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[RELEASE] - Friends and Foes: Retribution

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bomb3rman:
Hallo.

@praeseodym:

I use the spoiler so that no one has to read it if he doesn't want to:

Spoiler:Since this mission is just a dream and this happened several years before you play it, you can't destroy the transport because you didn't destroy it completely in the past.

It is guardianed at 15 % and the destruction is not necessary to complete the mission. Shoot it down to this 15 %, then wait what happens ;)

Or did you try this and the mission didn't end itself after the next "events"? I'm trying to figure out if there's a problem in the mission, because no one else reported this until now.

And if you go on with the campaign: Don't wonder, sometimes subsytems or ships are guardianed as well, so try to go on playing, sometimes the problem solves itself :)
@ SF-Junky:

Hallo. Strange, I didn't change anything within the bp ships... if I open FRED and look at the ship list provided by BPcomplete, I have the UEFg Purusha there. Didn't change their name or something. Do you maybe have an older version of BP where the ships was called different? I'm really surprised about this problem...

EDIT: In case anyone else also experiences the problem: I talked with SF-Junky via PM. He had an older version of BP. By replacing the core.vp within the bpcomplete folder with a recent version from the BP-thread linked to above, the problem seems solved. They seem to have renamed the ships in one of the versions, this could have caused the problem. Use a new one, then it should work.

procdrone:
Spoiler:Alright, so just made an attempt at your campaign, and oh boy I got wrecked. barely scraped through the first mission, second did ok, but the third one totally messed me up with the pulse and AAF beams on the Hyperions. How about beam protecting the player for the disable op? I was completely sent flying, and with the older fighter models, getting out of the dead-zone area is almost impossible, with low boost speed, and these pulses and beams  :eek2:

Nitpick. In mission one, GTVA ships do not hail you, do not pursue you. As we know from fall of Artemis station, GTVA exclusively targetted convoys fleeing the area. It does not make any sense to GTVA just ignore a poorly armed convoy now (which makes it a valid military target as per Beta-Aquilae convention.) Suggestion. Maybe make the GTVA arrive a little later,  when the Transports are closer to the gate. Or even a little further away. This way pursuing GTVA ships/fighters wouldn't be able to catch up and would simply not bother. But a mention of this would be nice, either from GTVA (comms either coded or decoded about pursuing the freighters), or from the freighters themselves.

Music is a complete chaos (mission 2). You used ambiance music that isn't supposed to be lopped, and the cutoff at the end sounds rather bad in my tastes. Arrival music flags all over the place. Man can't focus on the conversations.

Like others, I've also noticed GTVA helmets on some civies. Was little weird. To stay lore friendly, you could implement some dialog about getting it with some boasting crap bull**** story, or anything to justify him having it, even if not real.

Also. Escort List is a little mess on its own. You shouldn't put non-essential mission ships in there. They might be important story wise, but completely unimportant mission wise, docked away clicks away. Also, putting the wing leader on mission 2 on the escort list would be nice to orient around this target rich environment.

I might be a lill picky, but I've observed the battle in mission 3 between UEF and GTVA.
Ship deployment and formations seem to be left alone to the AI, which does little justice to UEF frigates that specialize on long range engagements.  I would certainly not leave any capital ship action to AI. In my humble opinion, AI only manages the FS1 era battles between cruisers that mostly rely on laser batteries. Any other engagement just looks weird IMHO. Ships turn around themselves at weird angles and rarely play to their strengths.

Also. I've noticed that all of GTVA and UEF ships are named unknown. While it might make sense for GTVA ships, that civilian ships can't read through their EM/IFF, that drops little weird on UEF ships. Fleet vessels should have strong IFF identifications, and while civilians wouldn't know much about them in general, Earth produced computers shouldn't have much issues to pick up and read that signal.

Ill surely leave more opinions if I manage to get deeper into your campaign.

EDIT: P.S. Im running the mod fine on a first bpcomplete release that aired. Never got myself to redownload it with all the new patches etc so I guess that isn't a problem. Maybe its some weird FSbuild? Im playing using FS2 Open 3.7.4 (RC2) SSE2.

FrikgFeek:
So I just went through this. The story was good and following a more 'neutral' side in the conflict struggling with the effects of the war rather than fighting it directly was  pretty interesting. The fiction entries and Cbriefs were a good read despite the frequent grammar and spelling errors, which didn't really take me out of the experience too much.
I liked your use of FuryAI with dynamic goals, it's more engaging to fight enemies who fight back and use the same tactics you might instead of just rolling over and letting you shoot them.
That said, I think this campaign had some pretty big flaws on the mission design side. sooo..
WARNING: HARSH CRITICISM BELOW
Hidden Text: ShowYour use of guardianing is extremely obvious. Many great campaigns use guardianing to prevent the player from blowing certain ships up but most of them try to hide it much better. 'That transport' goes down to the 15% threshold extremely quickly after you're ordered to shoot it, often leaving you with 30 seconds of nothing to do but watch the scripted sequence. It might've been better if the distance it had to travel was shorter or if the transport started going much faster after being shot at.
You could've also ordered the player to disable it, which would cause the engine failure and the player would be given a hold fire order. Only when it was too late would the player be ordered to destroy it. The scripting would still be obvious if you were trying to make it obvious but for anyone 'playing along' it wouldn't be too jarring.

In Mission 7 the suicide transports warp in too far away and can easily be brought down to the 1% guardian before they collide with the Karuna. You could've made them tougher, faster, or just let them explode and given them a big visual shockwave. That way when you sabotage the Karuna's systems you can claim they got taken out by the shockwave, you don't need to physically ram a ship to deal damage if your transport is filled with explosives.

In that same mission the player is completely invulnerable. I get it, you're sent into a massive furball with tons of enemy fighters and flak everywhere, trying to survive that would be extremely challenging. But maybe if you've designed a mission the player can't survive it would be better to tweak it and give the player more room to do things rather than straight up make them invulnerable.

I've also got some issues with your use of waved attacks and needlessly long missions. Mission 9 for example could be half as long and it would be much better for it. There are long parts where ships just fly to waypoints as you defend them against multiple waves of strikecraft. And at any moment a single mistake can get you killed or get a fragile transport/freighter killed and end the mission. Without checkpoints these long missions just become about very conservative flying and learning where the enemies come from. If you're going to give enemies a weapon like the Dart which has no lockon time, deals really high damage, and can be snapped off at point-blank range for a near instant kill then maybe you don't need quite so many of them. I like the feel of every enemy being potentially lethal just by themselves but that starts to fade when you're just going through multiple waves. You kinda just have to accept that sometimes you'll get instakilled by darts from 100m or less and either never go for close-range dogfights or 'roll the dice'.

And finally, the music. You're using a really good set of tracks from the BP modpack. But you're really heavily overusing the 'big epic battle' tracks. You don't need epic music blazing away as you just fly waypoints. It cheapens the effect of these tracks when they're being constantly used for everything from flying waypoints to just small skirmishes. I think more use of ambient tracks and low-key battle tracks would make moments where that epic music starts up much more effective.


I'm sorry if this comes off as bashing. I understand this is your first campaign and it's pretty good for a first effort. I just wanted to give you some areas where you could improve.

Mito [PL]:
So, after playing the campaign I can say some things. One of them is that this campaign is really fine, I liked the plot and all of the fiction that you wrote. The missions are also pretty good, especially when you consider that they are the FIRST ones that you made (released).
But to point out some things in the missions themselves:
Hidden Text: ShowMission 1:
Is the music from Freespace 1 deliberately there?
And you've got a pretty strange depart path for the transports... I thought they were going to use the gate.

Mission 2:
The medical vessel screams "we can't take much more" when its hull is at 97%... I suppose it's just a bad choice of words.
And I can hear a message "they're powering up their jump drives" when I'm just finishing the second spyboat...

Mission 3:
For some reason, the boarding transport speeds up to 300+ on its way to dock, not sure what's the problem. I can give a screenshot if necessary.
If you manage to destroy the second cruiser first, the messages get messed up.

Mission 4:
Except the obvious problem with guardianing the transport, I recall there being a funny little side effect before in the mission: When you pounded the transport it got really spinning around. I mean, not a glitch, I think a sort of explosion effect did this, but damn, this looked pretty realistic.
As for the guardianing problem, I have a few options:
a) Make the transport jump in closer to the station, with damaged engines, and when the player is close enough, send the message that they repaired them and are going to dock the station. If properly timed, player shouldn't even have the time to bring it down to around 50%,
b) When the transport's crew starts screaming, you can just lock player's weapons with a message "****... I can't do this. I can't!". And then the transport loses flight control.
And mix it anyhow you like with other options.

Mission 7:
A minor tiny little problem, but the entire drive assembly of the frigate just magically reappears. Is there a way to "extinguish" engine flames? Because it could be of use here.

Mission 10:
Are you anticipating that the Deimos gets disabled? Because I could have tried it...

Now, some other things I noticed:

You could have used the new Apollo model, released recently.
The music problems seem prevalent only if you set a track for fiction viewer, but none for command briefing.
I have a LARGE FPS problem everytime the mission plays out near Enigma... Yea, my PC is pretty bad for such hardcore shadow rendering... but that's 20 FPS with 30% GPU and CPU usage. Anyone could explain? Because I'm kind of puzzled. Maybe MSI Afterburner shows something wrong?
In the third mission, I had a pleasure to watch a refitted Sanctus beat the crap out of two Tev corvettes (Chimera and Bellerophon) on its own. It only needed to not be in their forward cone :P And it was left with 50% HP after the battle...
The player's invulnerability seems to be there in quite a few missions, what for? You've tested how things go and forgot to remove it?
And it also gets a bit annoying at some point - the default loadout is nearly always something useless. Like Scimitars when you have Uriels/Kents. Or an Uhlan with two Vulcans... Come on.

...You also tend to throw really ridiculous amounts of enemies at the player. IIRC, I finished half of the missions with my kill counter nearing 30.

And some tips for the harder missions:
Hidden Text: ShowMission 3: You can actually kill both cruisers. You just need to have a bank of six Paveways and a support ship. The rule is simple: when the first one arrives, be about 3 klicks away from it and have a fine look at its engines. Then just full burn towards it while spamming Paveways at the engine. If the missiles are launched in a way they hit the target roughly at the same moment, it's PD can't really shoot down all of them and usually about two reach the target.
Get the support ship, rearm, repeat with the second cruiser. After that, you've got a lot of time to disarm the beams.

Mission 7:
I suppose the best way to protect all of the transports is to just order everyone to attack any target, and pilot a Kentauroi with some serious close range firepower. My suggestion is Maul + Hellfire. You just need to break down formations of Scimitars (as other fighters aren't that big threat to the transports).

Darius:
As an aside, the Sanctus#Mk2 is supremely powerful in its current state and will get a balance pass in the next update.
Cutting down the point defense guns to roughly half, for one.
Likely decreasing the hitpoints, for another.

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