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RELEASE - Bem Cavalgar
Lt.D:
Bem Cavalgar
Bem Cavalgar is a campaign set during the Shivan invasion of Vasuda in the Great War. The story follows a group of loyalist Vasudan officers who stay behind to defend their homeworld and the evacuating civilians.
You play as both Captain Senbi, leader of the loyalists, and as an unnamed fighter pilot, Azriel 1.
Installation
Bem Cavalgar requires the Freespace Port 3.4, the FSPort MediaVPs and the MediaVPs 3.6.12 to function.
Make a folder in your root FS2 directory and unpack everything there. Select 'Bem Cavalgar' via your FSOpen launcher.
Loadout
Note that loadout is persistent across the campaign. At the moment (v1) it's set during the introductory cutscene at the start of the campaign and doesn't change afterwards; the exact number of ships and weapons you get is tied to the difficulty.
Play the introductory cutscene on Very Easy to get a full choice of ships and weapons. Play on higher difficulties to have your stocks proportionately reduced.
Credits
Freespace Port - all Freespace 1 content
Freespace Upgrade Project - strategic map ships based on their models
Black Wolf - Abydos installation
Trashman - Vasudan corvette
Ransom Arceihn - Comship model
Blue Planet - fonts, AI
Ben Prunty - Faster Than Light music (Federation and Last Stand)
David Nicolle - furusiyya translation
This campaign owes additional debts to:
Blue Planet
Goober5000
Ransom Arceihn
Download
FSMods: http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.901
Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/download/7u8ijb65x3byjhc/bemcavalgar.rar
Lt.D:
Okay, so this post right here is to 'explain' Bem Cavalgar, at least from my perspective. I don't want to influence people overmuch so I'll keep things light (and spoiled!) for now.
1. Balance
Spoiler:The most pressing issue for me at the moment is balance.
One of the core themes I tried to write into Bem Cavalgar is the idea of the dilemma or difficult choice. Hopefully that's apparent in at least some of the mission design and in the 'strategic map' as a whole.
Part of the concept of the dilemma is that it's a forced choice - there's a kind of pressure on you to make the 'right' choice, whatever that is. Strategically, at the moment that's done almost entirely through the Time variable, which controls what missions are available when. In later releases there'll be more missions so mission choice won't be quite as significant.
The other kind of 'strategic' pressure comes in the form of the ship and weapon stocks. Again, at the moment there are only a few missions so this doesn't matter so much - plus the variables are static anyway, so you'll always have the same resources available. In later releases, I'd like to heighten this aspect so that the player is tempted to take missions based on possible material benefit rather than just what they feel like doing at the moment.
Part of realising this will be including a way to lose resources - wingman deaths will result in shipframe and cannon losses, naturally. I haven't implemented this yet for various reasons (again, at the moment the campaign is only 5-7 missions long!).
The other part is making missions difficult enough that weapon and ship advantage can tilt the battle in the player's favour. Weapons and ships need to be powerful enough/the default Anubis and Avenger loadout needs to be weak enough that skipping saving civilian lives to get a supply package from the PVN is a tempting idea.
So: I've tried to balance missions roughly along the lines of a player using the default loadout of Anubis/Avenger/Fury playing on Normal can achieve roughly half of the mission objectives (i.e. save 50% of civilian lives, destroy 50% of Shivan ships).
Is this balance setting accurate? Does the default loadout give you roughly a 50% success rate in each mission?
Lt.D:
I've always been a proponent of iterative design and Bem Cavalgar is the kind of campaign (low narrative focus) where I might actually be able to put it into practice. This post will be about plans for later releases.
I also believe in content-sharing. Unfortunately as a FREDder I've never really been able to do this for myself - I can use other people's assets, but not share my own.
There are some things I would like for v2 of Bem Cavalgar. I'll scavenge or attempt to make my own, but I'm also willing to negotiate tit-for-tat FRED-for-assets deals, in the spirit of sharing and enabling content creation.
BUGFIXES
[*]Change Terran personae in M5
[*]Update credits in readme.txt
[*]Include mainhall setting in campaign file
[*]Deprecated info in AI table?
[*]Vasudan corvette model fixes?
[*]FSPort Upgrade tbm override
[*]Vasuda Prime is the fourth planet in the Vasuda system[/list]
BALANCE
[*]Amun bomber shields too strong?
[*]Shivan weaponry too weak?[/list]
MODELS
[*]PRIORITY - Some kind of giant Vasudan railgun/artillery piece
[*]Vasudan solar array? Might be able to use BW's construction kit here[/list]
SKYBOXES
[*]PRIORITY - Vasuda Prime atmospheric skybox
[*]Vasuda Prime orbital skybox
[*]Brihispati gas giant atmospheric skybox?
[*]orbital skyboxes for Mangala and Brihispati?
[*]generic Vasuda system skybox?[/list]
BACKGROUNDS
[*]Sun background
[*]Vasuda Prime background
[*]other planet backgrounds?[/list]
Black Wolf:
Congrats on the release! Downloading now.
Rodo:
Uhhh a new campaign, gotta play it on the weekend :D
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