Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Kestrellius on July 02, 2015, 08:05:59 pm
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So I've been doing some more FREDding, trying to create a convincing large-scale battle, against the advice of that one article from ages ago and probably against my better judgement. It's...annoyingly tricky, largely because I'm trying to create a situation in which the Shivans outnumber my Terran fleet but don't automatically roflstomp them.
Various stuff I've learned:
Terran destroyers, particularly Orions, go down really quickly. Part of it might be just due to the orders I gave some of the Shivan ships, or their natural AI targeting them first, but they have ludicrously low survivability. First several times I ran the mission, the Shivan cruisers and corvettes were mostly obliterated, along with the Terran destroyers, and it basically came down to a bunch of Deimoses with a few cruisers slowly whittling down a Lucifer, two Ravanas and two Demons. I had to add a Colossus just to make things less ridiculous.
I eventually noticed one of the Orions would mysteriously end up several clicks out from the battle, and would spend the whole time slowly making its way back, before getting sliced apart by beams upon arrival. In the end I figured out the cause. You know how people compare the Colossus to a baseball bat? Yeah, that's not just a metaphor.
Giving several dozen warships five random attack orders each so that they'll actually move takes ages.
My brilliant plan of a hierarchical command system, where groups of cruisers would be ordered to guard larger ships, is actually a terrible idea. Partially because cap ships don't actually have a guard order, just the "stay near ship" order, and partially because the corvettes would quickly outpace the cruisers, get killed, and leave them sitting there with no orders.
Now, I eventually remembered (well, suspected and then confirmed) that you can put warships into wings. This'll be invaluable, because it lets me automate respawns so that you don't have situations where all the weak ships get blown apart immediately and leave only the durable ones. It also makes working with orders a bit easier. Unfortunately, it seems to make cruisers behave like fighters, staying really close to each other, which makes the battles incredibly cramped, even by my standards. I'll have to see if there's a way to spread out the wing formation so they don't clump together like that.
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Don't use attack orders.
Use dynamic waypoints (you can use set-object-position events on waypoints).
Don't put warships in wings.
Use armor.tbl or special hits to make ships tougher.
Don't let warships decide to fire beams on their own, keep beams locked and use fire-beam events.
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Don't let warships decide to fire beams on their own, keep beams locked and use fire-beam events.
From now on, every time I get mauled by a Diomedes' AAA, I'm going to blame you personally.
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Oh, triple-A should stay under its own volition, almost always. My bad!
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Balancing an actual mission is even harder, because you have to account for human behavior.
I've been working on a short campaign for a few months and translating ideas into playable, fun missions is a struggle.
The Vrets Process of Campaign Design
- Plan out an intricate, "****ing badass" mission on paper. Put in pile of mission plans.
- Come home from stressful day at work and binge FRED
- Return to mission a week later. Realize that I am stooopid and delete entire mission.
- Drink heavily
edit: sorry, the last part of this post was suffering from step 4 of the process
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Yeah I have noticed that beam spam actually looks pretty terrible. This is why I generally tend to prefer pulse-style weapons in my science fiction, but eh.
Well there's a certain tension here between the concept of a "mission" and the concept of a "battle". The two aren't mutually exclusive, but they are distinct. Most missions in the Freespace games are just that, and while that's probably best for the bulk of the missions, you probably want to have at least a few big setpieces that really feel like full-scale battles in a war. Part of it is that warships can jump in and out at any time, so you get weird lopsided combat dynamics rather than fleets engaging each other straight-up.
Furthermore, there's a tension between game-as-narrative and game-as-challenge. Often what I'm trying to do with these sorts of things is create a big, visually impressive ambient battle for the player to enjoy, except that in the typical Freespace frame of mind, it's hard to enjoy a battle because you're focused on winning. You're not thinking "oh man that Shivan warship looks awesome shooting at that Orion", you're thinking "crap, that Shivan warship is shooting at that Orion, kill it". It's a matter of how active the player is, as opposed to essentially being a bystander. Immersion in cases like these can actually be a bad thing, because astonishingly enough, being part of a war is not fun. So if you're too invested in the outcome, you can't enjoy the eye candy.
Also, I'll tell you guys a secret: I haven't started using events at all yet. I don't know how. I'll get into it sooner or later, but right now I'm just setting things up and letting them play out.
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You don't have to accept that warships can jump in and out at any time. If you set rules about when, where, and how ships can jump, you have the foundations for a tactical paradigm. What if preparing to jump soon makes it harder to fight right now? What if you have to maneuver against not just the warships and fighters you're engaging, but the warships and fighters you know the enemy may still be holding in reverse?
If the player has a clear, actionable objective - it can be as simple as 'destroy that ONE ship' or 'fly to this point' - they can appreciate basically arbitrary amounts of **** going on around them. It's only when the player is asked to wander into the **** without understanding the rules that they get mad.
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Well, maybe it's just me, but I tend to feel responsible for the whole engagement, and feel like I did something wrong if my side loses any ships. Which is absurd, because these are battles involving tens of thousands of people, and I'm just one guy. But that's sort of the mentality I'm talking about, that's cultivated by the way missions (at least the retail ones) work.
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If you want the players to enjoy your spectacular battle, find some way to get them to look at it without being distracted with gameplay. Show the battle in progress with a cutscene, start the player far enough away from their objective that they can watch the battle while approaching the objective, etc.
Just don't drag the eye candy segments out too long, or the player will get bored.
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Well there's a certain tension here between the concept of a "mission" and the concept of a "battle". The two aren't mutually exclusive, but they are distinct.
They're not really distinct at all, though. FS1 and FS2 were limited by the capablities of existing computers to include only those ships you need directly interact with, but you are not. Even my old horrible stuff was more than happy to throw in things going on that aren't your problem, and I have made harsh criticism on occasion of campaigns that let you go off-script during their battle sequences too much. Give the player a job and make them do it or they fail.
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The massive battle single mission with WIH is a prime example of the thrown-together big battle mission.
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...WIH?
EDIT: war in heaven derp
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Also, I'll tell you guys a secret: I haven't started using events at all yet. I don't know how. I'll get into it sooner or later, but right now I'm just setting things up and letting them play out.
Seriously, put the mission aside and do the walkthrough. Events are the heart of any FS2 mission. Sure you can set up the ships and watch them shoot each other, but if you don't have any real events the mission is going to be pretty second rate.
Events are really not that hard to get your head round. They're all really just saying "If A do B". In fact it was only after about 10 years that someone decided to a add a more complicated "If A do B else do C" :D
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Events are great, and rad. Learn them immediately, they're so easy and yet so crazy powerful!
I learned events by looking at Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius missions and talking to better FREDders. You can put in just a little effort and obtain amazing powers.
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Events are great, and rad. Learn them immediately, they're so easy and yet so crazy powerful!
I learned events by looking at Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius missions and talking to better FREDders. You can put in just a little effort and obtain amazing powers.
I do not believe you can make quality missions WITHOUT events these days. They are a bare essential now.
And balancing is bad, someone, do it for me please.
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Events are great, and rad. Learn them immediately, they're so easy and yet so crazy powerful!
I learned events by looking at Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius missions and talking to better FREDders. You can put in just a little effort and obtain amazing powers.
I do not believe you can make quality missions WITHOUT events these day. They are a bare essential now.
Fixed that for you. :P
Events are now and have always been the very core, the DNA of FS missions. In a very real sense, FS missions are their events - everything else just gives those events a place to happen.
There's nothing wrong with throwing a couple of ships down and watching then destroy each other. It's fun. But it's not building a mission, not really FREDding, without the events editor. :nod:
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Well, yeah. That's a given. I'm not exactly going to be able to make anything publishable until I learn events.
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The massive battle single mission with WIH is a prime example of the thrown-together big battle mission.
The only "massive battle single mission" that comes to mind is "Her Finest Hour"; is that what you mean? (It's just that I wouldn't really classify that one as "thrown-together" in any context.)
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The massive battle single mission with WIH is a prime example of the thrown-together big battle mission.
The only "massive battle single mission" that comes to mind is "Her Finest Hour"; is that what you mean? (It's just that I wouldn't really classify that one as "thrown-together" in any context.)
I think he meant Delenda Est or Prime Meridian?
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No he means the one in the tech room called BP Massive Battle.
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No he means the one in the tech room called BP Massive Battle.
Basically all the ships from WiH line up and starts shooting. It is cool if your computer can handle everything going on (mine can't).
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Oh, duh. Well, now I feel silly for forgetting that.
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That's not a mission. It's just...ctrl clicking a bunch of ships and telling them to go kill each other.
I don't understand what people find interesting about that, other than the fact that the sheer amount of entities that your computer is require to process makes it a fairly decent benchmarking tool.
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I tried a WoD 'massive battle' once but after 10 ships freespace would always crash due to hitting projectile limits and stuff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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That's not a mission. It's just...ctrl clicking a bunch of ships and telling them to go kill each other.
I don't understand what people find interesting about that, other than the fact that the sheer amount of entities that your computer is require to process makes it a fairly decent benchmarking tool.
It actually does have some armor settings and basic target priorities!
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I tried a WoD 'massive battle' once but after 10 ships freespace would always crash due to hitting projectile limits and stuff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Projectile limits shouldn't cause crashes. More likely filling up BMPMAN slots.
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Not even that. Filling BMPMAN slots borks textures and lags the game, not crashes it. Projectile limits cause new projectiles not to spawn (odd priorities, too, it's often the player ship that is first affected by it). There might be some other problems limits, though.
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You know, someone could have told me that if you right-click on an event, you get a list of operators and such. I thought I was going to have to manually figure out the exact name of each operator and type it in. Well, this makes things easier.
On the subject of special hit points: I dunno, for some reason it kind of struck me as...cheating? Bad form? Eh.
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Do the tutorial, man.
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I think I did. Maybe I wasn't looking closely enough.
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Battuta means the walkthrough, not the tutorial. The walkthrough is a comprehensive and extremely detailed introduction to FREDding involving the creation of a mission around, IIRC, the NTF attacking an Arcadia? I don't precisely recall. Anyway, it takes a few hours, but once you've done it, you'll be very well equipped to start FREDding properly.
You might be getting confused with a much more basic tutorial that just involved chucking a few waves of ships down and building a dogfight. That one you could certainly have done and nit learned about events etc. But the walkthrough, you'd know if you'd done that.
I highly recommend it, it's more than worth the time for anyone who wants to us FRED. :nod:
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Tutorial or no tutorial, don't be afraid to fiddle around with silly mission concepts in FRED. Come up with a cool mission idea, then try to use the FREDding tools at your disposal to pull it off. Even if you junk the whole thing as stupid, you'll probably have learned a lot just by trying. ;)
Oh, and special-hits is a necessary balancing device. Sometimes, you need to keep ships alive longer, or kill them quickly. As long as you don't do anything too blatant (i.e. have a Fenris survive volleys from a Sath), your players shouldn't notice.
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Just like with jump clocks, you can come up with rules to govern when you make ships more or less tough. Fighters get more or less hard to kill depending on how they allocate power. So can warships - even if you don't adopt crazy technofluff like this (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86710.0), you can think about World War II fighting ships, which had to make decisions like 'do we move ordnance now, or seal off these sections?' 'Do we run this generator, or move to a backup system, and shut that one off so it doesn't explode?' It makes some kind of logical sense that a ship can render itself more or less hardened to damage, at the cost of other functions.
Interestingly, damage control capabilities were a huge part of WW2 combat, but most games don't model them much if at all.
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If you have it, Diaspora also has a very comprehensive walkthrough built in. In both cases you just simply need to go to the help menu in FRED and look at the Help Topics. You might also want to checkout the Diaspora help here (http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/FREDDocs/index.html). It's much more comprehensive than the one for FS2 as it covers almost every single SCP addition to FRED (So some of you experienced FREDders might want to check it out too. Just in case there are any features you've ever wondered about).
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Just like with jump clocks, you can come up with rules to govern when you make ships more or less tough. Fighters get more or less hard to kill depending on how they allocate power. So can warships - even if you don't adopt crazy technofluff like this (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86710.0), you can think about World War II fighting ships, which had to make decisions like 'do we move ordnance now, or seal off these sections?' 'Do we run this generator, or move to a backup system, and shut that one off so it doesn't explode?' It makes some kind of logical sense that a ship can render itself more or less hardened to damage, at the cost of other functions.
Interestingly, damage control capabilities were a huge part of WW2 combat, but most games don't model them much if at all.
Not...reaaaaally? One of the truisms of WW2 is that a ship doesn't come back from taking effective salvos. Damage control needs a space to work in where the ship is not being actively hit.
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You got a lot of catastrophic hits that wouldn't have been catastrophic with better DC practices, and a lot of ships that stopped at 'mission kill' instead of 'hull loss' due to good DC. But you're right that in the latter case that was more strategically than tactically relevant.
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Interestingly, damage control capabilities were a huge part of WW2 combat, but most games don't model them much if at all.
FTL tho
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You got a lot of catastrophic hits that wouldn't have been catastrophic with better DC practices, and a lot of ships that stopped at 'mission kill' instead of 'hull loss' due to good DC. But you're right that in the latter case that was more strategically than tactically relevant.
Catastrophic damage isn't really a matter for damage control; it's a matter of ship/weapon design and operational (as opposed to D/C) procedure. Poor magazine protection, excesses of flammable material, these are things dealt with in the design team or a refit. Draining your fuel lines in expectation of an attack helps prevent damage, but it is not a damage-control function as such. (Indeed, the man who first suggested it was actually a senior member of the ship's aviation maintenance crews.) Damage control is personnel, procedure, and related equipment that acts to repair damage or limit its spread after it has happened.
tl;dr: You're misusing the phraseology, in an understandable way, but still.
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Whatever you want to call it, responding to an internal fire with 'let's turn on all the ventilators' proved to be a preeeetty bad call at least once, iirc.
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I tried to make a Great War-era engagement with a bunch of Demons and Orions and Fenrii and Cains armed only with blobs (and missiles).
The resulting abomination looked more like traffic than combat, really.
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Orions and Hecates have 100,000 hitpoints, that's the same as a Ravana but Shivan beams are ludicrously overpowered. I'm not sure if the damage per shot is much greater than their GTVA equivalents but the refire rate on the LRed - primary armament of the Demon, Ravana and Lilith - is unbelievable.
What's in the tables isn't necessarily reflective of how they are supposed to operate. In the actual campaign you don't ever see that sort of fire rate maintained for very long, it was probably never intended for destroyer/destroyer combat. It's probably worth creating some kind of intermediate between SRed and LRed and justifying it as the beams being overcharged in the main campaign, much like the Colossus did in High Noon.
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The single-pulse damage for the LRed isn't that high. It's that it can fire constantly if you let the AI fire it on "full auto".
A simple solution to that is to control the rate of fire manually using fire-beam events. No need to table in intermediate weapons.
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And make all warships staggeringly tougher so they can have epic beem brawlz :hellyeah:
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difficulty its broke agein
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What's in the tables isn't necessarily reflective of how they are supposed to operate. In the actual campaign you don't ever see that sort of fire rate maintained for very long,
Because it's never necessary because of the massive damage it does.
Really though the idea the Shivans casually overclock their gear rather than the LRed's stats represent its normal stats is pretty close to declaring Jaws 4 is about a voodoo shark and so now it make sense.
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nope difficulty its broken look at damage
I cant build a mission with one wing man
destroying 2 wings
you will die in killing one wing
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Can you point to a build where that mission works as intended?
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The single-pulse damage for the LRed isn't that high.
Well, sure, if you compare it to the BFRed & LRGreen/BFGreen, it's not that overwhelming per pulse, roughly on par with other destroyer-grade beams, meaning that they kill most big things in 4 or 5 shots.
Anyway, in the past, I've had battles that involved special hit points, to increase the overall durability of particular ships, beam-resistant armor to make player bombs more impactful in comparison (and prevent destroyers from lol-stomping ships in less than 40 seconds), as well as beam-locking/fire-beaming as needed.
Overall, when balancing a significant battle, I'd say trimming it down - reducing wing-size, make a fighter or two stronger, playing with AI ranks, etc. works better than "escalating" it (adding more ships or wings). It then becomes easier to have player actions have impact, and makes it easier to micro-manage the various parts of the mission.