurd number of mines.

For example, the surface area of Earth is over 500 million square kilometers. At a reasonable distance from the planet, I'd imaging that for a 1km range mine, 1 km^2 on the surface would about match the 1 km radius covered by the mine. So that's 500 million mines to have 1-2 mines covering any given patch of sky. Let us assume that a mine costs about a million credits (a modern missile costs 500k plus, so this might be low). That makes it 500 trillion to put a very, very shallow minefield in space. Ingame, that'd be 500,000 bc, and you'd maybe get one mine hit, maybe one mine hit per enemy ship, depending on how spread out the ship formations are. That's utterly impractical. A space mine costs too much compared to a normal land-mine, and it would take way to many of them to protect anything large. You'd be better off with some form of mobile defensive platform that can put all that firepower where the enemy is. Instead of 500 million million-dollar mines spread out around the planet, have a couple dozen platforms to launch a bunch of million dollar missiles at your enemies; you won't need 500 million of them, and you'll get more hitting your actual target. Oh, and you won't have to worry about the IFF on your mines killing a passenger shuttle.

Basically, with how expensive an individual mine would be, and how much area you'd have to cover with mines to get any protection, it would be cheaper to build a mobile reaction force that can actually intercept the target and put all it's firepower in one place.

Mines in space would be as effective as mines on a future earth where soldiers all have jet-packs and tanks all hover and we have teleporters.