How to deal with mines

Anti-Strike Craft vessels (Grada-TEC/Defense-Advent/Sentinel-Vasari) are great at this when paired with one or two scouts. They have high health/armor to absorb lots of damage and 360 shooting capabilities. Fighters do in a pinch but are not as efficient due to flying style.

Advent mines are the only tough ones.  All the others can be easily swept by moving scouts forward and blasting them with either flaks or fighters (even the scouts themselves will do the job given enough time).  The Advent variety requires you to carefully inch forward with hold-ground stance on fighters and scouts.  Manually move the scouts just close enough to reveal the mines without getting in homing range.  Then move some fighters on hold ground stance right into the middle of the minefield, and they will blast each mine as it is revealed.  Keep inching the scouts forward, and you'll eventually have it cleared.

It seems if an enemy has ringed his Gravity Well the only thing you can do is send in a suicide squad of scouts followed directly by your main fleet or try a different avenue of attack.

But for just clearing the mines in general just follow what the infinitely more experienced players than me have said above. Only thing I will say is that if you need it done ASAP then suicide scouts are the best way to go. Or if you have a Cap with some shield regen abilities maybe?

The fastest way to deal with mines is to go over them...of course, that is considered cheating by some and if you do it in MP you're just asking for it....

Use the BRICK (Kol Battleship TEC) for that one.

No, Seleuceia was talking about going over, not through.

Indeed, using capital ships to plough through mines is very viable.  You want to move just close enough to detonate one mine.  This will cause your shield mitigation to max out.  Now go romping through the rest of the mines with your 70% or so damage reduction from mitigation.  Use something like the Kol that has defensive abilities, and you can clear mines very quickly in this fashion.

What Seleuceia is talking about is literally moving above the minefield.  The minefield exists in 2D, but your ships can move in 3D, so avoiding them is actually trivial.  Most people consider this cheating, though, since it makes mines absolutely worthless.

Forget about that Z-axis thing.

A little bit trickier against homing mines since those things are deployed in all 3 dimensions...but, still possible...

Unless you're playing against the cheating AI's, you can just throw one scout into their midst.  Keep throwing scouts at the minefield until it's gone.  You'll pay less in scouts than they paid in homing mines in most cases, since each scout will attract multiple mines.  All minefields need to be carefully defended or your investment can be cleaned up without must trouble.

In extreme cases vasari starbase is an excellent minesweeper but its not always practical. Many skilled players use Vas SB + overseers to assault well defended planets regardless of mines. key being to jump in at a point where you can deploy without mines killing the SB and holding your fleet around it.

Personally, I'd assume let my opponents waste money on mines and just micro around the mines. Also it cost more to deploy mines than it does to suicide one ship to take out several mines.

I thought they removed that trick by making the mines only blow up when ships moved past it and not star bases?

Mines can still target starbases as far as I know...and structures too...

As far as I know only advent mines dont react to star base

According to the entity files, that is correct...Advent mines only home on frigates and caps...the other 3 mines can target caps, frigates, SBs, and structures...