I actually set the mines up a bit too far out and they only barely overlap around the JP.
The friendly NPR jumped into Sol and was green on sensors, they start moving towards center of system and I am holding my breathe - bam! All the mines release their sub munitions. I think you mentioned before that this would probably happen, but I set this up on purpose just so I could see.
A few things on mines:
- if I am using active sensors then surely it shouldn't fire on greens? Not sure how you would do it for EM and TH since they are passive and quite rightly would find it hard to distinguish between friend and foe.
- is it possible to set an option that would stop a mine field from firing on neutrals? Say I have expanded beyond my feasible economical and military reach and want to settle in for a while to feast on my current holdings. But, I want to ensure that my approaches are secure except that I do not have the resources on hand to deploy mobile pickets so I go with mine fields. Now, I do not want to start an interstellar incident so I will deploy the mines and set them to attack only known enemies and to ignore neutrals and friendlies.
At the moment mines fire on anything that isn't one of your ships. The reason for this is that alliances can change and there is no way for the mines to know who is your friend at the time they get activated, compared to the time they were laid. I don't think its realistic for all mines to be aware of the current diplmatic situation but I have an alternative suggestion. How about a window that allows you to specify the allowable targets for mines. This could be as simple as "Any foreign ship", or as complex as "Arachnid Ships between 5000 and 10,000 tons", "Thermal Signatures greater than 1000", or even a specified range of known alien classes. Perhaps even a command to ignore the first few targets or wait a certain time before activating. I think for modern captor mines the software can be set for targets within certain ranges so this would allow you to setup something similar. When you lay a mine, it would adopt whatever rules were set for your mines at that point in time. You wouldn't be able to change the targeting instruction for a mine once laid but it would still add a lot more flexibility. I think the window would have to contain a list of deployed mines so you could keep track. For those players who aren't interested in this level of detail, the default would remain "All Alien Ships"
- my designs above may not be balanced but I noticed the following happen when my mines went off: the separation range is set to 150k km and the NPR only came within that range of 3 of the mines yet all the mines around the JP released their sub munitions. Then what happened was that only those sub munitions from the 3 mines within range actually attacked. The others lost target and didn't even move 1km - then self destructed. Is that by design? Are they using other sensors on purpose?
No, that sounds like a bug I thought I had fixed. I'll look at it again.
- is there a way to self-destruct a mine? I can be a neat freak sometimes and it could be bad for the civies if a mine gets a short and goes off
Steve