Author Topic: Contraband  (Read 62701 times)

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Offline Rheyah

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Fifty four years ago in the Altair system, Vasudan scientists discovered remnants of a civilization we now call the Ancients.

The Second Great War came and went.  The destruction of the Capella node bought time that civilization had not previously known, but at great cost.  For ten years, the GTVA fought fire after fire with their weakened fleet, struggling to hold on to newly emergent, terrified civilian organizations driven by local warlords to doubt the protection that the Beta Aquilae Convention offered.  Vasudans returned to their religious ways in great numbers.  The Hammer of Light, once driven to extinction, re-emerged as old hatreds reignited.  As Vasudans fled into the arms of religion, Terrans found solace in an unlikely figure - the long vanished Admiral Bosch, re imagined as a martyr for a greater cause.

For a time, peace itself lay prone upon a knife edge.  A force that had faced down the greatest threat in human history was not something to be taken lightly, however.  One by one, the warlords and their personal armies were snuffed out.  The volatile cults were silenced.  The populace calmed and order returned one city at a time to GTVA space.  Terrans and Vasudans once again began to co-operate, mega-corporations began to trade openly once again and twelve years after it began, the GTVA formally ended its application of martial law on the final rebellious settlement.

Remnants of that manic time still litter known space in the form of charred hulks of old warships.  Civilian docking installations turned into military training grounds hang dead in space.  Frozen bodies float in the void between worlds, their eyes lifeless and fixed upon stars they cannot see.  The dead of three wars mingle in their final rest.

One such remnant made its home far beyond the Altair system.  Armed with little more than resourcefulness, one hell of an engineer, an appropriated asteroid base deep in the outskirts of the Oort cloud, an old NTF Fenris and whatever Great War era fighters they could rustle up, a pirate crew is about to make the score of their lives.

The trouble is, it might claim them as well.


This is something of a marker for myself as well as anyone else.  I'm developing my fredding skills in association with my writing and rather enjoyed coming up with a plot for this.  Expect missions filled with interesting dialogue, fun little asides, a branching campaign to the extent Freespace will let me get away with it, LOTS of out of date and underpowered weapons and enough engineering breakdowns to sink a Nimitz.

I hope it'll be a bit unique in amongst a lot of the high tech stuff.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2020, 06:51:22 pm by Rheyah »

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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I was always wondering about a campaign about GTVA divided on multiple independent factions. Pirates, fanatics, mercs, and... Something much bigger waiting in the darkness. Campaign in feel of Firefly or Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. Life of the outlaw. I don't know how much this vision matches Your project. I just found it cool anyway.

Good luck on Your project.
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Offline Lorric

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I'm actually intrigued by this. Yes, something different. I also like the battles to go longer than they do in FS2 with all the top weapons blowing everything apart in seconds, so I approve of the underpowered weapons. Branching too.

I wish you the best of luck!  :D

 

Offline Lepanto

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This character-driven, lower-tech setup you've got going here is intriguing, and might present a lot of plot opportunities. Personally, I'm more of a fan of the high-tech-huge-ships-lots-of-BEAMZ approach, but still, I'll be following this.
"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."
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Blue Planet: The Battle Captains: Missions starring the Admirals of BP: WiH
Frontlines 2334+2335: T-V War campaign
GVB Ammit: Vasudan strike bomber
Player-Controlled Capship Modding Tutorial

 

Offline Rheyah

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Gameplay and Mission Design

The thing that stuck with me about the original Freespace 2 campaign was the moment the Colossus overcharged her beams.  What if you didn't have an entire war effort sat behind you to repair your ship every single time it took a beating?  I just had this image of a Fenris with her back against the wall firing her main gun at five times the normal charge level and blowing out every power conduit on the ship, being reduced to drifting while her fighters desperately tried to keep her alive.  A variation on the usual "protect ship, stop it blowing up."  One of the things I'm going to try and do is use SEXPs to choreograph beam hits so they disable critical systems during battle.

My main gameplay goal in this campaign is to reverse a bit of the bad ass decay cruisers suffer throughout the games and restore a bit of the "gnats around an elephant" feeling we got the first time we played Freespace.

In Blue Planet and other mods of a similar type, this situation is taken to its logical end.  Cruisers are outdated and mostly considered gunboats - disposable assets that just exist to fire their shot and die or flee if they have the appropriate tags.  That's definitely one way to go and a valid one considering the canon thus far.  I'd like to try the opposite approach.

The little plucky Fenris you're with is going to be a proper weapons platform, considered a capital ship good and proper.  Since I'm going to be pushing this campaign in the direction of a low tech piratey duct tape and boot straps approach, that ship and other ships like her are going to be hard to kill.  Heavily armed transports are going to be a handful for a wing of fighters.  Military grade weapons are going to be a godsend, IF you can get hold of them.

 A Corvette arriving in a mission is an"Oh ****" moment.  A Destroyer is a genuine "right we need to get the **** out of here" moment.  To that end I'm going to be playing with the tbms to try and achieve this kind of balance, where an extension of combat time between capital ships and a rebalancing of the relationship between fighters and cruisers is achievable without just inflating everything's hitpoints fifty fold and giving everything a big ship flag.

My end goal on this is to allow missions time to tell the story of relatively small numbers of ships in interesting environments.  Ships will have power outages.  They will retreat from combat ala Blue Planet before they get too low and you will have to disable them by some means other than brute force.  Armed military transports will be an existential threat and something you have to plan around.  Cruisers will be proper capital ships capable of more than holding their own against a few pokey fighters.

Oh and should the GTVA show up?  Good luck.

It'll be a little different from the standard Freespace combat.  You'll feel like you're in a hokey, battle damaged fighter and taking out a cruiser will be a major event.  There will be lots of low tech ships for you to take out though and plenty of juicy transports.  Depending on how the story goes, anyway.  Hell, maybe it'll start a trend? :)
« Last Edit: July 25, 2013, 07:48:49 am by Rheyah »

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Between the Ashes (play their 2 mission demo NAU!) also seems to go for that kind of low-key route. I like your ideas so far and your plot points are really interesting. I especially like the irony of having Bosch play like a kind of martyr for a godlike cause. After all, he was the only one in FS2 who was aware of the gap between our species and the shivans.

I also appreciated your criticism of BP in the other thread, so I think you have the brains to perhaps build up something smart and interesting! Consider myself hyped :yes:


ALSO a shameless plug for my own narrative interpretation on Bosch's figure in FS2 in this thread, which could give you random ideas for your martyr characterization of him.
« Last Edit: July 25, 2013, 09:01:58 am by Luis Dias »

 

Offline Rheyah

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Okay So Where Am I Up To?

Story's pretty much mapped out.  I know where I'm going, what the characters are doing, why they are doing it and their characterisation is more or less solid.  One of the things I'm concentrating on in dialogue is to have a handful of characters aboard the pirate cruiser who you will come to rely on, discuss tactics with and even argue with given the opportunity to do so.  I want to personalise the ship.

I am squashing bugs in the mod files.  I've had to pull in a lot of external resources to get the right "feel" and not everything has gone as smoothly as I would have liked.  For example the primary weapon the player character first uses is currently unable to fire.  Think that might just be a newbie mistake.

Capital ship combat has been lengthened (on the order of a factor of two).  Blob turrets are quicker and substantially more powerful.  A cruiser can relatively overwhelm a wing of fighters now.  Bombing is much harder.

My first real test mission is about 50% complete.  It is that mission which lead me to make a proper mod for this.

In terms of where the GTVA stand, I'm using a very, very rough Blue Planet technological progression using exceptional community assets like the Titan and the Raynor though their justification will be radically different - taken from the mod pack on Freespace mods rather than BP itself.  The Deimos and a new cruiser class will be the backbone of the fleet along with refurbished old Leviathans and Vasudan warships.

In terms of where you stand, as a player, you have the following problems:

- your weapons are rubbish, pre-Second Great War rubbish for the most part.  Either old mass production weapons unsuitable for military combat or cobbled together bombs and missiles.
- your ship is..  maintained by a crew with a lot on their mind.  Expect failure.
- ships break.

Missions will be designed like that.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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That's a lot of opportunities for golden comedy moments :yes:.

 

Offline MatthTheGeek

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Remember when your Kent primaries failed in WiH ?

That's just one proof of concept for what you seem to be aiming at here.
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Offline Mongoose

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Two points for duct tape quotes!

 

Offline Lorric

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I hope that if I play this I won't end up sat there helpless like you are if you
Spoiler:
linger around too long in that one mission in Silent Threat Reborn.

 

Offline Rheyah

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Remember when your Kent primaries failed in WiH ?

That's just one proof of concept for what you seem to be aiming at here.

That style of thing - in fact in order to figure out the SEXPs for dialogue choices, I had a long, long look at how BP does it since it remains the most marvelous mission design I've seen so far.

Since the pace of combat is going to be a little slower than usual but the ships and weapons are weaker compared to capital ships, you might find depending on when this kind of error happens, you might be offered a choice to reboot one or two of several systems that failed.

Designing missions that work with this ethos is going to take a looong time by the way, but I hope to have something to show soon :)

 

Offline Rheyah

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I hope that if I play this I won't end up sat there helpless like you are if you
Spoiler:
linger around too long in that one mission in Silent Threat Reborn.

More important to me is the image of fun.  If something is unfun or too player independent then I won't put it in.  My biggest problem is going to be the difficulty.

 

Offline Lorric

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Sounds good to me.

 

Offline Rheyah

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Another blogish post to let people know what to expect given the changes I'm making to the base combat of Freespace.

Armour And You

There was one little phenomenon  that always got on my nerves.  It's a phenomenon I like to call The Quadruple Maxim Hornet Cruiser Bombardment.  Essentially four fighters would appear out of nowhere, fire a bank full of Hornets, fire a few rounds from their Maxims or whatever and whatever cruiser you were guarding was down 50%.

Which lead me to think the following.  Those cruisers are three to four hundred metres long.  They must have several hundred people on board AT LEAST.  What in the living hell are they even doing out there if 4 fighters with a few anti-fighter missiles can hole them?  It makes telling a story of a cruiser a work of immense irritation.

Blue Planet made reference to it regarding Maxim penetration and Trebuchet launches.  They quite admirably went in the direction of just admitting how stupid it looked and making it part of the plot line.  A few other mods have gone so far as having Fenris Red Shirts and expendable cruisers left right and centre.

I'm going to the opposite direction and disregarding prior canon in this and am using armour tbms to explicitly seperate out different weapon types and armours.  The aim is to do four things:

1.  Make protecting bombers and other capital ships worthwhile in dealing with smaller grades of hardened targets.  Since all weapons are capable of dealing a reasonable amount of damage (even Blob turrets, which look much more awesome now I've played with them).  Note:  I use the term "bomber" very loosely here, as people will see when they play my campaign when it's done :)

2.  Separate out unhardened targets from hardened targets.  This means I can play with freighter armour types, make certain targets easy to take out, certain targets harder to take out.  A lot of this information can be given in tech databases and dialogue cues but it should be obvious.

3.  Increase the length of capital ship combat without rewriting every single weapon tbm entry completely from scratch.

4.  Allow for more interesting types of weapon to be regulated without messing with the numbers balance.

The aim overall is to give the game time to make combat more interesting and restore a bit of the feeling we had back at the beginning of Freespace 1 where combat felt hairy, armoured freighters with escort were a nightmare to attack and required special thinking and so on.

 

Offline Lorric

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I very much like the sound of that.

I just played Operation Templar and a handful of bombers can take out a Typhon, that's ridiculous any way you look at it. A few fighters can make quick work of an Aten.

If you pull it off I might feel like messing around with your mod in FRED. I like the idea of a group of fighters seeing a cruiser as a major threat, not some big easy target. Cruisers are dangerous early FS1 with no shields and weak weapons.

 

Offline Rheyah

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The Great War, Propaganda And The People

When we analyse the changes in the GTVA, it is important to remember the differences between the two wars and more importantly, how they could be painted to the populace.

The cost of the Great War had been great.  Before the war, the loss of an Orion was considered a terrifying defeat.  The immense vessels were symbols of Terran power and their very existence as a species seemed to hinge upon their immense frames.  At two kilometres long, an Orion in a non-geosync orbit could be seen from the ground.  For the millions that lived in space based installations, their dark metal shadow represented stability and the guardian of the bright future of Earth.  The loss of the Galatea made the GTA aware of how feeble even the greatest of material science could be as a source of inspiration.  A fierce propaganda effort had swiftly silenced the loss of the Galatea.  Her wings were remembered as martyrs, her crew as heroes and her final battle as a last stand.

No one wanted the horrifying truth of the Galatea's annihilation at the hands of the Shivans to ever settle in the consciousness of its people.  Guncam footage and the accounts of her survivors were classified to the highest degree possible.  In a way, it was almost fortunate that the destruction of the Lucifer had diverted the attention of the Lost Generation so completely away from just how close they came to utter annihilation.  Reports from Vasuda Prime had been scarce.  The GTVA had yet to be formalised and the only real co-operation between the two governments was through the military.  Only years after the event did the GTA's fledgling interstellar paparazi finally air the footage taken from the orbital platforms moments before the Lucifer's main beam cannons began their thirteen hour bombardment.

The Vasudans never looked back home for inspiration.  As the humans reeled from the loss of Earth, the Vasudans took to the stars and made the void their own.  Their militaries began to trade tech.  The first beam cannons came to fruition in a Vasudan lab using Terran research staff.  The first Sobek class corvette used blended materials science derived from the remarkable Reinstrom Institute, the first truly great interstellar physics research institution.  The Vasudan penchant for reactor technology merged with Terran materials science and advanced weapons tech.  Piece by piece, the GTVA became a force that in the eyes of its populace, could contain and defeat the threat that had all but wiped them out years before.  They became confidence.  They became safety.

What made the Second Incursion so much worse than the first was the civilians.

The evacuation of Capella had come soon, but not soon enough.  As they poured through the node, the civilians brought stories with them.  Not the stories of what might have been or what could have been as had existed in the Great War, but documentary evidence.  They came with tales of heroic pilots dooming themselves against vast Shivan hordes.  They spoke in hushed, terrified tones of the destruction of the Colossus, once feted as the end solution to all war.   They passed by dead cruisers and corvettes, through debris clouds.  They witnessed flak and beam fire up close.  They saw the shadow of the Sathani, the oscillating subspace field and the vibration of Capella's outer layers as it turned the star they once called home into a traitor.

The one image that stood out above all else was surprisingly deceptive, however.  It defined how the public saw the war.

One civilian contractor piloting a small Elysium captured the moment a Deimos class corvette was torn apart by a lance of Shivan beam fire.  Though the footage has been analysed frame by frame by network journalists, experts and columnists alike, it painted an unmistakable picture.  The Shivans were death incarnate.  It was even possible to see the photon discharges of flash vapourising GTVA officers within the decks of the ignited corvette.

Fear spread like a cancer throughout the populace.  The GTVA had been founded on a military pact and the military industrial complex behind it.  It owed its very existence to the Shivan threat.  Now, with less than a third of its fleet remaining intact and half of them in dry dock undergoing desperate repair efforts, the GTVA's power base upon which it had relied so much as broken.

Politics flared on both sides of the divide.  Old hatreds reignited amongst conservatives who remembered the war with the Vasudans with hatred and derision.  How dare the GTA gamble the lives of humans in an unproven alliance with them?  Liberals took hold of a chance to finally attack the military industrial complex they despised while venting bile at the "bigoted Neo-Terrans".  The loss of so much military power resulted in a greatly reduced interstellar patrol fleet.  Crime spread with the fear in great waves.  Whole settlements went dark as wide spread looting cut power to communications.

There was no sense of heroism or of relief.  To the estranged people of Earth, they were living on borrowed time.  Nihilism began to take hold in the cultural attitudes of the populace.  Food riots on starved stations wracked by piracy resulted in over a million deaths in under two months as organised saboteurs vented entire habitats into space.  Their perpetrators were old world religious fanatics who saw the Shivans as the agents of the apocalypse.

The change was more subtle amongst Vasudans.  The Vasudan parliament found itself under both cultural and political siege - how had the Vasudan Imperium changed in thirty years?  Was the GTVA truly worth the loss of autonomy?  A people drowning in artists and philosophers had lost its spirit.  It had become savage warriors as befit a universe dripping with blood.  Was this their fate?  Were they to forever avenge their fallen homeworld, only to die defending a graveyard?  Vasuda, they argued, had died with the planet that bore their name.

Any GTVA response was sluggish at best.  Unlike the Great War, both the GTA and the PVN had born virtually equal losses fighting a defensive war in a nebula.  While their economies remained intact, their ability to project power had greatly diminished.  Worse still, agitator members of the NTF still lurked in the shadows and when the first Vasudan settlement was destroyed by a briefcase nuke, a new war loomed which the GTVA was ill prepared for.  Out of every hole poured the opportunists and vultures that pick clean all battlefields.  Pirates, mercs and criminals emerged from boltholes and struck civilian and megacorp stations in every system.  Vasudan piracy, almost unheard of prior to the Great War, became common place as civilian stations commandeered what few military grade transports they could and set about raiding nearby stations for food and water.

The greatest military alliance in the history of either species balanced on a knife edge.  With threat boards lighting up red across Terran-Vasudan space, a coherent response was needed and quickly.

 
I've thought about making FS1 capships useful myself, for a campaign I might maybe possibly try making at some point. I don't think I got far beyond deciding some of the blob turrets should be replaced with those cannon things they use in ASW, though.
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 

Offline Lorric

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It would be interesting to see how the FS1 campaign would go if you took the shields away from both sides and left the allied side (and HOL) with basic weaponry...

Wait, scratch that. I just remembered how weak Shivan fighter hulls are.

 
"Very frustratingly for the player."
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.