Greetings...
The concept of the land mine and other blocking terrain effects is actually quite ancient. Of course it hasn't always been deployed using JUST simple explosives, That's a fairly recent improvement to an otherwise very old idea in warfare.
The Caltrop is probably the simplest and earliest example of mining warfare. The ancient Chinese used them extensively.
Abatis is another example - Hidden Trash and poles set with spikes and other nastiness. Pit Traps, trip traps, and wire.
Of course in the early days, fire was a common tool in warfare, and trench lines filled with oil were a common defense. The Foss in front of Constantinople by land for example... The Moat of early castles is a simplistic form of blocking terrain and can be considered just as effective as any minefield.
Covered collapsable pits filled with stakes and disiesed with feces (AKA Pungy Sticks) is an Idea SO ancient, that the US military had almost completely forgotten about it when they encountered it yet again in South East Asia...
But the idea and the PURPOSE of a minefield is NOT to damage the enemy or to deny them the terrain, but simply to slow them down in the grand tactical sense. They are NOT a strategic weapon, nor do I think they should be included as a unit in Civ, as any real effect they might have is already built into the game. The denial of roads and rails in enemy territory is equivilent.
But I suppose if you DO want to include them, here's a more realistic progression:
There is absolutely NO point in NOT giving them movement points (just as there is no point in having them anyway - a regular military unit is far more useful, much more capable and a heck of alot more functional)
Available at the start - 0.(1.0).1.1 That's a defensive artillery strike at range 0. Invisible, (stealth does nothing). Unflagged is NOT useful. AI job should be defense, so they don't swamp you with them, but they will anyway. And if you plan on building hoards of them, you better make them not require support. Be aware that the AI wil NOT properly deploy them, cities will be full of them at the expense of more useful units.
They should get progressively more powerful as time and technology marches on.
with the defensive artillery strike getting more powerful and the firepower getting more powerful. The defense factor never really needs to be greater than 1. You simply march it out and fortify it in position. The cost over time should always stay the same, since the cost of any minefield is really always very slight economicly, but is a large investment in time and manpower, and always has been.
If you want a more powerful minefield, you just add more and build fortifications then Blockade on it. Remember that the mine should almost always lose the battle - but damage the opponent and use up it's attack and movement. So 4 of them in a stack will STOP even a Panzer or an army cold. A defense in depth. Remember that Minefields as a detail of battle have only ever worked on a strategic sense, only when the forces fighting were either small in number and the terrain of the battle was huge (Afrika 1941,42) or just the opposite - a huge number of forces in a very local area (phrokorovka a.k.a The Battle of Kursk 1943). Land density, or Unit density. That's the attack value of mining in warfare... It was estimated that the Russsian defense had deployed on average 1.7 MILLION mines per square kilometer in the Phrokorovka defense area.
Some things that have ALWAYS been true about minefields and other blocking terrain items:
Any minefield can always be cleared, unless the minefield is protected which is a contridiction in terms... The Idea is to make it expensive in TIME to clear the minefield.
There are really ONLY 2 kinds of minefields. Those that are advertised and those that are NOT. Even in WW2 - MOST Minefields were almost always advertised to the enemy - not the locations of the mines, but the fact that there WAS a minefield. Why? To get the enemy to deploy engineers to locate and clear them which could take weeks! It uses up his resources and keeps his engineers busy so they aren't looking for your UNADVERTISED minefields elsewhere.
No minefield ever won a battle.
No Minefield has ever Destroyed an enemy formation bigger than a squad. The New Panther Tanks used by the germans in the Battle of Phrokorovka were pretty much put out of action by Russian minefields. However they were NOT destroyed. Simply broken and needing repairs, thus most of them (nearly 65% among their other problems) never engaged in the battle.
Probably the most spectacular "victory" that a "minefield" has ever scored was at the Battle of Constantinople in 1453 when the Ottoman bashi bazouks attacked the walls across the Foss with siege towers. The Byzantines fired the Foss, (a huge trench filled with spiked logs, overgrown with brambles, and soaked in oil) catching the bashi in almost full strength and destroying many of the seige towers. To add insult to injury, the Byzantines then Flooded the Foss from the sea, while the bashi were trying to pick up their wounded and recover their dead. But the City fell anyway, an unlocked Gate!) and was looted and renamed Istanbul...
Mines as an explosive have been used in warfare since the early days of gunpowder. Simple buried "Bombs" with long fuses were used during the 30 years war to break up line formations of pikes. It was a surprise tactic used by Gustavus Adolphus ( the Swedish King who first deployed cannon in battle) who had ordered the ground prepared the night before the battle. His troops marched out onto the field, arrayed themselves, then simply about faced and marched a full 1/4 mile "BACK". The enemy tempted and confused marched up to meet them, not knowing that the ground was sown with hundreds of small buried kegs of powder wrapped with stones. The march out by the army was to cover the tracks of the engineers (bombadiers) to confuse the ground and press the grass down over the fuse lines (cloth tubes filled with powder), which couldn't be done the night before. When the Enemy reached the mined area, Gustavas ordered the fuses lit. Great plumes of smoke from the ground raced towards the confused enemy, not knowing what to expect. The army then turned and charged... About half of the bombs actually exploded on que, breaking and demoralizing the enemy formations, filled the air with great clouds of smoke, and scared the heck out of the enemy horse so badly that they enmass turned and uncontrolably fled the field. Some exploded during the melee, and many simply didn't explode. Gustavas had lots of powder, but the cannon hadn't arrived in time to get set up and dug in for the battle...
Explosive Mines in an automatic mode were first used enmass in WW1 along with barbed wire, artillery gas attacks and the machine gun in and defining Trench Warfare. It was also the first large scale deployments of anti-shipping mines (torpedoes). All had been used much earlier - but NOT on that scale.
The Phrase "Damn the Torpedoes - Full Steam Ahead" Commadore Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay 1898 was refering to "Mines".... (No American vessels were damaged by the Mines!)
The concept of the land mine and other blocking terrain effects is actually quite ancient. Of course it hasn't always been deployed using JUST simple explosives, That's a fairly recent improvement to an otherwise very old idea in warfare.
The Caltrop is probably the simplest and earliest example of mining warfare. The ancient Chinese used them extensively.
Abatis is another example - Hidden Trash and poles set with spikes and other nastiness. Pit Traps, trip traps, and wire.
Of course in the early days, fire was a common tool in warfare, and trench lines filled with oil were a common defense. The Foss in front of Constantinople by land for example... The Moat of early castles is a simplistic form of blocking terrain and can be considered just as effective as any minefield.
Covered collapsable pits filled with stakes and disiesed with feces (AKA Pungy Sticks) is an Idea SO ancient, that the US military had almost completely forgotten about it when they encountered it yet again in South East Asia...
But the idea and the PURPOSE of a minefield is NOT to damage the enemy or to deny them the terrain, but simply to slow them down in the grand tactical sense. They are NOT a strategic weapon, nor do I think they should be included as a unit in Civ, as any real effect they might have is already built into the game. The denial of roads and rails in enemy territory is equivilent.
But I suppose if you DO want to include them, here's a more realistic progression:
There is absolutely NO point in NOT giving them movement points (just as there is no point in having them anyway - a regular military unit is far more useful, much more capable and a heck of alot more functional)
Available at the start - 0.(1.0).1.1 That's a defensive artillery strike at range 0. Invisible, (stealth does nothing). Unflagged is NOT useful. AI job should be defense, so they don't swamp you with them, but they will anyway. And if you plan on building hoards of them, you better make them not require support. Be aware that the AI wil NOT properly deploy them, cities will be full of them at the expense of more useful units.
They should get progressively more powerful as time and technology marches on.
with the defensive artillery strike getting more powerful and the firepower getting more powerful. The defense factor never really needs to be greater than 1. You simply march it out and fortify it in position. The cost over time should always stay the same, since the cost of any minefield is really always very slight economicly, but is a large investment in time and manpower, and always has been.
If you want a more powerful minefield, you just add more and build fortifications then Blockade on it. Remember that the mine should almost always lose the battle - but damage the opponent and use up it's attack and movement. So 4 of them in a stack will STOP even a Panzer or an army cold. A defense in depth. Remember that Minefields as a detail of battle have only ever worked on a strategic sense, only when the forces fighting were either small in number and the terrain of the battle was huge (Afrika 1941,42) or just the opposite - a huge number of forces in a very local area (phrokorovka a.k.a The Battle of Kursk 1943). Land density, or Unit density. That's the attack value of mining in warfare... It was estimated that the Russsian defense had deployed on average 1.7 MILLION mines per square kilometer in the Phrokorovka defense area.
Some things that have ALWAYS been true about minefields and other blocking terrain items:
Any minefield can always be cleared, unless the minefield is protected which is a contridiction in terms... The Idea is to make it expensive in TIME to clear the minefield.
There are really ONLY 2 kinds of minefields. Those that are advertised and those that are NOT. Even in WW2 - MOST Minefields were almost always advertised to the enemy - not the locations of the mines, but the fact that there WAS a minefield. Why? To get the enemy to deploy engineers to locate and clear them which could take weeks! It uses up his resources and keeps his engineers busy so they aren't looking for your UNADVERTISED minefields elsewhere.
No minefield ever won a battle.
No Minefield has ever Destroyed an enemy formation bigger than a squad. The New Panther Tanks used by the germans in the Battle of Phrokorovka were pretty much put out of action by Russian minefields. However they were NOT destroyed. Simply broken and needing repairs, thus most of them (nearly 65% among their other problems) never engaged in the battle.
Probably the most spectacular "victory" that a "minefield" has ever scored was at the Battle of Constantinople in 1453 when the Ottoman bashi bazouks attacked the walls across the Foss with siege towers. The Byzantines fired the Foss, (a huge trench filled with spiked logs, overgrown with brambles, and soaked in oil) catching the bashi in almost full strength and destroying many of the seige towers. To add insult to injury, the Byzantines then Flooded the Foss from the sea, while the bashi were trying to pick up their wounded and recover their dead. But the City fell anyway, an unlocked Gate!) and was looted and renamed Istanbul...
Mines as an explosive have been used in warfare since the early days of gunpowder. Simple buried "Bombs" with long fuses were used during the 30 years war to break up line formations of pikes. It was a surprise tactic used by Gustavus Adolphus ( the Swedish King who first deployed cannon in battle) who had ordered the ground prepared the night before the battle. His troops marched out onto the field, arrayed themselves, then simply about faced and marched a full 1/4 mile "BACK". The enemy tempted and confused marched up to meet them, not knowing that the ground was sown with hundreds of small buried kegs of powder wrapped with stones. The march out by the army was to cover the tracks of the engineers (bombadiers) to confuse the ground and press the grass down over the fuse lines (cloth tubes filled with powder), which couldn't be done the night before. When the Enemy reached the mined area, Gustavas ordered the fuses lit. Great plumes of smoke from the ground raced towards the confused enemy, not knowing what to expect. The army then turned and charged... About half of the bombs actually exploded on que, breaking and demoralizing the enemy formations, filled the air with great clouds of smoke, and scared the heck out of the enemy horse so badly that they enmass turned and uncontrolably fled the field. Some exploded during the melee, and many simply didn't explode. Gustavas had lots of powder, but the cannon hadn't arrived in time to get set up and dug in for the battle...
Explosive Mines in an automatic mode were first used enmass in WW1 along with barbed wire, artillery gas attacks and the machine gun in and defining Trench Warfare. It was also the first large scale deployments of anti-shipping mines (torpedoes). All had been used much earlier - but NOT on that scale.
The Phrase "Damn the Torpedoes - Full Steam Ahead" Commadore Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay 1898 was refering to "Mines".... (No American vessels were damaged by the Mines!)
