Minesweeper - The grenade of the future

[bobucles]

Land mines are useful for base defense

That's funny. You're funny, devs. I have played around with mines for a little bit and have come to the following conclusion:

Land mines are the ultimate grenade.
Let's start with the numbers.

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Land mine
Structure
HP: 15
Damage: 300 explosion, AoE 6
Special: Time to arm, applies stun
Cost : 2 explosive, 1 steel => 4 mines
Tech: Military 2 => Red Green Military tier

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Cluster Grenade
Fire rate: 2
Damage: 7 x (35 + 42 research + 20% x unlimited) explosion
AoE: 6.5 + cluster spread
Special: Initial attack throws 7 grenades in a random pattern around itself.
Cost: 5 explosive, 5 steel, 7 grenade (70 coal, 35 iron)
Tech: Military 4 => RGBM High tech tier

Have you noticed anything? The most obvious thing of course is the damage. A land mine out of the box hits for a very impressive 300 damage. The cluster grenade starts at 245 damage (IF all the grenades hit, this is very unlikely!) and peaks at 539 explosion damage at maximum normal research. Normally that means cluster grenades are better, right? Not quite.

Look at the cost. Land mines are CHEAP, and every recipe gets you FOUR! The cost of iron alone means that for every cluster grenade you can have nearly 50 land mines. Wow! The difference in oil/cracked coal still nets you a stack of land mines for the cost of 3 cluster grenades. Packing your inventory full of land mines is not a problem.

The range difference is pretty major. Land mines only reach out to your normal structure placement range. Grenades reach out to 25 and clusters to 20 tiles. This photo shows the range difference:

Range circles

land mines factorio.jpg (257.66 KiB) Viewed 4970 times

Don't worry. The range difference doesn't matter for three important reasons.
1) Land mines are damage soaks. 15HP doesn't look like much, but it absorbs a large worm's 50 damage and a behemoth's bite all the same. You might lose half your mines by charging in mines first, but that's damage you aren't taking.
2) The stun effect. Any thing that gets too close will be stunned by the explosion, which lets you get away.
3) Land mines are a structure. structure. Think about that for a moment. Put them in your hand, shake your mouse around and what happens? The floor is scattered in dozens of land mines. The adjusted fire rate of land mines is as fast as you can place them! 2 grenades/second can't compete with a near instant mine field.

The result is what you see here. This modestly armored suit has no problem bulldozing through a moderate sized biter base at max evolution

All tremble before the mighty mine

factorio mine destruction.jpg (724.35 KiB) Viewed 4970 times

Can I use construction bots to air drop mines?

Absolutely! This feature lets you drop mines like a long range artillery, without ever suffering a scratch. Yes, mines will trigger on enemy nests and an adjacent mine will definitely do damage to the nest regardless. But be careful doing this. Dead mines automatically make ghosts, which means your bots will fly out and attempt to replace them. If the mine is in range of enemy attacks you may reach an endless loop of mines dying and getting replaced. This gets very annoying in personal roboports. The ghost maze grows and drags your bots all over the enemy, which gets a lot of bots killed.

Some other notes:
- The stun effect has no visual feedback. The enemy just stands there not moving and it's kind of weird. I'm spoiled by Warcraft titles that show a swirly effect.
- Set your deconstruction planner to remove mines. A personal roboport is very handy for cleaning up any unpopped ordinance, but keep it offline while attacking.
- Mines are eco friendly and will not hurt trees. Who would have thought?
- Mines are player friendly and will not hurt you. They also don't hurt other mines. Isn't that nice?
- Mines don't have any damage boosting research. This is unfortunate, but their vanilla potential is just so good. It takes a LOT of space research for grenades to ever compete.
- Mines are very low tech. You can be pooping out mines before reaching blue science.
- Mines triggered for deconstruction will shut down. Take advantage of this by disabling mines, luring biters into a trap, and removing the red X to re enable them all at once. POP.

Throw away your grenades, boys. The future is here and it is land mines.

[Gergely]

I... built a grenade factory. A Cluster grenade factory. And I did not even research land mines. I thought they are "wasteful defense" next to my laser turrets. And now this.

And I thought that turret creep was the weirdest way to approach enemy bases.



Got to go check it out. Also, from where do you quote the devs? Can you give me a link to it?

[Jap2.0]

Very interesting. I'll have to try this out sometime.

[Engimage]

Btw LongReach mod makes mines an ultimate biter clearing tool

[voddan]

Wow, you literally opened my eyes, mate!

[mr_fancy_pants]

I got really excited when I started to read this. Then I started thinking... "But how do you trigger the mines to kill the trees?"

- Mines are eco friendly and will not hurt trees. Who would have thought?

Noooooo!

[5thHorseman]

I got really excited when I started to read this. Then I started thinking... "But how do you trigger the mines to kill the trees?"

Exactly the same thought here!

As a big proponent of turret creeping via Long Reach (this is a game about factory building not a twitch shooter) I simply MUST try land mines on my next assault. I too never thought of them.

[eradicator]

If your playing in peaceful mode landmindes have another weird unique feature: They do not make the biters aggressive. You can walk into the base and mine out all the spawners without ever being attacked :P.

[purdueme91]

I got really excited when I started to read this. Then I started thinking... "But how do you trigger the mines to kill the trees?"

Exactly the same thought here!

As a big proponent of turret creeping via Long Reach (this is a game about factory building not a twitch shooter) I simply MUST try land mines on my next assault. I too never thought of them.

I have to try this land mine creep. It might replace the method of using picker to push the turrets into range

[Gergely]

Mines will be nerfed. I just know it.

[Jap2.0]

If your playing in peaceful mode landmindes have another weird unique feature: They do not make the biters aggressive. You can walk into the base and mine out all the spawners without ever being attacked .

The other stuff is cool, but that kind of sounds like a bug.

[bobucles]

I hope you guys enjoyed learning something about land mines. I don't really intend to decide whether land mines are over or underpowered. Instead I hoped to spark some conversation on an item that most players don't even think about. Try some land mines, relish in their power, and who knows? You might even find some bugs.

[eradicator]

If your playing in peaceful mode landmindes have another weird unique feature: They do not make the biters aggressive. You can walk into the base and mine out all the spawners without ever being attacked :P.

The other stuff is cool, but that kind of sounds like a bug.

Everything is a feature until it's fixed :P (And honestly i don't even know if that still works, been a long time since i noticed that)

[Jap2.0]

If your playing in peaceful mode landmindes have another weird unique feature: They do not make the biters aggressive. You can walk into the base and mine out all the spawners without ever being attacked .

The other stuff is cool, but that kind of sounds like a bug.

Everything is a feature until it's fixed (And honestly i don't even know if that still works, been a long time since i noticed that)

Oh, so then we must've been doing this all wrong. Taking out features is easy, right (see fluid tanker)? So we just need to tell the devs to take out the belt uncompression & wierd mapgen features. Easy.