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This article is from the netrek
Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions list, by Tom Holub
doosh@best.com with numerous contributions by others.
24. Allow ships to drop mines.
Problem: There just aren't enough ways to kill things.
Proposal: Allow ships to drop mines which explode when you run into
them.
Why Not: The first thing to ask yourself is, what good are they? A new
way to runner scum? Maybe it's supposed to garrison an SB or planet?
Or is it just a new toy added for the hell of it?
They aren't really all that useful unless you want to give them
serious damage capability (say 150 points - otherwise I'll come by in
an AS and soak up half a dozen), in which case they'll be used either
while running away at maxwarp or during oggs, essentially giving you a
single big torp. If you make them more expensive than torps, they
won't get used here, but when will they be used?
Guarding an SB? Just steer around them, or send a suicide minesweeper
in. For a planet? Maybe. It might slow down SC-taking. If they can be
destroyed with phaser shots though then they're pretty much
worthless. On the other hand, during an LPS you could have everyone on
your team drop a mine on the home planet, making it impossible to
take.
One proposal was to allow SBs to either fire torps or mines (i.e. you
would choose on an individual basis whether what you fire is going to
be a torp or a mine). This restricts the #of mines active by
essentially crippling the starbase every time it drops one. It also
requires that the team HAVE an SB for them to work at all. Something
like this was tried on Calvin.
At any rate, all mine proposals have one major flaw: how to display
them. Unless you want to force a change to the client code, you have
to represent them with a player's torps, plasmas, etc. Unfortunately
these tend to look just like vestigal torps which were "forgotten" by
a UDP connection, so remote players tend to slam into them (or end up
swerving around bogus torps). If you want to get fancy (say, have two
standard torps orbiting each other) you will be using two torps per
mine (which might not be a bad thing).
If you're going to propose this, you need to consider:
* who gets them (ship type, #of kills, rank)
* how many each person/team gets
* how they are drawn (plasma, photon, phaser, Iggy?)
* how they are removed (only on collision, at request of "owner",
when phasered, when plasmaed, after n seconds)
* how much damage they do (point-blank damage + blast radius)
* whether or not they can be tractored/pressored/beamed
* whether they can be dropped while cloaked (VERY bad idea)
* who causes them to explode (other team, everyone, all != owner,
non-cloakers, just cloakers, other exploding mines)
* who takes damage (other team, everyone, all != owner) The really
hard part is making them useful but not abuseable.
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