The more I think about it the more I think that they do way too much damage. I mean, they instakill ships and -nothing- else in the game can do that. Sure, they're stationary but with vasari it's easy to drop a million of them and make them impossible to avoid.
Supagoat
Mines seem extremely overpowered to me (especially Vasari), but there are some ways to improve balance: - Make the ship AI smart enough to not run into them. I don't understand why, if i can see mines, my ship's can't. Or if they can, why I need to manually give them orders to go around them rather than plow right on through them - Make mines easier to clear. They take too long to shoot and it seems as though unless you're targeting them manually, ships aren'
Ok, after I posted, someone found: https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=346&AID=106943 Which means that we understand how it works... But the reason we had so much trouble figuring it out is that it just doesn't make any sense at all. I understand that everyone plays under the same rules, but at the same time this is supposed to be some kind of a model of reality... Not to mention that, as the other post says, it's not clear how building factories or labs alters the balance. Ugh.