Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Dilmah G on July 06, 2010, 10:58:18 pm
-
Alright ladies and gents.
I've started work on a remake for the two missions, planning it to play out a bit like the first poll option and to be released as a two-mission mini-campaign.
WHAT DO THE PEOPLE WANT?
-
Snuffy.
-
A mother****ing BoE, 'nuff said.
-
snuff..
go for what you like the most, after all you are the one making it
-
BOE. BOE. BOE.
-
didn't you already do this?
-
Only for High Noon. :P And even then, it was one of the first missions ever that I FREDed.
-
i went option 1 because of the difficulty balancing a BOE
-
I kind of don't like remakes in general.
Hence Snuffleupagus.
-
Do whatever you feel will make ****ty retail missions better Dilmah :yes:
-
Insert another mission in before Bearbaiting. It's mentioned in one of the two briefing that the Sathanas smashed a blockade on its way to Capella, but obviously that's not true, because Alpha One wasn't there, and Alpha One is at all major engagements, always. This is where you get your BoE on. GTVA Command makes a big deal of making the Sathanas sound unstoppable, so demonstrate its power! Twenty capital ships! Forty capital ships! However many you like, so long as the Sathanas effortlessly punches a hole through the middle and continues on without so much as slowing down for breath. Oh, and grossly misprioritize the player by giving him the task of intercepting the Sathanas' bombers, so that he doesn't get the wise idea of trying to knock out the forward beams prematurely.
Bearbaiting does pretty well at the start. Given how close the Sathanas is to the Capella node, there's serious time-pressure for you to get your job done, so it builds tension very well, while providing a healthy challenge. It all falls apart, once the Sathanas jumps out, and despite the importance of disarming it, prior to it engaging the Colossus, you have to faff around with a Demon (a comparatively minor threat) and kill every single fighter in the area. I'd make Bearbaiting shorter, by having ordering the bomber wing to immediately pursue the Sathanas and exacting punishment for noncompliance.
High Noon is a little trickier. First instinct is to insert more warships, because who wouldn't erect a mother-f'n blockade with a juggernaut coming to town? Trouble is, by the time the Sathanas gets to Capella, it's bashed its way through at least one of those already, so the Colossus is being deployed in lieu of losing another dozen capital ships. However, with two ships with fighterbays the size of small moons, one would think that between them, they'd deploy a little more than a wing of bombers and a few waves of assault fighters. More fighters! More bombers! Reset the Colossus' AAA beams to normal (instead of those ridiculous Ultra-AAA beams), and make the player work to survive, nevermind sneaking a Sathanas kill credit onto his record. If FS2 was going WWII air combat in space, then make this feel like an epic engagement between carrier groups (as the Sathanas and Colossus both are each supposed to be a carrier group built into one ship). The Battle of Midway involved an estimated 624 aircraft. Surely the Colossus and Sathanas combined, even after your slaughter of the latter's bombers in the first mission of the series, can muster at least that many fighters. ;)
Anyway, the option that seems closest to what I've written is the big, domesticated mammoth.
-
motha****ing BOE
-
BlueFlames, check your PMs. :yes:
-
WTF is BOE?
-
Battle of Endor.
-
WTF is BOE?
Battle of Endor
This describes scenarios similar to the Star Wars Battle of Endor where by large numbers of capital warships are operating in one field of engagement at one time. This is something historically the FS engine has not handled well though a number of SCP updates had address many of the technical and performance issues relating to this. The biggest remaining difficulties are that missions operating on a BoE basis tend to be very difficult to balance often requiring heavy use of events to micro manage the ships involved, it also suffers from extreme difficulty in making the mission such that the player feels that they make a real difference.
-
"Balanced" BoE for High Noon. Many, many ships on both sides which don't appear all at the same time. Colossus, Sathanas and some 10 more ships at the beginning are fine. Other ships would arrive progressively.
At the end, you'd have some 20+ warship kills for both sides even if, during the mission, there weren't more than 15 ships at the same time.
-
Thanks for explanation, I love Battle of Endor style, that's what I miss in Freespace (I remember one mission in FS similar to BoE, maybe it was in the Inerno Alliance)
-
Glad you're looking for new gaming experiences, but I wouldn't recommend (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/BoE) pure BoE missions.
-
BoE missions are easy to make but very hard to make well. Even if the player can get involved the risk of random death is high.
If only we had mid-mission checkpoints! :nervous:
-
If only we had mid-mission checkpoints! :nervous:
...
<3
-
I voted for the first option largely because it seems like the option that Dilmah was pretty much already prepared for.
-
There are many kinds of BoE missions, IMHO. There are so many variables to take in considerations, like the type of anti-warship weapons which are employed.
-
BoE, eh?
Hm, Space is HUGE, make use of it.
Voted first option.
-
I'm with BlueFlame on having a pre-mission in there. Since the Gamma Draconis-to-Capella jump node was recently the site of a blockade to stop the NTF, it stands to reason that some of those same fleet assets are still in place. The same warships and RBCs along with a few other ships could represent the allied fleet. However, to avoid attacks from its less-well-defended flanks, have the Sathanas escorted by say two Liliths, a Rakshasa, and a Moloch (with the extra SRed beam). As the Sath approaches the blockade, the player is charged with flying heavy assault to first help deal with these escorts, basically de-beaming them as allied ships try the flanking attacks. Once the escort ships are dealt with (or nearing so), the Sath enters firing range and starts taking out the fleet ahead, but the RBCs are inflicting damage too. The Sath then sends bombers to take them out, so the player has to protect the RBCs from these attacks, as well as try to protect the Hedetet, which the Saths beams are avoiding for scripting purposes. Eventually, as more and more ships are knocked out, Command realizes that they can't keep the Sath from jumping to Capella, so they order your wing to board the Hedetet through the fighterbay, where you're swapped into pre-armed Bakhas and are sent out via scramble mission right back into the main Bearbating mission.
You'll witness the final destruction of the allied blockade at the very beginning, including a disabled Hedetet, and the Phoenicia running like scared babies as the Sath gives them massive hull damage. While you were switching ships, assault fighters from the Sath have taken down or are in the final process of taking out the RBCs, and the player must do the traditional de-clawing of the Sath, while the flank-attacking allied ships try to harass it but get a face-full of its ass-SRed. Once the Sath jumps, you could still have the Beleth arrive afterwards, but instead of trying to follow the Sath into Capella, it tries to keep any allied ships from following, so you have to assist in taking down the destroyer both to keep the remaining warships form becoming toast, and to clear the node so you can follow and assist the Colossus.
For the High Noon mission, have the Colossus delayed, so you have to cover other surviving warships including the badly-damaged Phoenicia, as they attempt to wolfpack the Sath. You could even include the Psamtik, which launches additional escort fighters. When the Colossus arrives, the other warships try to take a defensive position around it. As stated by many, the preferred mission type would involve more in the way of defensive of the fleet, rather than the door-wide-open offensive of the original. You could even have it that the player has returned to the Psamtik and switches into a heavy assault or interceptor. On the other hand, once the Sath's main guns are down, it could potentially try to pump more power through its AAA guns, turning them into LReds or perhaps even an SRed or two. That would necessitate the player doing surgical strikes on the Sath to knock these out, lest the fleet suffer. Such a mission would be better if the player retained the Bakha.
Oh, and by this run-down, you can deduce that I voted for option #1.
Oh, and as a suggestion for the title of this mini-campaign: "Tooth and Nail"
-
Um... I think you mean "LRed" instead of SRed and vice versa? In last two large paras.
Sounds interesting though - how would you do the fighterbay part? Is there an "end mission if near area" or similar?
-
An end mission triggered by distance to ship subsystem should do the trick. It was part of what I was planning anyway, well, not exactly what Trivial Psychic said, but close. ;)
As some people may or may not know. You know who you are.