Does anybody use Mines?

[Alice]

Just curious. I have never equipped them or tried to use them. Is there a viable strat involving them? Is baiting them into following you and throwing down mines a viable strat? Has anyone tried? Is this useless?

[RasterOps]

I tried using a single mine once. No idea if the pursuing enemy even hit the mine. Then I looked at the damage rating. A single mine isn't gonna do it, even at 2 sec/shot (wiki, says 4 sec/shot!?) which is more than double a Pulson. Also do they have a duration? Don't know.

I think for mines to work, you will need to invest in multiple mines and ancient relics to upgrade them. They take up the same space as Pulson missile launchers, sooo...

According to the wiki, a blue heavy mine does 165 dmg. A blue Pulson does 121, as indicated in my game (the wiki is out of date?). Both mines and missiles require missile ammo.

Could you outfit a ship with nothing but mines and lay down a mine field well in front of a war-fleet? Perhaps. It would be interesting to know if anyone has tried and how effective it was.

[phoenix_54d]

It's not my style, but, true to the very idea of using anti-vehicular mines, they can be used to do some seriously cheesy stuff.

Two viable tactics are your own thrusters, or a tractor beam. Trying to get things to follow you is generally less useful, but the things you can do when stacking them...

[ryvrdrgn14]

I can imagine using mines to help defend a space station if you're too low level or planting a lot of them around a Ravager and just leading it around through them.

I haven't used them myself though.

I guess the only good thing I can think of is that you only need one high quality mine if you're patient with laying them down.

[phoenix_54d]

And yes, patience is your friend. You're preparing the surprise, no need to maximize the DPS over the DPA.

[WeaverSong]

Originally posted by ryvrdrgn14:

I can imagine using mines to help defend a space station if you're too low level or planting a lot of them around a Ravager and just leading it around through them.

I haven't used them myself though.

I guess the only good thing I can think of is that you only need one high quality mine if you're patient with laying them down.

Mines have no timeout (that I have ever encountered) and can be stacked perfectly on top of each other. For ravagers you don't use a minefield - just a single stack that one-shots the Ravager. Mines can also be nice for their infinite range - when a hunter fleet is following, you can outrun them while laying mines, and watch them whittle their own numbers down. But in most cases mines are useless.

[ryvrdrgn14]

Originally posted by master_lego_maker:

Originally posted by ryvrdrgn14:

I can imagine using mines to help defend a space station if you're too low level or planting a lot of them around a Ravager and just leading it around through them.

I haven't used them myself though.

I guess the only good thing I can think of is that you only need one high quality mine if you're patient with laying them down.

Mines have no timeout (that I have ever encountered) and can be stacked perfectly on top of each other. For ravagers you don't use a minefield - just a single stack that one-shots the Ravager. Mines can also be nice for their infinite range - when a hunter fleet is following, you can outrun them while laying mines, and watch them whittle their own numbers down. But in most cases mines are useless.

Well, you know what they say... go big or go home.

Here's my 36 space, 6,000 damage, 80% crit, 8,594 DPS crafted mine:

https://i.ibb.co/mbDWzgZ/image.png

It fits nicely on my Titan. It actually does more DPS than all my front lasers (7 of them) combined and requires 0 heat and 0 energy.

[Moon-Shadow]

Important when you load the game, no mines placed are loaded as they are not saved at all.

Mines have a big disadvantage, since there is no remote ignition so far, neutral ships can trigger the mines, which leads to a bad reputation, so depending on Sektor Life, it is a bigger problem.

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Mines are useful when you have a slow ship and not that much firepower and you can't get rid of opponents, then you fly away and they go into mines.

For this you would have more than 1 mine system with you, the one for light mines, and also later for heavy mines.

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Arena battles.

You can lay mines beforehand the Fight.

After the game is loaded, you have to re-lay, but you can convert the mines for the fight.

So lay mines and then switch to weapons.

[Moon-Shadow]

When flying away from the enemy, shooting missiles is, depending on the speed of the flight and the missiles, rather bad because the missiles then also fly after the enemy and do not hit.

And they hit the enemy from behind, and the explosion pushes the enemy even closer to you so he can hit even better.

So missiles would have to be in a turret to the rear, or a 360 degree turret to shoot straight back, and missiles don't really fit in turrets.

Depending on the ship, you need several towers, weapons for Defend drones and missiles.

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Mines cannot be shot down by enemies, but missiles and drones can be intercepted.

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You can also build your own mines.

[Strider]

Missiles still beat mines in the chase regard as its pretty easy to just stay out of reach and navigate the following ship into turning at an angle to get hit by a missile. Or unload a boot load of them to quickly overload shields.

Outside of station defense, mines are just eh.

[phoenix_54d]

They're a brutal assassination tool, including against stations.
They're just not made for actual combat - they're mines after all.

[RasterOps]

Just experimented with a mine. While in combat I kited enemies, and would drop a single mine. They will shoot at it with normal energy weapons but it did last long enuf to work.

I imagine war-fleets might clear mines en route to their target. I can also imagine mine clearing missions...

[HungryHobo]

Mines can make it very easy to kill bosses way way over your own level.

I have a custom mine weapon that's a heavy mount + 4 mines + penetrating, I can grab 800 or so missile ammo, jump into a system, move just outside the trigger range of a boss and then just drop most of the mines in one spot.

I then kite the boss over that spot and BOOM, I can go collect the loot.

[[KGW] Larsalot]

In my small fast lv.3 craft I only have missiles and mines atm, I fly in circles around the nmy keeping out of laser range, firing missiles, and if too strong fly away, if they hunt I fly in a straight line and drop heavy mines and they usually fly into them :) The mines stick around for some time, you can use them to drag other nmys into them...

[lalelunatic]

depending on what you wanna do with them... it might be a bit difficult to use those in lategame.... as every single ship of an attack squad has the hp of a ravager (or close to) or are just numerous that they´re all over the place...

as mine laying takes time as does the pullling them through the mine field, its not practical enough for farming those i guess, as they may spawn faster as you can lure and kill them, as lay a new patch of mines.

all the ammunition weaponry also has the downside of well... needing ammo =P. so you gotta refill that too all the time... i´d just go with a bunch of custom lasers that do about 2k+ dps and still stay in the 200/200 heat/energy zone for just 11 space... not pretty, but effective...

[Maku]

I was also experimenting with mines and had 2 heavy + 1 normal minelayer - on the small ships (which do not seem to have PDCs) it works far better than rockets. On the bigger ships (cruisers and above) it was somewhat problematic since they shot down the mines of mine - there were the rockets + kiting more effective. At least for me.
A question though - are you guys certain, mines cannot be shot down ? In my game they were quite frequently (by enemies...)