Question: The Malta appears in Apocalypse, but where do the other ships in the Bastion's escort go?
edit (because my double posts have become insaanee)
Yay I finished it! First time I finished the whole thing on insanity, which is nice.
I still have *thoughts* about Apocalypse though:
First of all, there's a bit of weirdness regarding the fighters and capitals that get carried over. I can understand that mission balance requires that only a limited set of fighters or cruisers get carried over, but the current method is a bit crude: The Malta gets carried over if the malta survives, but if the Ertenax and the Templar both survive whilst the Malta is destroyed apocalypse is still harder then it would be if you lost two cruisers but saved the Malta. From a reward perspective, this makes no sense.
My suggestion would be to ensure that if you manage to save atleast one cruiser, the cruiser with the least amount of hull damage is carried over to Apocalypse. The final mission appears to have scripting disabled to make all three of them appear but that might screw up with balance a bit too much (Even if Apocalypse is damn hard, but it should be).
The same with fighters: It makes no sense that you get all your fighters when Alpha and beta and gamma 1,2 survive, but none if only gamma 3,4 and delta survive.
Secondly, the mission has voice files for every ship that makes it trough the node, even if the convoys have no chance of surviving. This could be a boon to make the mission less predictable. Right now, anyone who has played apocalypse knows when it will end, thus encouraging the player to bolt it after a certain set of time is passed. Perhaps make that timer a *lot* more random. Sometimes earlier to catch out veterans, whilst often longer to coax people into tempting fate and trying to save a few more transport ships. The way the current mission is designed makes Petrarch's speech on how Alpha 1 heroically decided to stay behind seem like a complete sham. Simply being nearby the third or fourth convoy makes running in the default herc II impossible.
Perhaps, try making that mission play exactly like Petrarch paints it and tie the apocalypse to the flight path of a random transport ship: When that transport ship is about 50 seconds away from the node, trigger the supernova and have that ship be attacked by shivans so that the player is actually forced to choose between just bolting for the node and trying to cover that last transport ship at the risk of their own life.
I have no idea if such a thing even can be fredded but I DARE YOU.
(Also, do the AI actually use trebuchets?)