Author Topic: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash  (Read 6392 times)

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RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
So, inspired by this thread from so many months ago, I set about building my first releasable mission. And here it is.

I'm going to call it a beta just to cover myself. It should be mostly seamless, though there are a few things I'd like to mention:
1) It's quite a bit BOE. As such, it may brutalize your computer if played with MVPs.
2) It is compatible with vanilla FS2, MVPs 3.12, Blueplanet, or Blueplanet 2
3) It unfortunately almost plays itself on Very Easy. I recommend Normal difficulty at least.
4) I realize it's probably rough in spots, so I'd appreciate some feedback. I just wanted to get this puppy out the door already.
EDIT 1: Built and tested on a very recent nightly build, but should be backward compatible at least to 3.6.12. Inferno build required.

And now without further ado, here it is: Hecate Crash (beta)
(EDIT: Don't click that one, it's old. Here's version 1.1: http://www.mediafire.com/?5n7p9laonaqrhya)

Mission includes
Spoiler:
88 GTVA fighters and bombers
1 Hecate destroyer
1 Deimos corvette
2 GTVA cruisers

A maximum possible total of 150 Shivan fighters and bombers
1 Demon destroyer
2 Moloch corvettes
3 Rakshasa cruisers
4 Cain/Lilith cruisers
1 little surprise
And some freighters and transports!
« Last Edit: April 07, 2011, 02:12:12 pm by Scourge of Ages »

 

Offline Nemesis6

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Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
With nobody else having replied to this, I'm gonna load it up and give it a try. Unless procrastination prevents it, I'll post my impression after completing it.

Edit: I'm gonna focus on what I didn't like since you'll probably appreciate some constructive criticism, okay?

Spoiler:
Way too many enemy craft, way too many friendly, which presented some problems which I'll elaborate on later. While it was chaotic, it didn't feel tense. It was like I kind of slumped back and forth taking out beams while a lot of not-really-important stuff was going on behind me, but this might have been due to the fact that the music stopped playing for some reason on what I think was me second try. I lost a friendly ship in the back to enemies, because there was no way I could do both -- I couldn't de-beak the cruisers, save the cruiser in the back, and ward off fighters at the same time. On the same topic, later in the mission, I found out, to my horror, that for some reason, the Franklin cruiser was way, way ahead of the Hebe for some reason. In the mind-numbing grand scheme of things, I just hadn't really noticed it. I managed to save it, though. In the end, having taken out all the warships, the shivan bombers that appeared from over 10,000 meters away seemed like they were just delaying the end.

Anyway, the way I played the mission was to just load up on maxim guns and trebuchets, which didn't really seem to work. The amount of enemies and action also seemed to make the controls unresponsive at time, which was problematic because I was relying on my Maxim guns to take out threats to the Hebe.

Also, the Thanatos absolutely blindsided me on my first go-around - It didn't appear on the target list. I wasn't warned about it, and I had been operating on the Hecate's port side the whole time. It might have been mentioned in the messages, but I didn't really pay attention to them -- Too focused on the de-beaming task and the occasional fighter that crept up on me.

Now, suggestions: Cut out the freighters, cargo ships, and about half of all fighters and sentry guns present in the mission. Basically, rethinking the scale of the mission is the thing that jumps to mind as the biggest thing that could benefit this mission. It would bring better performance, more focused action, etc.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2011, 09:50:49 pm by Nemesis6 »

 
Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
Thanks! I appreciate the feedback!

First: just now, right before you posted that, I finished up version 1.1. It's a little tighter, with some little things like messaging and directives cleared up, and some ships moved around to make a bigger threat. If you haven't played this mission yet, this is the version to play: http://www.mediafire.com/?5n7p9laonaqrhya

By the way, the entire mission should only take about 10 minutes.

Now, to address Nemesis' concerns:
Spoiler:
So yeah, it's a pretty huge battle. I realized going in that the mission was going to suffer from BoE syndrome at least to some extent. I attempted to set up things so that you would have a task, that if you completed, would lead to success in the mission. I also wanted to give the impression that your task was not the only task, and that you had allies with their own jobs who were fighting for their lives as well.
I figure I could thin out the freighters and stuff, but removing too many of the fighters seems like it would take away from the scale, and therefore believability of the mission, which were the main objectives I went in with in the first place.
In conclusion, I guess there's a pretty good reason why more missions don't max out the number of ships in play. It's just not as fun as it seems like it should be. Well, I think I can consider that lesson learned.
(Just to be clear, this is not me ignoring any advice, this is me saying, "it's too late for this mission, but it won't happen again")

I'm wondering, what difficulty(ies) did you play on? For most of my tests, the Thanatos and especially the Beast seemed to be among the weakest threats.
Thanks very much for taking the time to play and comment on the mission, Nemesis, I really appreciate it.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2011, 12:29:18 am by Scourge of Ages »

 

Offline Spoon

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Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
What sad times these are when people release missions and hardly anyone takes even the time to play them.

It's a pretty good mission, it has a bunch of good things like hotkeys for your primary targets and such.
My biggest beef though is that the distances between everything are so large. Flying in an Ares just means I had to snipe everything with maxims and trebs. Freighters and a 2 stray basilisks aside, I hardly saw any of the shivans up close.
There is a bit of a task overload, with all those targets available that need debeaming all at once. I managed to win the mission in one go (medium) with the hecate only having 8% health left
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 
Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
Thanks, Spoon!

 

Offline VPR

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Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
Here's some feedback from me after playing this on medium difficulty.

The briefing while getting a lot across could have been much shorter, there's too much information and some of it the player doesn't really need to know such as who's escorting who and so I skipped most of the later screens.

Next the mission had too much to do at once with pretty much all the warships there at the start. I felt the mission would have played better if you'd had an initial guarding force then reinforcing Shivan warships arriving later in the mission. This would have allowed you to make better use of the Shivan warships by placing more tension in the mission as they came in at different positions for example. The Shivan bombers were rendered useless by the massive fighter screen. I think if the mission had two or more stages of Shivan attack it would play better, reduce the allied fighters and then you can use bombers more effectively to support each wave of warships. This would help with improving the tension and make the players job easier at dealing with all the threats.

A few other things:

No return to hanger directive at the end because it has a time delay of 5000 seconds.
Assign emptymsg.wav to the in mission messages, it makes them much more noticable.
Though not a major issue, lack of a background.

The mission wasn't bad by any means it could just use more structure to it. :)
« Last Edit: April 10, 2011, 04:42:18 pm by VPR »

 
Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
Hi, and thanks for playing!
I had been thinking of how to reduce the number of ships out at once, in accord with the previous comments, but I couldn't really figure out how to do it.
I think attack waves would work really well. Let me get on that.

 

Offline bigchunk1

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Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
I like single missions actually, just saw this thread now. Here's what I think

Spoiler:
Wow what a briefing! 13 stages. It looks like you put a lot of thought into the progress of this mission and put it in briefing format. Pretty detailed, perhaps too detailed, but it is a BOE.

The mission involved many ships. The reason I am not so wild about BOEs is that I don't have too much control over the entire mission and things just 'happen' almost chaotically. While this is closer to true combat than any other kind of mission, it makes a mission less like a game and more like a show. For example: Trying to be everywhere at once in an Aries is pretty difficult. My trebs were the first thing to go.

Speaking of show though, those bombers were great fun to watch. Sigma wing just overwhelmed that Shivan Daemon destroyer with a single bombing run. Must have been at least 8 heavy bombers total. Health dropped from 60% to 0 nearly instantly when all the Helios torpedoes impacted the portside hull. Good entertainment.   

Near the end, the Hecate was sitting at 1% for me. Is it on guardian or am I just super lucky?

Enemy fighter/bomber count seemed kind of low for such a large mission. Maybe that's a good thing.

Random errors:
Alt-J training msg 'Subspace drive recharging...' would flash multiple times after pressing Alt-J

Docking distance is somewhat low and took me some fidgeting to trigger the end of the mission.

No RTB docking directive.

Overall:
Making a BOE without it turning into something ridiculous is an involved process, and you did a pretty decent job making it a playable and fun mission.
BP Multi
The Antagonist
Zacam: Uh. No, using an effect is okay. But you are literally using the TECHROOM ani as the weapon effect.

 
Re: RELEASE: Single mission - Hecate Crash
Thanks! Based on some advice, I'm going to go over the mission again and clean it up. You're the second person to mention no RTB directive though, I didn't actually notice that before... I'll get that too.
Oh yeah, there's no guardian or anything like that. It'd be pretty silly if the only thing you could do to lose the mission (besides die) is impossible.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2011, 12:59:29 am by Scourge of Ages »