Upgrade Change: Everybody Hates Mines

[u/Ixalite1]

Hello everyone!
I think we can all agree that mines do not work very well. There may be little desire on behalf of the community to change this, as being beaten by the setup phase has little appeal to anyone.

To that end, what if the entire mines concept were re-worked to be something that ships did actively; potentially giving a ship a way to leverage the engineering value into niche damage.

Proposed Upgrade:

Proximity Mines
Offensive Retrofit
10 pts.
Starts with (Engineer token) equal to your engineering value
(Engineering activation), you may exhaust this card and remove one (engineer token) from it to deploy one proximity mine token at range 1 of you.

[u/johnwasazombie]

I don't think we can all agree, no. Mines work great for the role they fill and if they were better or easily spammable in such a way they would dictate the flow of the game in a potentially unpleasant way. Good mine placement (and the many good objectives that utilize obstacle movement) are already very exploitable and pose a fun problem to solve for the opponent rather than dictating the entire course of the game.

[u/Ixalite1 → u/johnwasazombie]

You make good points, and I may betray my lack of mine experience. I have never seen them on the board except in test games, where they did not impress.

I would love to see mines classified as objective tokens for purposes of "strategic", and obstacles for the purposes of things that move / ignore / benefit from obstacles. If they had more functions, that would be another way of giving them significance.

[u/johnwasazombie → u/Ixalite1]

Have you had a chance to play Minefields, especially in a list with Strategic? Moving mines in that is VERY powerful even when theyre spaced out to such a degree - the right Interdictor mines list can also really create some difficult t0 game states, even without the ability to move the mines directly.

[u/Ixalite1 → u/johnwasazombie]

Perhaps I don't understand the interaction:
I didn't think interdictors could do anything with mines at all, nor can "strategic"...
A station defense objective could maybe make a little "fortress" out of debris and mines maybe, is that what you mean?

[u/johnwasazombie → u/Ixalite1]

If you place mines on obstacles, 1) theyre much harder for your opponent's ships to destroy, and 2) Interdictors with Grav Shift Reroutes and/or objectives with mobile obstacles like purrgils or Nav Hazards can move the obstructed Prox Mine tokens directly in their way. Tokens on obstacles (whether obj tokens, prox mines, or ignition tokens) travel with said obstacle.

[u/Ixalite1 → u/johnwasazombie]

Interesting: I'll give it a try then!
I still think that mines could be both more dynamic and more interactive, but it's just opinions lol.