That if you chose to destory the GTT Omega in ...But Hate the Traitor the campaign is not mechanically set-up to stop your progress, despite the announcement of court martial in the debrief.
... which gets even worse when you consider that the campaign then progresses to elevate you into a command level position in Exodus...
The realization that I'd potentially prevented the Vasudans from being able to fight back against the Shivans earlier than they did by helping capture Alexander McCarthy, thus ensuring the Vasudans would rely on inferior weaponry that couldn't damage Shivan ships until the ceasefire and agreements were made to share technology with the Zods. A lot of lives would probably have been saved in the long run.
Probably the penultimate mission where command nags the Bastion to "catch up with the Lucifer", how was this ever supposed to be possible? Lucy and Orion go at the same speed, and the Bastion was well back from the jump node on arrival.I guess the Bastion was supposed to jump to Sol just a moment after Lucy did. Which failed spectacularly with that one mis-jump. So the last mission was probably meant to be a capital ship duel but I guess :v-old: had some problems either with performance or explaining why wouldn't Lucy just use its main cannons in subspace to cut up Bastion into pieces.
Are they any moments in Freespace campaigns that felt wrong or made you uncomfortable?
In the Derelict mission "The Sting", you are ordered to capture the cruiser Minerva, and they agree to surrender. But when the Auriga shows up, Command orders you to forget about capturing the Minerva and just kill them. Killing a surrendering enemy is a war crime. Sure, they did try to escape when the Auriga arrived, but they weren't even given a warning or an option to stand down again, Command just said that we had no use for them anymore, so kill them.
The Phoenicia being ordered to stay to hold off the Sathanas in Bearbaiting. It bought all of like 20 seconds, which seems like a terrible tradeoff for a whole destroyer and its crew.
The Phoenicia being ordered to stay to hold off the Sathanas in Bearbaiting. It bought all of like 20 seconds, which seems like a terrible tradeoff for a whole destroyer and its crew.
Are they any moments in Freespace campaigns that felt wrong or made you uncomfortable?
In the Derelict mission "The Sting", you are ordered to capture the cruiser Minerva, and they agree to surrender. But when the Auriga shows up, Command orders you to forget about capturing the Minerva and just kill them. Killing a surrendering enemy is a war crime. Sure, they did try to escape when the Auriga arrived, but they weren't even given a warning or an option to stand down again, Command just said that we had no use for them anymore, so kill them.
This is not a post promoting warcrimes (of course), but enemy combatants attempting to escape during an enemy attack are not "prisoners" persay.
The Phoenicia being ordered to stay to hold off the Sathanas in Bearbaiting. It bought all of like 20 seconds, which seems like a terrible tradeoff for a whole destroyer and its crew.I'm leaning more towards 0 seconds since I don't think the Sathanas slows down at all before firing, and vaporizing a Hecate-class destroyer takes less than two and a half seconds for a Sathanas.
The ending to "Homesick".
It was a great campaign that I really enjoyed up until then.
The ending to "Homesick".
It was a great campaign that I really enjoyed up until then.
Same here. The "Homesick" ending really peeved me more than it should have.
The Phoenicia being ordered to stay to hold off the Sathanas in Bearbaiting. It bought all of like 20 seconds, which seems like a terrible tradeoff for a whole destroyer and its crew.
First mission of the Silent Threat campaign, 'sanitizing' the area. On a less philosophical level, the whole ST campaign being a giant pile of disorganized crap. Thank god for ST:R.
I guess the Bastion was supposed to jump to Sol just a moment after Lucy did. Which failed spectacularly with that one mis-jump. So the last mission was probably meant to be a capital ship duel but I guess :v-old: had some problems either with performance or explaining why wouldn't Lucy just use its main cannons in subspace to cut up Bastion into pieces.
In the mission "Eve of Destruction", you are supposed to be on the "third watch" of guarding the GTC Orff. But then you get relieved after only TWO MINUTES (iirc). I get this is the first mission of the game, so it's supposed to be easy, but give some in-universe reason ("Hey Alpha, looks like you've seen a lot of action and are a bit beat up. We'll send Delta to finish your watch.").
It doesn't make me feel "wrong" in a moral sense, but I have a hard time taking it seriously when a capship goes kamikaze in any campaign. They just move too slowly to make it seem like a legitimate threat. It would be a lot easier to take it seriously if you had the ship suddenly start going really fast and explain it by saying they're overcharging their engines way past the safety limits or something.This is actually surprisingly difficult to do in the engine; the way that Silent Threat: Reborn handles it with the Hope attempting to jump out directly in front of it's target is pretty clever I think.
a #kamikaze variant of the ship with the same acceleration but a huge top speed.
I know the ships are moving slowly but you have to remember that they are huge and very heavy. A modern-day aircraft carrier weighs somewhere around 50 - 100 thousand tonnes. The Repulse is probably 5 to 10 times that weight and is travelling at 20mph! Something that size and weight at that speed would tear through almost anything you can imagine.
If you've ever seen a video of what happens when something stalls on a level crossing and gets hit by a train, it's shouldn't be too hard to see why even at low speed that kind of mass is going to do a huge amount of damage.
From a gameplay perspective - lack of reverse thrust and glide functions. Once you have gotten used to using them, as you will if you play any of the Babylon Project campaigns for example, not having them feels like loosing a limb. Especially so when carrying out gun runs on cap ships. The 'glide-by-shooting' technique is awesome :cool:
[...]Dimensional Eclipse, [...] but they always seemed too slow to be of any real use. I guess I was hoping they'd be more like Descent. I'm certainly willing to be corrected about this, but that's how it looks to me right now.
The fact that a fighter's jump drive seems to take a random amount of time to charge up has also killed me on more than one occasion. Area completely clear? Three seconds from pressing the button to actually jumping. Ten fighters on my tail, but far enough away that I can afford three seconds?It's consistent, but it is strongly affected by being shot at. You need to reach a particular speed and maintain your heading for several seconds, and being shot at at all will knock you around messing up your speed and direction and delaying the warp. This is obviously on purpose in order to encourage you not to jump out with hostiles still near you (and this might all be wrong if a coder wants to correct me, this is just based on my experience with it).
A lack of Dark ships 18 years after his concept art for the apollo mk 2 :nono:
A lack of Dark ships 18 years after his concept art for the apollo mk 2 :nono:
As awesome as Darks concepts were, there're quite a few takes on a Apollo Mk II.
Yes. But I wanted dark ships.The SOF Orpheus is basically a Apollo Mk2 with SOC (like Artemis DH) maps. ;)
That's why if you find yourself in that situation, you crank engines to max, spam the afterburner, and hope your ship is fast enough to get a few-thousand-meter head start before you try to jump.If that's not possible because they're faster than me, I've managed to jump out by throwing my ship around until I've got them off my 6 just long enough to cut the engine and hit jump when it's as close to the magic number 40 as possible.
Take this but a working embeded version of it. :p
It's consistent, but it is strongly affected by being shot at. You need to reach a particular speed and maintain your heading for several seconds, and being shot at at all will knock you around messing up your speed and direction and delaying the warp. This is obviously on purpose in order to encourage you not to jump out with hostiles still near you (and this might all be wrong if a coder wants to correct me, this is just based on my experience with it).
As I learned today, the speed to reach is 40 with a 5% tolerance (So 38-42 range). The time it takes for you to warp out will depend heavily on the acceleration and deceleration of your fighter. The minimum warptime will be 3 seconds.
A WoD example; the Kaze has fast acceleration but slow deceleration. From stand still, it will take only roughly 4 seconds to warp out. But from max afterburner speed, it will take a wooping 13 seconds, and half of that time is waiting for the ship to decelerate from 50 to 40. Because of the exponential acceleration that freespace uses to adjust velocity.
DahBlount today added a feature to customize the '$Target warpout match percent' in game settings.tbl so a higher tolerance value can be set. Which is very nice indeed.
Ah yes, the can't jump out if you're being shot up thing. Something that you have to learn the hard way and something that comes up rare enough to forget, and then there's the fact that you can't cancel the jump, so you just have to helplessly watch as your sitting duck ship gets destroyed.
I thought you could press alt+Jt again, oh! You mean once the jump point opens?
Okay, why did up/down/left/right thrust never go that fast for me? What was I doing wrong?Spoilers for DE so
One thing I didn't like about FS2 compared to FS1 was the boiler plate "You did not have authorization to return to base pilot". FS1 had pretty detailed debriefings on the consequences if you fled.
FS2 debriefs for failure states are not any better in that regard really.One thing I didn't like about FS2 compared to FS1 was the boiler plate "You did not have authorization to return to base pilot". FS1 had pretty detailed debriefings on the consequences if you fled.
While true, the debriefings were often also ridiculous. You'd end up getting court martialed or assigned to janitorial duties. The entire campaign falls apart and thousands died because you retreated, despite the player character supposity just being one out of many, many pilots in a the war. And this applies even if things have gone completely sour, and your fighter craft is on the verge of exploding. Compared to how pilots are actually treated in real life, it feels like you're a penal legion pilot that's supposed to fight until he dies or something.
FS2 debriefs for failure states are not any better in that regard really.
Try failing the first mission of the FS2 campaign. Those refugee ships you're escorting are apparantly incredibly vital to the war effort.
As officers of the GTVA, we have sworn to protect all citizens of the Alliance. The destruction of both Iota transports is a travesty, pilot. You have disgraced the 53rd Hammerheads, and I will recommend your immediate discharge from the fighter corps.
The Alliance's offensive is now in shambles. Only 25 percent of the Vasudan refugees have been recovered, while the NTF continues to massacre thousands without mercy.
Command reports we have lost the GTD Aeneas, the GTC Coriolanus, and the GVC Mirage. Our efforts to blockade the Alpha Centauri and Sirius jump nodes have failed. The Security Council will order the fleet to withdraw from Deneb and negotiate terms with the NTF.
Honestly those things always cracked me up. I mean you are the Almighty Alpha 1, after all.Exactly. Your presence galvanises them all. Even if you're not there in a particular battle, the knowledge you're there fighting and being Alpha 1 raises the standard of everyone else as they stand tall on the shoulders of the colossus that you are. Without you they are hopelessly lost, and they dissolve and crumble. :)
My own theory is that how well the player does in a particular mission is supposed to be representative of how well the entire fleet does everywhere else (in FS2 anyway), eg. if you do well, they roll over the NTF or the Shivans at every turn, if you do poorly they still succeed but it becomes more of a Pyrrhic type of victory, and if you fail **** goes downhill for everybody.
That's indeed a very interesting way to think about these things. :nod:
Even though FS2 had awesome writing, there are fans to give even the few flat parts a meaningful explanation. :D
BTW, why didn't the Belisarius try to fire upon the Psamptik?
I know that mission designers don't want their players to just be sitting there doing nothing or ensure very long missions, but the rate at which a boarding party captures a ship in the Freespace universe really breaks my immersion. We're talking about huge ships, but one or two tiny transport ships are able to board marines that can not only traverse through the ship in record speeds, but also often shoot through all the crews and onboard marines of another ship. And while I try to image some kind of ridiculously efficient hyper loop transport systems inside of ships to make up for this kind of ludicrous speed, it very much does not match what we actually see on the flight deck in the menu (I'm looking at you exit animation button).
I know that mission designers don't want their players to just be sitting there doing nothing or ensure very long missions, but the rate at which a boarding party captures a ship in the Freespace universe really breaks my immersion. We're talking about huge ships, but one or two tiny transport ships are able to board marines that can not only traverse through the ship in record speeds, but also often shoot through all the crews and onboard marines of another ship. And while I try to image some kind of ridiculously efficient hyper loop transport systems inside of ships to make up for this kind of ludicrous speed, it very much does not match what we actually see on the flight deck in the menu (I'm looking at you exit animation button).
Internal partitions are thinner than hull armor so you just get inside and railgun everyone through the walls :snipe:Well, :V: told us that it was a valid way to fight as far back as the original Red Faction.
Internal partitions are thinner than hull armor so you just get inside and railgun everyone through the walls :snipe:Well, :V: told us that it was a valid way to fight as far back as the original Red Faction.
I know that mission designers don't want their players to just be sitting there doing nothing or ensure very long missions, but the rate at which a boarding party captures a ship in the Freespace universe really breaks my immersion. We're talking about huge ships, but one or two tiny transport ships are able to board marines that can not only traverse through the ship in record speeds, but also often shoot through all the crews and onboard marines of another ship. And while I try to image some kind of ridiculously efficient hyper loop transport systems inside of ships to make up for this kind of ludicrous speed, it very much does not match what we actually see on the flight deck in the menu (I'm looking at you exit animation button).
I consider the short capture time to just be a concession for the sake of gameplay, like the absurdly low ranges of weapons and speeds of ships.
I know that mission designers don't want their players to just be sitting there doing nothing or ensure very long missions, but the rate at which a boarding party captures a ship in the Freespace universe really breaks my immersion. We're talking about huge ships, but one or two tiny transport ships are able to board marines that can not only traverse through the ship in record speeds, but also often shoot through all the crews and onboard marines of another ship. And while I try to image some kind of ridiculously efficient hyper loop transport systems inside of ships to make up for this kind of ludicrous speed, it very much does not match what we actually see on the flight deck in the menu (I'm looking at you exit animation button).
It was for this very reason that I FREDed the Repulse capture operation the way I did in ST:R.I consider the short capture time to just be a concession for the sake of gameplay, like the absurdly low ranges of weapons and speeds of ships.
Also, this.
That said I do often feel the ships in FS2 are too slow. Anything less than a Perseus feels like you are flying through treacle. I would love to see a mod that increases the speed of the ships slightly. Perhaps have retail Perseus speed as a base speed for the slow ships, like bombers, and increase form there, so that the modded Perseus really is nippy AF :DThere was the old velocity mod that probably doesn't work anymore. Also, it's a completely different universe but have you played Dimensional Eclipse?
The realization that I'd potentially prevented the Vasudans from being able to fight back against the Shivans earlier than they did by helping capture Alexander McCarthy, thus ensuring the Vasudans would rely on inferior weaponry that couldn't damage Shivan ships until the ceasefire and agreements were made to share technology with the Zods. A lot of lives would probably have been saved in the long run.