Mines, oh God the Mines!

With Loyalist Advent all the mines your opponents build are a gift to you: they become your mines in their gravwells. Easier than disabling options.

@ JMT214

I unfortunately i hope you were spaming corvettes and ran into a couple of mines and almost lost all of them. That would be funny. 

I use the cheap corvettes as suicide minesweepers. Considering you can get five corvettes for about the same price as one mine cluster, and each corvette can take at least a few mines, they make a pretty good tradeoff to protect your heavier ships.

Its actually fairly easy to clear mines now with a titan. Set a scout to hold position, tell it to move fairly close to the mine, and the titan will pop them extremely quickly. Don't manually order your scout to use the ability, its much faster just to send them near some mines and let the autocast do the work.

Another bonus with using the titan is that the mines give you pretty good exp for it.

Well, I'm focusing on early game raids before a Titan can launch. Once you get an Ankylon out the gate, mines aren't as big a priority for me. It's the early attacks where every ship counts and mines are a hassle.

I've been annoyed since Entrenchment that you had to basically fly scouts around manually in order to clear things, because it's so annoying that I'd rather stab myself with a fork then do it. It'd be great if they had an "auto clear mines" command like auto explore.

Well they will clear mines by themselves... slowly. It's just much faster to get as close to the minefield as possible in order to reveal the maximum number of mines at once for your flak/fighters/titan. I used to think that way when I tried to manually use the ability rather than manually use the scout, but once I realized the former worked better its not so bad... though Advent mines are a huge pain still.

150 mines means 1500 points of experience for the taking

Great way to level up a titan, just have a scout moving with it and the rest will happen by itself

Always works for me, remarkably well infact. Only problem i have is any deffenses nearby are smart enough to focus fire on your scouts even if you have a bigger target nearby. also just make a small specialist group of 3 scouts and 3 flack frigs(or eqiv). Highly effective early game mine clearer.

I actually saw them doing it just now during a game. It does work, eventually. You can kind of leave the scout there after clearing the other defenses and it'll eventually get the job done, but it's pretty slow.

I get that they are clearable, but the mechanism for clearing is so slow. This occured during the "mop up" phase of the game and the mines were packed so tight we couldn't even get close to the planet to attack. My buddy was running a TEC defensive Titan (loayalist?) and he just started plowing through eventually. Even so, it made the end of the game excessively long. 

If you move the scouts yourself near the mines its actually pretty quick. It is still annoying if every planet you hit requires clearing

The real annoying problem for me is the homing mines (advent) it is very dificult for disable, because the range of the scout is the same of the mines, so you most disable it with so much caution .

With TEC and Vasari mines, just put the scout near in old-position with some fleet and see how the mines disappears in the gravity well  .

But i think is no necessary put a switch.

I hate how a scout only clears a small area when you have them on auto-attack and auto-reveal-mines. Some players/AI really love mines and I really can't be bothered to micromanage scouts in 5 different gravity wells just to clear the mines...

Haha, wait till someone gets the ingenious idea to mine the next sun. That well can be filled with 500 of them .

advent loyalist  carriers can take over mines to now

teaming scouts with flak can help speed up the mine clearing.

edit: I thought the massive mine behavior was fixed in Diplomacy.  Perhaps an alternative to disabling mines would be a lower limit on how many can be placed in a gravity well so you have to be more strategic about where you place them.  I actually observe the AI doing this, placing mines around key structures.  Would 5-7 mines fields be reasonable?  Has anyone tried something like this in a mod?

someone mentioned a small group of scouts and flaks - that works, but you can also speed things along by using navpoints.  Click a location near the mines using the mouse and the shift key and then move to the next location, etc etc.  Then let them do the thing they do.  They will more in the preset pattern detroying mines as they go.

I also use the same tactic to set mines when I use the Advent and Vasari.

This. I don't think they make the fights any harder, just more annoying. The mines did not really change the outcome of the battle, they just made cleaning up the grav well slower after I had already won the planet.