Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: General Battuta on August 31, 2010, 05:00:40 pm
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Delenda Est was the first mission I ever FREDded, and while I'm really grateful for the praise it's gotten, I don't think that it's - as some have said - one of the great missions of all time. Like most forced fail missions, it breaks naturalism at a few points in order to make sure its ending goes off as the plot demands.
If I were redoing it I think I'd make a few changes that would push it in away from that direction, which would also, incidentally, make it a fun multi mission. I don't know if I'd want to replace the current DE with this, but it might make a fun standalone - 'could the Wargods win' and whatnot.
What I'd do (using only our R1 bag of tricks, nothing from the R2 sandbox)
1) Remove all hull guardians. Very few ships have them anyway, not a big deal.
2) Unguardian the Carthage flank beam. Make sure it's heavily armored still.
3) If the Carthage flank beam is taken out, fighters would arrive to attempt to SSM strike the Hanuman. If the player can in turn stop the SSM strike, the Imperieuse would never arrive, and the Wargods would destroy the Carthage OR the Imperieuse would arrive and try to launch fighters to tag the Hanuman for its own forward beams
4) If the Imperieuse does arrive post-Hanuman, as the mission usually flows, its forward beams would not be guardianed. It would retain, however, its kickass escorts, and probably in greater numbers. If players could get past these escorts, defang the forward beams, or badly damage the Imperieuse's hull, the Imp would withdraw and the mission would again succeed.
These are all ways of removing some of the 'nudges' from the mission design and allowing greater player agency, with the obstacles to player success now being extreme difficulty rather than 'you can't do that'.
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So you say you want a two-way outcome allowing for the total destruction of the Carthage and death of Anita Lopez, as long as the player properly holds off the threats flung at them? Or am I wrong? Could make for an interesting bonus mission maybe. Not taking into account the story that way, but allowing a what-if from a pure tactical and strategic point of view (as I always assumed the Carthage survived for story reasons).
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So you say you want a two-way outcome allowing for the total destruction of the Carthage and death of Anita Lopez, as long as the player properly holds off the threats flung at them? Or am I wrong? Could make for an interesting bonus mission maybe. Not taking into account the story that way, but allowing a what-if from a pure tactical and strategic point of view (as I always assumed the Carthage survived for story reasons).
Yeah, it'd be an interesting standalone to see if a sufficiently badass player could prevent the catastrophic defeat there.
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I'm not sure if I would agree; I like player agency, but with something as momentous as the end of Delenda Est, I think railroading the player was the right thing to do.
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I agree. At that point, we needed to do some railroading just to tell the story as we intended to. Allowing the player to win just wasn't on the charts, really.
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I think he intends this as a 'what if'
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As long as QuantumDelta finds it mildly challenging, it should be alright.
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I think it would make a great multiplayer mission. I'd love to play that with a few friends and see if we can crack it.
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Stock DE would probably be too easy for multi :P
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Definitely, cuz then you could actually leave a player to debeam, the reason it's so damn hard (even with the guardians off) is that it takes almost two minutes to kill the main beam off the carthage, and even longer to kill the beams on the Imp), doing that while fending off fighters is virtually impossible on your own.
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Delenda Est was the first mission I ever FREDded...
:eek: You are my GOD !
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I think an alternative version of Delenda est like outlines would be a nice addition, but just as a single mission for solo or multi.
From narrative point -and the BP team is definatly narrating here (it's almost interactive movie)- the railroading was necessary. That said: the first time I played the mission I didn't notice the RRing much.
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Could also make for an interesting capital-ship mission, commanding the Indus.