Okay. I've taken a look at the mission. Several points to make.
1. Where is the music? It's deathly silent out there. Pick a tune from the mission specs editor.
2. The enemy fighters didn't seem that much of a challenge. Sending in one wave of fighters at a time against 3 wings of friendlies is a little too easy. In addition the enemy fighters only appear during a narrow window. The rest of the mission the player is sitting around bored. More Fighters please!
3. There was no return to base directive (even if there was a message). Many players tend to wait for the directive to pop up before leaving so you need to put one in.
4. Personally I would have had two main objectives. Capture Bosch and Capture Alexus (this one would be marked invalid and would be validated once the Bosch jumps out). Doing things this way would mean you'd get the half victory music rather than the victory music (feels more correct to me cause the Bosch is still at large). But that's just a personal choice. I'm only mentioning it in case you choose the way you FREDded it because you didn't know how to do it this way.
Okay. Lets take a look at the mission in FRED.
5. You don't appear to have a debriefing stage for if the pilot fails to protect the freighters. There should be one as those poseidons are pretty vulnerable.
6. The mission doesn't have a debriefing stage for if the player jumps out without permission. This is probably the most common mistake I've seen while testing for the FRED Academy though so I'm not surprised to see it again
7. Your first event protects the TACs. You could just as easily do this from the ships editor>Misc options and it's a better place to do it from as it prevents you from wasting a SEXP.
8. Good work with the whole disabling the Alexus bit. I expected to see mistakes there but it was handled fairly well. Alpha go in without orders from the player and also regard disarming the Alexus as more important than disabling it (which is pretty clever of them
) In general I noted that you've taken care to make sure that the AI fighters are given orders, something I rarely see from beginners. Well done.
9. Since you're using the Ahkerton in this mission it's possible to take the Alexus without damaging it. Have the BP Chatter #1 event check if the Alexus is damaged. Have a different event occur if the crew are still alive (for instance the bridge is locked and the crew are fighting back). In addition check that the Echelon is still alive at this point.
10. Lots of lovely chatter. Well done on that too.
11. This is a damage limitation bit. We all know that some players don't read the messages all the time. The problem is that the whole mission falls apart if the player wasn't paying attention and blows up the Alexus. Take some steps in both the mission and the debriefing to address this.
Okay. That will do me for now. Get that lot fixed and I'll try this again
