Making Minelayers more viable

[Dreadnought]

As in viable to maintain small ship presence when you are low on red but have alot of yellow and blue - because sometimes you just cant find enough red and the enemy team is destroying all your eco because you cant support it because again, your out of red, this is a soft counter if you are low on red, and allows minelayers to be more viable a choice.
Unlike most small ships, minelayers rely heavily on items to be effective rather then just a BC healer.

Construction Console
EMP mine - from 5/5/95 to - 5/95/5
Proximity mine - from 10/50 to - 30/30
Distress Beacon - from 5/5/95 to - 25/60/15

Upgrades Console
Upgrade Mine Damage - from 25/10/30 to 20/30/10

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Another Upgrade that we could put into place:
Condensed Emitters - 50/85/5
Nano-Hull Spray and Shield Rechargers cone (spread) is reduced by -20%, the speed is increased by 20% and duration in flight (before it fades out) is increased by 20%.
This upgrade can be used if players want to do minelayer support on other small ships.

[WhyteDragon]

Minelayer is -very- viable right now. I've seen it control an entire game.

[Red-Rocket]

Well yes of course its viable, its an amazing counter to enemy drones because if they see one within a long distance they must immediately run back to BC (kinda OP really, maybe reduce drone awareness on mines and other miners)

Its still expensive, its just blue based instead of red, that way even if you dont have red you can go for minelayers to get back map control because there are alot of games where you are starved of 1 or 2 resources (red is particularly bad because everyone MUST have those weapons and miner upgrades of course)

Minelayer is viable in itself of course, its just not viable in a resource situation if your short on red, i think minelayers are 'Energy' and spellcasters based, which is basically blue.

[WhyteDragon]

Alright, just to be clear I'm not fully against the suggested price changes. However, the reasons why you are arguing for it seem a bit off base to me. Naturally there is going to be opportunity cost in a game -- that is just how things work. If you change it to blue, suddenly people are going to be conflicted between getting a minelayer and shields, or a minlayer and scans, or a minelayer and whatever blue hefty investment that's required. Of course it's not going to be viable in a situation you're short on red -- that's stating the obvious, just as much as saying that a powerdock strategy isn't viable without yellow. That doesn't necessarily mean we should make chompers cost less of it.

I don't think the extra upgrade you've suggested really provides anything to the gameplay. It feels like it'll be there fora resource dump as most of the time you'll be spraying your own BC -- believe me, I love the idea of using sprays on allies but this is 100% not it. The issue is that it's a skill shot on two moving vessels in space with their own velocities. Narrowing the cone and speeding it up is going to do very little to suddenly make it more viable or more used in that way.

I think distress beacon is fine as it is. Frankly, it causes all sorts of chaos in a game and is well deserving of its current cost. I never even touch Proximity Mines to be honest, as it's a space that goes away from other more useful items. EMP mines can also be a huge nuisance due to the throttle cut. Putting it in what you'd call a 'dump resource' (which a lot of the time it can be) to make it freely accessible could get out of hand fairly quickly in my opinion.

And as an overall look at the resource cost if you want to get the EMP mine as well as the distress beacon...
100y 75b 25r
5y 5b 95r
5y 5b 95r
------------
110y 85b 215r

It's not that unevenly distributed.

[Karl913]

Add a tractor beam to the minelayer that works inverse, forcing the minelayer to tail the tractored ship, allowing it to actually heal the ship even if it's moving? Maybe remove some control from the player over it's movement, and giving it a few more abilities? That would make for some interesting scenarios.

[Red-Rocket]

or some BIG mines that can can only be used once sort of like how flares work