I think I agree with the general consensus that for strategic purposes,
as the game works now, mines are going to be about as relevant to warfare as the machine gun was to World War One. That is to say, massively, overwhelmingly relevant, a transformational technology that causes a tremendous shift of advantage from defender to attacker. A lot of military doctrines that predate the machine gun become simply irrelevant in the face of that kind of brute technological fact.
Most 1900-era powers believed in decisive clashes of armies in the open field, a la Napoleon. However, this strategy
utterly failed in practice, despite everyone spending years developing and refining their doctrines. Because it turned out that all this practice and training and theorizing about how important it was for soldiers to bravely clash in the open was irrelevant, in the face of the reality that heavy machine gun fire could kill just about anyone standing within half a mile,
quickly, unless they took cover.
The only way to fight effectively was to entrench and bristle and force the enemy to come to you. It was that simple. It's not that existing infantry tactics were wrong as such- for pure infantry fights. It's that as soon as machine guns and ballistic heavy artillery showed up to the battle, all the old infantry tactics became almost completely irrelevant. War was no longer about whether your soldiers were better than my soldiers. It was about whether your soldiers were more solidly protected from my artillery and machine guns than mine were from yours. Whoever exposed their troops to more heavy weapons fire, lost- and they lost almost regardless of whether their troops were brave or well trained or numerous or whatever. The differences between prewar French, German, Russian, and British infantry doctrine were almost irrelevant, except insofar as they impacted the number of soldiers who got killed by machine guns in the opening weeks of the war before everyone started digging in.
Likewise, we're in a position where barring an utterly insane advantage in raw numbers, whoever exposes their fleet to more mines is going to tend to lose. It won't matter if your fleet doctrine revolves around 'Base Strike,' 'Decisive Battle,' 'Wolfpack,' or whatever. He who facechecks the most mines, loses. He who does not facecheck mines, wins by default.
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Now, what ultimately resolved this "machine guns OP, nerf please" situation during World War One was a combination of technology and doctrine that
reduced the effect of machine guns. In particular, the invention of the tank and advancing artillery techniques meant that soldiers had options for dealing with a machine gun nest besides "rush it, hope they can't kill us all before we get there." Defensive machine gun emplacements and artillery barrages remained a huge part of warfare, but they were only a
part of warfare, they didn't completely set and dominate the terms of the battlefield.
By analogy, I really think that the Alpha Quadrant powers logically should, and for gameplay reasons need to, work on ways to do something about mines other than 'sail through and hope you don't smack into one.' There should be SOME kind of counter-mine strategy at work, one that is reasonably effective if used thoroughly, even if it comes with its own tactical disadvantages and costs.
I dunno what you'd actually be expecting out of that, though. I could imagine a technology that gives (for example) +1 to mine detection. Something like that would be would be nice to have, but not so nice that you couldn't make cost-benefit questions about, "How often do we assault minefields compared to doing other stuff we could research instead?"
But I get the impression that when you talk about counter-mine technology branches, you're talking about something that if you took the whole thing then mines would effectively no longer be a problem. Which I don't really see happening.
Your impression is not entirely correct. I'm not saying 'mines should go away.' I'm saying 'mines should be part of the balance, not dominating the balance.'
Maybe you'd expect it to look something more like the Anti-Cloaking Technology tree under Sensors? But it's important to remember that tree is part of a race. We're improving it while the Romulans and Klingons are improving their cloaking technology. Having a mine/anti-mine race just seems like a new place for us to be dumping research points to no ultimate advantage.
It would still give us a reward for
pursuing the research, and a way for improving our technology to avoid casualties to our fleet at a later time. Instead of being stuck in a situation where mines remain eternally as dangerous as they are now.
That said, I
do think that changing game balance should gradually make mines less relevant over time, because in the TNG era the ONLY place mines even show up is the wormhole minefield, one which ran on a truly extraordinary level of technobabble and was being used to block an incredibly confined area of space by 'spaceship' standards. Note that minefields do not 'need' to become
IR-relevant, but at the moment they're immensely powerful to the point where normal fleet combat is far less likely to prove decisive than minefields are.
It doesn't feel much like Trek to have the constant minefield threat dominating every kind of combat that takes place near an installation. I'm sorry, it just... doesn't.
[Conversely, I think cloaks need to be made
MORE relevant, because it seems like we reached a point where we're regularly able to track cloaked ships. TNG era cloaking wasn't perfectly reliable, but frankly it seemed a lot more effective in narrative terms than the cloaks we face today appear to be.]
This isn't a Total War game, where you win a war by steamrolling over territory. Napoleon once said that the moral is to the physical as three is to one. Well, you have a warp support level and they have one as well. That's the figure at the heart of any war you fight.
Well… if the Syndicate War was any indication, In this game we win by removing enemy assets from circulation.
In this case, the Ix and their mad science.
Yeah, that's kind of the issue. It's going to take
tremendously disproportionate military losses to take assets out of play if the Ixaria defenses are a representative sample of 'let's get serious' defenses in game. As noted, this has a lot of implications for strategy and astropolitics. The fact that nobody can just casually conquer another power isn't in itself a bad thing at all. The problem, though, is that a lot of strategies that nominally exist in the game stop making sense in this context. Raiding strategies are made far more effective because "he who facechecks the fewest mines, wins." Conversely, decisive battles become very hard to force on an enemy, because the enemy's correct reaction to whatever your fleet does is usually to yawn and retreat to their minefield. Once they start operating at even a modest numerical disadvantage, the "yawn, retreat to mines" option becomes even more appealing. And 'base strike' just becomes a cruel joke unless it has the power to
largely defang some of these more menacing minefields.
A stationary mine doesn't stay where you put it - orbital mechanics. So, station-keeping thrusters/gravitics. Sensors. Stealth coating.
A photon torpedo needs maneuvering thrusters
and an impulse engine and possibly some kind of warp-sustaining FTL pseudo-drive. And still needs sensors. And isn't that big to begin with. The point here is that a mine the size of a photon torpedo
SHOULD be able to save considerable room for extra 'boom' compared to the torpedo. And since mines don't have to be launched from a mobile firing platform, they benefit more from economies of scale, so that advantage grows even faster as the mine gets larger.
And to think that a starship just happens to hit a mine in space, especially if it tries to avoid mine fields - how many trillion mines do you expect to be laid? Or you add a booster engine that gives the mine a sprinter capability, fast enough not to be avoided. And then the payload is big enough to one-hit kill frigates, right? And the mines have to be low maintenance, and must have a somewhat high endurance.
Really doesn't sound like a cheap weapons systems. Or simple.
[sighs]
Look, you're dancing around between different lines of argument.
The point is that making mine warheads very powerful isn't that hard. There are
other problems associated with mine design. But between the fact that a mine doesn't have to be as small as a photon torpedo, plus the fact that its propulsive needs are LESS, though not necessarily ZERO, you can make a mine that is hellaciously powerful compared to a torpedo- and it's implied in Trek canon that a single torpedo hit on an unshielded hull is a very bad thing to have happen even if it won't reliably break the ship's back all by itself.[/QUOTE]
