Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > FRED Academy

[FA] - Retail Mission 1

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Black Wolf:
This is what I had for the extended version.

Mission 1 – NTR (Neo Terran Remnant) have been raiding cargo depots in the Polaris system. Intel has pinpointed several likely future targets, and has rotating shifts watching them. Your squadron (luckily enough) happens to be there when the NTF make their move.

OK. The Remnant should operate pretty much like the old NTF for continuity purposes. This mission should be the simples of the campaign, which, in some ways, is going to make it the hardest. It’s always a challenge making exciting missions where capships can’t be used for story missions. Essentially, this mission will be a dogfight, which, while that’s OK in some missions, isn’t going to cut it if we’re supposed to be teaching you to FRED. So we’re going to spice it up a bit.

First off, supplement your fighters with Freighters. It makes logical sense that if the NTR are raiding the place they’re going to need to capture cargo. Have the freighters warp in, dock to some cargo and warp out. Keep in mind that the Remnant also wants to disrupt the GTVA, which means attacking the cargo containers they don’t want. If the player loses too many cargo containers, either to freighters or to being destroyed through fighters, he fails. NOTE – the easiest way to do this is with variables. Every time a cargo container is destroyed or has departed (ie. been stolen) add one to your variable. When the if the variable gets too high, the mission is failed. This can be adjusted depending on difficulty (ie, easy, medium, hard etc.) through valid and invalid objectives and the is-difficulty-at-least sexp. Moreover, you can use the method to send the player a message when he’s coming close to failing. (Make sure your variable has nos paces in its name or it’ll screw things up)

Balancing this mission might be difficult. The action sections (which can be broken up by sections of relative calm) have to stay intense to ensure it’s not too easy, but it’d be easy to step over the line and have too many fighters. Keep in mind that there are lots of ways to affect mission balance other than increasing and decreasing the number of hostile fighters, eg. Enemy and Ally AI, available weapons/fighter pool, AI orders (It’s harder to concentrate on destroying freighters if an entire wing of hostile fighters is ordered to attack Alpha 1) etc. etc.

And on that note, remember to keep updating the orders of the friendly AI as well. The AI aren’t particularly clever, but they can be given a higher apparent intelligence if you tell them what they’re supposed to be doing at all times. A single initial order at the start of the mission often wont cut it in missions like this.


Looks like we've been thinking along similar lines though :)

karajorma:

--- Quote ---Originally posted by Ghostavo
Here it is.

Use "save as" and then change from .doc to .fs2
--- End quote ---


Can you zip the mission files in the future? I don't know why but I can never open FS2 mission files that are sent to me as text. I think Mozilla is saving them in the wrong format or the text encoding on the server you're using is different from the one FRED expects.

Ghostavo:
Can anyone post a image or mission link to a "medium sized" cargo depot? I kinda agree with Axem that my depot looks too unorganized, but the thing is if I follow his advice (not to offend you or anything) the depot will look too simple and not taking any volume.

And how many wings of lokis I have available to battle Alpha? I'm thinking of using 3 or 4.

karajorma:
Stack the boxes on the Y axis as well as the X and Z ones. That would help solve the volume problem.

Make sure you leave quite a big gap between the containers though.

Make sure you leave some spaces open as well while you're at it. I've never liked seeing cargo depots with all the boxes in a 5x5x5 grid. Just seems too neat to be real to me.

magatsu1:
if you're feeling really sly you could just load up the second retail mission (forgot the name, something about chariots).

Nice cargo depot there.:nervous:

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