Author Topic: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution  (Read 22669 times)

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[RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
All you wanted was a new life somewhere in the wild and unregulated areas outside of UEF control. As a member of the Flying Pumpkins, you hoped to leave your inglorious past behind. But how long can you stay neutral when civil war knocks at your front door?

This story is about those people that get caught in between when empires collide and great armies fight their wars. This is about the survival of those you love and need the most. About those who sweat and bleed next to you when the going gets tough.

Follow the path of Andrew "Vega" Polly, trying to survive in a system that is slowly fading into chaos. With only a few people at his side, he's trying to persevere in the war zone when the GTVA enters Sol and starts its attack on the UEF. Meet new friends, make peace with your past, fight the rising threat of a new and powerful militant organization and grasp the opportunity to get things right, finally.

After 7 months of work and many many stupid questions in the forum, I'm finally able to give something back to the community.

Bomb3rman productions proudly presents:



Welcome to my first finished campaign :)

The story of this campaign is loosely based on Blue Planet, though I tried to be as correct as I could be with the dates and background stories. It takes place within the 18 months before the GTVA captures Jupiter, shortly after the GTVA arrived in Sol.

What do you need for this campaign to work?

Must have:

- I'm using FS2 Open 3.7.4. I always used SSE2.exe so I have no idea if there is a problem if you use another, this is the one I recommend.
- Blue Planet complete, older version. Download-Link: http://www.mediafire.com/folder/6lmw0ioq6ynvl/bpcomplete

 I used the Bpcomplete mod to create this mission and also used their ship models, so this is definitely needed.
- As it is needed for Blue Planet: The MediaVPs 2014: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86475.0

Campaign download link:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yx5ep9qj0mrggwq/Friends_and_Foes.rar -> UPDATED version released!

It's 340 mb when it's packed as a RAR-file,  ~ 803 mb unpacked.

Installation instructions:

Extract the RAR-file and put the "Friends and Foes"-Folder within your Freespace 2 folder. Then use your launcher (I recommend the wxlauncher, http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=67950.0) and activate the "Friends and Foes"-Mod. The bpmod and the MediaVPs 2014 should automatically be activated with it.

Then start the game, go to the campaign room and activate "Friends and Foes".

I hope this works for you. Since I'm relatively new to all of this, creating the vp.file was a pain in the a**, but I finally managed to get it done. I tried to download and install the files, didn't have a problem with it.

The campaign consists of 13 missions, I recommend playing on medium for a challenge (I usually play at medium and think it's quiet challenging, though I just might suck in a cockpit  :P). Estimated playing time is about 4 to 5 hours.

So have fun and thanks for reading, give me a feedback if you like, I'm thinking about a sequel right now ;)

And now some screenshots:



















Credits:

The Blue Planet Team

Black Wolf
IronBeer
c914
SolCommand
Betrayal
Starman
ktistai228
Mant   
Aldo_14
Galemp
Turambar
Shivan Hunter
Fightermedic

Thanks to all of you great modders out there, without you, this would not have been possible. (A more detailed list can be found inside the "Friends and Foes" folder.)


(I can't believe it, I almost managed to stick to my schedule  ;))
« Last Edit: May 22, 2020, 07:17:52 am by bomb3rman »

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Nicely done! :yes:

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Gratz. :nod:

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Wow! That was great! A campaign in the true spirit of War in Heaven. A real treat, and a must-play if you need something for your War in Heaven fix while you wait for act 4. It took a few missions for me to warm up to it, but once it got going it really sucked me in.

There were a few things I noticed, of course, but overall was wonderful.

Spoiler:
In the second mission, there are quite a few distant friendly transports and so forth which jump in and play arrival music, but the regular music doesn't stop, making them play on top of each other awkwardly. none of them appeared to actually be relevant to the mission so I think they should simply have their arrival music turned off?

Overall, could benefit from checkpoints. There were several difficult parts which came at the end of long missions. I know they're a pain to implement, but it's frustrating to repeatedly play back through the early parts.

In two thirty-eight, make it less obvious that the transport is guardianed! I got it to 15% at least 30 seconds before it hit the Florida! In general I prefer to give large special hits in lieu of guardian whenever possible, and it might work here? There are several possible ways to fix it, but it's rather immersion-breaking if you get to that point.

I don't think this one is your fault, but two missions, both with command briefings, but no regular briefings (when you have to defend the sanctus from gefs the first time, and defending it while being repaired the second), the music playing during the command briefing would continue into the mission and play at the same time as the regular music! In fact, I could only get the music to stop by quitting the game completely.

I was unfamiliar with many of the strikecraft used, so I couldn't identify them visually, and many of them only have "OC Wing" as their class, making it difficult for me to determine bombers from fighters.

Second-to-last mission, make it less obvious the Invictus' beams are guardianed! It might be sort of my "fault" for being abnormally prepared, but I brought a pair of scalpels, and as soon as it showed up, I made a beeline for it (thinking of the first time it shows up and I had to do something similar) and easily brought both of them to 54% well before the Akebono arrives. Maybe bring the cruisers more towards its front, so they can discourage a frontal attack?

 

Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Hey, congrats! I wish you many more successful FRED projects, good sir.  :nod:

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Definitly going to play this :P. Congratulations!
Exile | Shadow Genesis | Inferno | Series Resurrecta  | DA Profile | P3D Profile

Proud owner of NyctiShipyards. Remember - Nyx will fix it!

All of my assets including models, textures, skyboxes, effects may be used under standard CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

 

Offline Darius

  • 211
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Ok! About halfway through the campaign and it's really starting to hit its stride.

A few random thoughts whilst playing so far:

It's such a simple thing but having the same fiction and briefing music. I didn't know that having the same music meant it would keep going when exiting the fiction viewer! Makes the progression seem much more natural and flows so much better.
The characters and ships are really starting to grow on me after a few missions.

Spoiler:
Treasure Hunt II is fiendishly difficult. Those Scimitar-X fighters with the missile pods are a handful, and I can never take down enough of them quickly enough to save Sid from the Gef cruiser. I had to cheat my way through that mission. Also noticed the music bug in that mission.

I really, really enjoyed the set piece in Sunrise.

Those small gef fighters (ShivanHunter's Electron) were fun little things to dogfight. Coincidentally, I was planning to use the Electron as a converted mining scouter/now space superiority fighter in the next release of the modpack. It seems we both had similar ideas!

I noticed the comms anim for ?Nails having a GTVA cap. Not too big a deal, I put it down to him acquiring it from someone.

Final thoughts after I finish the campaign.  :yes:

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Hello and thank you all for your kind replies :) I'm very happy that you like it.

I'm using the anti-spoiler method to give you the answers as well, don't want anyone to read more than he should ;)

I'm very busy right now due to exams, but one day I'll find time to bring up an updated version of the campaign because of your thoughts, I promise.

@ Asteroth:

Spoiler:
Thanks, I forgot to set the "no arrival music" flag on some ships.

Yes, checkpoints might be useful. But since I'm quiet new to all of this, I didn't want to mess around with these scripts. I might look into this one day, some missions could really benefit from checkpoints.

The problem in Two-thirty-eight is that the transport has to hit the Florida. When I just use more hitpoints, there a chance that it might blow up before that. I used guardian as a compromise. I don't know any other way, maybe more hitpoints and a lower guardian percentage...

I'm not happy with the music bug, too. Maybe I take out the music for the two command briefings completely.

In some missions, I might change some of the "OC Wing" to "OC Fighter" and "OC Bomber", I think this will help.

To put the Ancamnas more in front is a way in the second last mission, maybe I give the player another directive to distract him from the beam turrets. But you have a point here.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughts!

@ Darius:

Spoiler:
The main weapons of the Ancamnas is the fusion mortar at the bottom. It can deliver a huge amount of damage. If you take it out soon, the Vespira/Sid should be able to survive longer. Strange that you found it so hard, I never experienced this. What difficulty are you playing at? You can also give orders to your comrades, order one to disarm the Ancamna. But keep an eye on the Salamanca as well, a few fighters have orders to attack her directly.

Thanks for the flowers about the set piece  :lol: :yes:

Yeah the Electorns are hard to hit in a dog fight, I gave them a little bit of higher verlocity to make it harder. They take some time to be destroyed. I hope I didn't use them too often because at a certain point they were going on my nerves :P

LOL I didn't recognize the GTVA cap :) But let's just say he aquired it somewhere, he's a strange guy, you know ;)

So thanks for playing and I hope you had fun!

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Hi,

congrats to this campaign  :yes:

Unfortunately, I cannot go further when asked to destroy "that" transport. It is stuck at 15%. Using Ubuntu 14.04 64bit ans wxlauncher. Doesn't work with both 3.7.4 and 3.7.5.

Ideas?

 

Offline SF-Junky

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Am I the only one with troubles here? I'm getting error msgs from mission 2 on that it can't find ship classes. I checked this and in mission 3 there is a UEFg Purusha. In bpcomplete, however, there is ony a Purusha (without the UEFg prefix).

 :confused:

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Hallo.

@praeseodym:

I use the spoiler so that no one has to read it if he doesn't want to:

Spoiler:
Since this mission is just a dream and this happened several years before you play it, you can't destroy the transport because you didn't destroy it completely in the past.

It is guardianed at 15 % and the destruction is not necessary to complete the mission. Shoot it down to this 15 %, then wait what happens ;)

Or did you try this and the mission didn't end itself after the next "events"? I'm trying to figure out if there's a problem in the mission, because no one else reported this until now.

And if you go on with the campaign: Don't wonder, sometimes subsytems or ships are guardianed as well, so try to go on playing, sometimes the problem solves itself :)

@ SF-Junky:

Hallo. Strange, I didn't change anything within the bp ships... if I open FRED and look at the ship list provided by BPcomplete, I have the UEFg Purusha there. Didn't change their name or something. Do you maybe have an older version of BP where the ships was called different? I'm really surprised about this problem...

EDIT: In case anyone else also experiences the problem: I talked with SF-Junky via PM. He had an older version of BP. By replacing the core.vp within the bpcomplete folder with a recent version from the BP-thread linked to above, the problem seems solved. They seem to have renamed the ships in one of the versions, this could have caused the problem. Use a new one, then it should work.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2017, 06:52:22 am by bomb3rman »

 

Offline procdrone

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Spoiler:
Alright, so just made an attempt at your campaign, and oh boy I got wrecked. barely scraped through the first mission, second did ok, but the third one totally messed me up with the pulse and AAF beams on the Hyperions. How about beam protecting the player for the disable op? I was completely sent flying, and with the older fighter models, getting out of the dead-zone area is almost impossible, with low boost speed, and these pulses and beams  :eek2:

Nitpick. In mission one, GTVA ships do not hail you, do not pursue you. As we know from fall of Artemis station, GTVA exclusively targetted convoys fleeing the area. It does not make any sense to GTVA just ignore a poorly armed convoy now (which makes it a valid military target as per Beta-Aquilae convention.) Suggestion. Maybe make the GTVA arrive a little later,  when the Transports are closer to the gate. Or even a little further away. This way pursuing GTVA ships/fighters wouldn't be able to catch up and would simply not bother. But a mention of this would be nice, either from GTVA (comms either coded or decoded about pursuing the freighters), or from the freighters themselves.

Music is a complete chaos (mission 2). You used ambiance music that isn't supposed to be lopped, and the cutoff at the end sounds rather bad in my tastes. Arrival music flags all over the place. Man can't focus on the conversations.

Like others, I've also noticed GTVA helmets on some civies. Was little weird. To stay lore friendly, you could implement some dialog about getting it with some boasting crap bull**** story, or anything to justify him having it, even if not real.

Also. Escort List is a little mess on its own. You shouldn't put non-essential mission ships in there. They might be important story wise, but completely unimportant mission wise, docked away clicks away. Also, putting the wing leader on mission 2 on the escort list would be nice to orient around this target rich environment.

I might be a lill picky, but I've observed the battle in mission 3 between UEF and GTVA.
Ship deployment and formations seem to be left alone to the AI, which does little justice to UEF frigates that specialize on long range engagements.  I would certainly not leave any capital ship action to AI. In my humble opinion, AI only manages the FS1 era battles between cruisers that mostly rely on laser batteries. Any other engagement just looks weird IMHO. Ships turn around themselves at weird angles and rarely play to their strengths.

Also. I've noticed that all of GTVA and UEF ships are named unknown. While it might make sense for GTVA ships, that civilian ships can't read through their EM/IFF, that drops little weird on UEF ships. Fleet vessels should have strong IFF identifications, and while civilians wouldn't know much about them in general, Earth produced computers shouldn't have much issues to pick up and read that signal.

Ill surely leave more opinions if I manage to get deeper into your campaign.

EDIT: P.S. Im running the mod fine on a first bpcomplete release that aired. Never got myself to redownload it with all the new patches etc so I guess that isn't a problem. Maybe its some weird FSbuild? Im playing using FS2 Open 3.7.4 (RC2) SSE2.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2017, 01:30:51 am by TheHound »
--Did it! It's RELEASED! VeniceMirror Thread--

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
So I just went through this. The story was good and following a more 'neutral' side in the conflict struggling with the effects of the war rather than fighting it directly was  pretty interesting. The fiction entries and Cbriefs were a good read despite the frequent grammar and spelling errors, which didn't really take me out of the experience too much.
I liked your use of FuryAI with dynamic goals, it's more engaging to fight enemies who fight back and use the same tactics you might instead of just rolling over and letting you shoot them.
That said, I think this campaign had some pretty big flaws on the mission design side. sooo..
WARNING: HARSH CRITICISM BELOW
Hidden Text: Show
Your use of guardianing is extremely obvious. Many great campaigns use guardianing to prevent the player from blowing certain ships up but most of them try to hide it much better. 'That transport' goes down to the 15% threshold extremely quickly after you're ordered to shoot it, often leaving you with 30 seconds of nothing to do but watch the scripted sequence. It might've been better if the distance it had to travel was shorter or if the transport started going much faster after being shot at.
You could've also ordered the player to disable it, which would cause the engine failure and the player would be given a hold fire order. Only when it was too late would the player be ordered to destroy it. The scripting would still be obvious if you were trying to make it obvious but for anyone 'playing along' it wouldn't be too jarring.

In Mission 7 the suicide transports warp in too far away and can easily be brought down to the 1% guardian before they collide with the Karuna. You could've made them tougher, faster, or just let them explode and given them a big visual shockwave. That way when you sabotage the Karuna's systems you can claim they got taken out by the shockwave, you don't need to physically ram a ship to deal damage if your transport is filled with explosives.

In that same mission the player is completely invulnerable. I get it, you're sent into a massive furball with tons of enemy fighters and flak everywhere, trying to survive that would be extremely challenging. But maybe if you've designed a mission the player can't survive it would be better to tweak it and give the player more room to do things rather than straight up make them invulnerable.

I've also got some issues with your use of waved attacks and needlessly long missions. Mission 9 for example could be half as long and it would be much better for it. There are long parts where ships just fly to waypoints as you defend them against multiple waves of strikecraft. And at any moment a single mistake can get you killed or get a fragile transport/freighter killed and end the mission. Without checkpoints these long missions just become about very conservative flying and learning where the enemies come from. If you're going to give enemies a weapon like the Dart which has no lockon time, deals really high damage, and can be snapped off at point-blank range for a near instant kill then maybe you don't need quite so many of them. I like the feel of every enemy being potentially lethal just by themselves but that starts to fade when you're just going through multiple waves. You kinda just have to accept that sometimes you'll get instakilled by darts from 100m or less and either never go for close-range dogfights or 'roll the dice'.

And finally, the music. You're using a really good set of tracks from the BP modpack. But you're really heavily overusing the 'big epic battle' tracks. You don't need epic music blazing away as you just fly waypoints. It cheapens the effect of these tracks when they're being constantly used for everything from flying waypoints to just small skirmishes. I think more use of ambient tracks and low-key battle tracks would make moments where that epic music starts up much more effective.


I'm sorry if this comes off as bashing. I understand this is your first campaign and it's pretty good for a first effort. I just wanted to give you some areas where you could improve.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
So, after playing the campaign I can say some things. One of them is that this campaign is really fine, I liked the plot and all of the fiction that you wrote. The missions are also pretty good, especially when you consider that they are the FIRST ones that you made (released).
But to point out some things in the missions themselves:
Hidden Text: Show
Mission 1:
Is the music from Freespace 1 deliberately there?
And you've got a pretty strange depart path for the transports... I thought they were going to use the gate.

Mission 2:
The medical vessel screams "we can't take much more" when its hull is at 97%... I suppose it's just a bad choice of words.
And I can hear a message "they're powering up their jump drives" when I'm just finishing the second spyboat...

Mission 3:
For some reason, the boarding transport speeds up to 300+ on its way to dock, not sure what's the problem. I can give a screenshot if necessary.
If you manage to destroy the second cruiser first, the messages get messed up.

Mission 4:
Except the obvious problem with guardianing the transport, I recall there being a funny little side effect before in the mission: When you pounded the transport it got really spinning around. I mean, not a glitch, I think a sort of explosion effect did this, but damn, this looked pretty realistic.
As for the guardianing problem, I have a few options:
a) Make the transport jump in closer to the station, with damaged engines, and when the player is close enough, send the message that they repaired them and are going to dock the station. If properly timed, player shouldn't even have the time to bring it down to around 50%,
b) When the transport's crew starts screaming, you can just lock player's weapons with a message "****... I can't do this. I can't!". And then the transport loses flight control.
And mix it anyhow you like with other options.

Mission 7:
A minor tiny little problem, but the entire drive assembly of the frigate just magically reappears. Is there a way to "extinguish" engine flames? Because it could be of use here.

Mission 10:
Are you anticipating that the Deimos gets disabled? Because I could have tried it...

Now, some other things I noticed:

You could have used the new Apollo model, released recently.
The music problems seem prevalent only if you set a track for fiction viewer, but none for command briefing.
I have a LARGE FPS problem everytime the mission plays out near Enigma... Yea, my PC is pretty bad for such hardcore shadow rendering... but that's 20 FPS with 30% GPU and CPU usage. Anyone could explain? Because I'm kind of puzzled. Maybe MSI Afterburner shows something wrong?
In the third mission, I had a pleasure to watch a refitted Sanctus beat the crap out of two Tev corvettes (Chimera and Bellerophon) on its own. It only needed to not be in their forward cone :P And it was left with 50% HP after the battle...
The player's invulnerability seems to be there in quite a few missions, what for? You've tested how things go and forgot to remove it?
And it also gets a bit annoying at some point - the default loadout is nearly always something useless. Like Scimitars when you have Uriels/Kents. Or an Uhlan with two Vulcans... Come on.

...You also tend to throw really ridiculous amounts of enemies at the player. IIRC, I finished half of the missions with my kill counter nearing 30.

And some tips for the harder missions:
Hidden Text: Show
Mission 3: You can actually kill both cruisers. You just need to have a bank of six Paveways and a support ship. The rule is simple: when the first one arrives, be about 3 klicks away from it and have a fine look at its engines. Then just full burn towards it while spamming Paveways at the engine. If the missiles are launched in a way they hit the target roughly at the same moment, it's PD can't really shoot down all of them and usually about two reach the target.
Get the support ship, rearm, repeat with the second cruiser. After that, you've got a lot of time to disarm the beams.

Mission 7:
I suppose the best way to protect all of the transports is to just order everyone to attack any target, and pilot a Kentauroi with some serious close range firepower. My suggestion is Maul + Hellfire. You just need to break down formations of Scimitars (as other fighters aren't that big threat to the transports).
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 

Offline Darius

  • 211
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
As an aside, the Sanctus#Mk2 is supremely powerful in its current state and will get a balance pass in the next update.
Cutting down the point defense guns to roughly half, for one.
Likely decreasing the hitpoints, for another.

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Also the next update will probably completely break this mod due to numerous ship renames, subsystem renames and changes, and different assets. So it's going to need another pass to be playable with the next BP patch.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Wow, a lot of answers in a short time, I'm trying to go through all of this :) But thanks to all of you for your reviews, and first of all: I'm not taking any of this personally, so don't worry, I wanted to have feedback and I don't think that your critics are "bashing". Really, I don't.

@ TheHound:

Spoiler:

1. Look at the help provided by MitoPL a few posts below yours. The key in this mission are the Paveways. With them you can stay out of the range of the pulse weapons/flak and take your shots at the beam weapons (recommended to just finish the mission) or as MitoPL said at the engines (for the bonus goal). If you managed to get the Canberra out of the first mission at 100 % hull, you can fly an Uhlan, being able to carry the paveways as well but it might get a little easier this way. So concentrate on the beams, use the paveways. This should help. You can also give additional anti subsystem weapons to your wingmen, what I really recommend! You should change their loadout in the coming missions very often, the standard loadout won't make things easier.

2. The fall of Artemis Station takes place much later. It's 2385, only a few weeks after the GTVA arrived. I don't think that it's logical in a military way to chase every little convoy while you're still trying to gain a foothold in the system. These ships are right now very unimportant for the GTVA, so why bother with them? Your critic might be good if it were later, but not right now. That's why they're leaving you alone, at least until you fly towards them, which you shouldn't ;) I just think everything else would be a waste of military ressources given the current state of the war.

3. The point with the music has been noticed, I know what you mean. I will look into it. The same is with the arrival music.

4. Yeah the cap Nails is wearing... I'll look into it ;)

5. Escort list: You're right, I'll change a few things.

6. M3 battle: Yes, I used the battle just as some background engagement. But since it seems to be so important for some people, I might look into the names of the UEF ships and the behaviour of the capital ships during the battle a bit more. Maybe I can get a better choreography out of it.

Quote
EDIT: P.S. Im running the mod fine on a first bpcomplete release that aired. Never got myself to redownload it with all the new patches etc so I guess that isn't a problem. Maybe its some weird FSbuild? Im playing using FS2 Open 3.7.4 (RC2) SSE2.

Well, SF-Junky told me that he got it to work by replacing the core.vp, so I thought it might help others, too.

So, thanks for your feedback and I hope you can enjoy the rest of the campaign. Since you had problems at mission 1, which difficulty are you playing on? I thought 1 was one of the easiest missions, so probably you'll run into trouble if you keep playing on this difficulty level through the whole campaign. From my point of view, playing on medium is challenging. So maybe try 2nd run?

@FrikgFeek:

Quote
The fiction entries and Cbriefs were a good read despite the frequent grammar and spelling errors, which didn't really take me out of the experience too much.

Since I'm not a native speaker, I might get a beta tester for future missions to help me out with this.

Spoiler:

The guardian problem has been mentioned before, so I will look into this and try to find a "smarter" solution.

The idea with the explosion of the suicide transports in M 7 is quiet good, so maybe I'll use this to make their attack a little bit more "realistic".

As mentioned by MitoPL as well: DAMN! I really forgot to take out the invulnerable flags in M 7 and M 12. This really shouldn't have happened. I will look into this soon and see if I have to rebalance the mission.

Maybe I change the loadout of several enemies because of the dart problem, you're right here. But especially in M 9 there is no real need to defend the Salamanca and the Vespire. Or did you mean M 7 (Sunrise), where you have to escort the Freighters. This mission could be a bit shorter, here you're right.

And I will have a look into the music, maybe I change some tracks.

But thanks for your feedback ;)

@ MitoPL:

Spoiler:
M 1: I don't know which music is from FS 1, is that a problem? I just ooked through the various options.
So maybe the transports should depart closer to the gate? I didn't see a problem so far...

M 2: The medical vessel should get another message, you're right. But the spyboats??? How fast were you? I mean they are supposed to be attacked after the wings are gone, so I thought the message would fit.

M 3: I don't know what's causing this high speed of the boarding pod, but I could make it slower with a waypoint and cap-waypoint speed...
I never thought of someone who attacks/destroys the second cruiser first, I'll look into the messages and give them an "or is destroyed" to make it better. You're just acting in unexpected ways :P

M 4: The spinning comes from the ship-maneuver sexp. This was some real hard work to get the movements right, great you appreciate it :)
And thanks for the options, b) is quiet good!

M 7: That's a good question. I'm not that familiar with effects, though...

M 10: Well the destruction is anticipated as another possibility, using the Uriel with the Archer would be the easiest way I guess to disable it, then the Sanctus would do the rest.

The other Apollo model: I remember that I wanted to use it, but had some problems. I'll think about it.

Is there any way to set a music just for the command briefing? I thought using the briefing tab is necessary.

Invulnerability: Was a mistake, will be changed soon.

The loadout: Well the starting ships are the ships they own, so this is their "standard". I thought it would be good for the players to be able to choose from a variety, didn't think that this was so annoying.

The FPS Drop: Well the Enigma missions are the ones with the most objects... This could be a reason, additionally I think there is the biggest collection of asteroids. They seem to be hardware demanding, at least that's my guess.

I didn't think that these were too many enemies/waves. I have the feeling you're just a better palyer than most of us here, since you come up with certain scenarios I didn't anticipate. During my tests, my wingmen were taking out more enemies so I almost never had this high kill count.

Thanks for the information about the coming update and maybe f***ing up the mod when changing things. I'll see if I can get this to work without BP by taking the models/tables and putting it into my mod, just to be safe. Is there a specific date until this should be done?

So thank you all, you're really helping here!
« Last Edit: June 01, 2017, 07:54:28 am by bomb3rman »

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
Ooops, I meant mission 8, where you have to defend some boarding pods and later freighters from waves of fighters that have darts and hellfires. Those things, combined with the flag that lets the AI rapdfire dumbfires makes it a rather difficult mission as only 1 fighter getting through can wreck a fragile boarding pod in 3-4 seconds.

I was on Insane/reality and I was still getting kills into the high 20s or low 30s in the later missions. Some of these missions have quite a few targets.
That's not a bad thing by itself, I mean I got 40 kills in 'Delenda Est', but it starts to become a bit tedious and repetitive when you don't have good 'breakpoints' between large battles but instead have a constant drizzle of waved attacks.

@MitoPL If you've got an AMD card you should turn off shadows if you want decent FPS. For some reason they cause an abysmal FPS drop on AMD hardware, probably because their OGL drivers are crap.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2017, 10:11:57 am by FrikgFeek »
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
If you want to just go for the beams on the cruisers, that's the simplest thing on Earth (see what I did there?). Just move to a very narrow cone in front of the cruiser and spam at the beams. I suggest Paveways here too, but Dirk is the second best weapon to hit it, since it has a fairly big range of about 1,5km and does some nice subsystem damage. If you want though you can just get up close and go for primaries and dumbfires. Just watch out for flak on your way out. And take into consideration that the cruiser is moving forward.

As for the battle at Mission 3, since it's only a few weeks into the conflict, I highly doubt that either side had made their military doctrines against each other like we see after the fall of Jupiter. So I suppose that disorganised furball is even not that strange (although I didn't see any Tev fighters).

The way I moved a new Apollo model into my FSPort is just grabbing a proper .pof with maps and replacing them, leaving names of maps unchanged, but changing model name to the old one... That works there perfectly. I suppose the problem could be inside the table file.

The music from Freespace 1 isn't a problem - I just was wondering if it isn't a bug related to my VERY messy mod installation methods. And I *think* that the transports should depart inside the gate. It's a gate! :D

How fast was I with the spyboats? Well, that's thanks to Fury's AI - since I can at least partially trust my wingmen to not just instantly die, what would happen with retail AI, I'm usually taking a few shots at the fighters while I make a fly-by (that usually consists of some hive missile spam) and then go for the vital objective. And after that's done, go to clean up whatever is left in the battlezone. I must admit that wingmen give some nice cover. The same goes for capturing the pirate cruiser, just ignore the fighters (usually dead in like a minute) and disarm the bastard.

Just make a variable like "CruisersOut" with initial value of 0, and just add 1 to it when any of the cruisers jump or explode. And transmit a message based on the variable's value.

The large amount of enemies is... Well, at some point kinda cheap. I mean, both sides of the conflict have limited resources and manpower - look at the situation at Enigma. Some 20ish fighters, nothing spectacular. And the enemy, although reckless and treating people like tools, and supported by GTVA, throws total of hundreds of fighters and dozens of cruisers at Enigma's defenders. Where did they get so much stuff? I understand that the campaign has to have the feeling of being overwhelmed, but I'd expect such waves of everything from Shivans, not people.
I don't say that it's that bad - dogfights in BP aren't boring when compared to typical FS2 escort mission - but kinda illogical.

@FrikgFeek: I also tried this with shadows off. The FPS gain is visible, but not big. About 5 average. I feel like I should have tested it with a non-PBR build or some settings toned down, but meh. Too lazy.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 
Re: [RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution
FrikgFeeK:

Quote
Ooops, I meant mission 8, where you have to defend some boarding pods and later freighters from waves of fighters that have darts and hellfires. Those things, combined with the flag that lets the AI rapdfire dumbfires makes it a rather difficult mission as only 1 fighter getting through can wreck a fragile boarding pod in 3-4 seconds.

Yeah I should look at the loadout of the fighters, maybe I should give them more Javelins, they don't do that much damage to freighters and can't be fired that quickly...

MitoPL:

Quote
As for the battle at Mission 3, since it's only a few weeks into the conflict, I highly doubt that either side had made their military doctrines against each other like we see after the fall of Jupiter. So I suppose that disorganised furball is even not that strange (although I didn't see any Tev fighters).

Well I could do a little choreography here, though it should be a bit of chaos, I think so, too. There actually are a few fighters for both sides, maybe the fighters of one side got shot down early on...

Quote
The large amount of enemies is... Well, at some point kinda cheap. I mean, both sides of the conflict have limited resources and manpower - look at the situation at Enigma. Some 20ish fighters, nothing spectacular. And the enemy, although reckless and treating people like tools, and supported by GTVA, throws total of hundreds of fighters and dozens of cruisers at Enigma's defenders. Where did they get so much stuff? I understand that the campaign has to have the feeling of being overwhelmed, but I'd expect such waves of everything from Shivans, not people.
I don't say that it's that bad - dogfights in BP aren't boring when compared to typical FS2 escort mission - but kinda illogical.

You have a point here, maybe I should look into the battle for Enigma as well, trying to make it a bit better with less cruisers etc ;)

EDIT: The first updated version has been released: Several suggestions were implemented (including the "invulnerable player" in M 7 and M 12).
« Last Edit: June 04, 2017, 03:43:11 pm by bomb3rman »