Landmines: stealth buffed?

[BlakeMW]

I just noticed landmines come in 4-packs and deal 40 damage, pretty sure they used to come in singles and deal 20 damage, but I can't find any reference to landmine buffs in the notes (at least not since 2013). The wiki lists them at 40 damage, but not coming in 4-packs, I'm guessing the 4-pack buff came in 0.13.0 or perhaps a subversion.

With these stats landmines are actually semi-usable as it put the cost per mine at 1.2 iron, 0.5 coal, 0.75 petroleum gas.

Considering a regular ammo magazine (2 iron) when shot out of a gun turret with no upgrades deals 40 damage the land mine is still pretty bad, but if it could deal more than about 60 damage per blast (that is hitting 4 small biters or 2 medium biters) it could be on cost-parity with unupgraded regular ammo, which doesn't make it good, but could elevate it to merely "pretty bad" rather than a total waste of resources.

[Frightning]

They come in 4/recipe even in 0.12.35 (just edited the wiki myself to address that issue; checked in game to confirm), and I think their not as bad cost efficiency-wise as you might think:
First off, the damage is Explosive, rather than Physical, which means that Biters (not Spitters) tend to take a greater proportion of incoming raw damage (small have no resists, medium and big are 10%, no flat, and behemoth is 10/20%; actually slightly higher than physical resist, but mines do a lot of damage, hence effect of flat resist is diminished).
Second, the damage is AoE, and has a pretty sizable radius (6), hence can hit many biters/spitters. Moreover, in testing in 0.12.35, I confirmed that mines do not damage other nearby mines, so you can literally carpet your base perimeter (a safe distance beyond your walls) with them and generally deny biters/spitters from even reaching your defenses. Also easy to automate their replacement with Construction Robots.

[BlakeMW]

Thanks for checking 0.12, I didn't have a copy on hand and couldn't be bothered downloading it.

I still think they're as bad as I think. The thing is I compared them with unupgraded regular ammo, once you put a few upgrades into regular ammo the land mines fall behind. Now if landmines benefited from upgrades that could make me change my mind. If they could take out a medium biter in one blast that'd be something to write home about.

[Epicnoob]

It'd be great if landmines would benefit from the grenade damage upgrade.

I can think of one unique use of landmines though: detect biters. Put some mines down and a provider chest with mines next to a roboport covering the mines. When a biter comes and triggers the mine a bot will come and replace the mine with a spare from the chest. This can be detected by a wire hooked up to the chest and used for whatever malicious plans you have.
My plan is to use this signal to send in guided trains to squish the biters that triggered the mine.

[BlakeMW]

It'd be great if landmines would benefit from the grenade damage upgrade.

I concur. Grenade and landmines by themselves hardly justify a research chain, but taken together they give you "supporting" offensive and defensive options.

[Frightning]

Thanks for checking 0.12, I didn't have a copy on hand and couldn't be bothered downloading it.

I still think they're as bad as I think. The thing is I compared them with unupgraded regular ammo, once you put a few upgrades into regular ammo the land mines fall behind. Now if landmines benefited from upgrades that could make me change my mind. If they could take out a medium biter in one blast that'd be something to write home about.

Don't underestimate the AoE on them (6 is pretty large actually, the basic grenade is only slightly bigger at 6.5 which have a bigger blast radius than may be apparent if you haven't used them much), and that they can be placed as close to each other as you like with no problems. Biters usually attack in sizeable groups, which massively improves cost effectiveness of Land mines against them. They can be researched without tier 2 military (granted, military 2 is actually more accessible, and cheap to research than land mines), and because of the damage type, mines lose less effectiveness against Medium biters than Regular magazines (ditto to Piercing mags, but to a much lesser extent when fired from gun turrets, especially with some of the damage upgrades done). They can also deal with large biters much better than gun turrets (sans lots of upgrades and piercing ammo at least).

There is also another hilarious subtlety about them that I discovered in peaceful games. When they damage an enemy, the enemy only sees them as the source of that damage, not the player character that placed them, hence they won't aggro to you because mines you set went off, and mines will trigger from enemy buildings being next to them (mines have a trigger radius notably bigger than their footprint too). So in peaceful mode, you can actually, safely, assassinate enemy spawners and worms by simply walking up and placing mines next to them (mind the blast radius though!) With aggressive biters, ofc, that detail isn't all the valuable, but I found it rather surprising and funny that they work like that.