Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Devising on November 07, 2019, 01:08:59 pm
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Hello everyone,,
I keep reading that Command was stupid in FS 1 and even more in FS2.
While I see that it does mistakes, and often understaff its strike forces, what are according to you Command "blunders" ? I mean - real blunders, being stupid - , not "mistakes" like underestimating a Shivan force by lack of information (in FS and in FS2)
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Throwing the Phoenicia out in front of the Sathanas to "stall it". To name one.
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Telling the player to fly into the Lucifer's fighterbay.
Like, what did command even expect us to do if we got in undetected?
Storm the Lucifer alone with our sidearm? Take over the ship single-handedly? Blow stuff up the Lucifer isn't supposed to? :p
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(https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/017/204/CaptainAmerica1_zps8c295f96.jpg)
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...or see how many fighters/bombers Shivans have available or finding some weak points. I think that spaceships can fly through the shields and even a single wing of bombers could deal a lot of damage to a vessel from inside. Definitely more than from the outside, even with shields turned down (thx subspace).
So, a couple from me:
1. Assaulting the Ravana, the most dangerous Shivan destroyer met (except Lucy) with only a mere single wing of bombers and single wing of fighters plus a corvette for distraction. Seriously, the mission is crazy hard on higher difficulties basically for no reason. Or they could have the corvette dirtily use the gigantic beamless spots on the Shivan warship too, even without bomber support.
2. Building the Colossus.
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Letting.
Bosch.
Open.
The.
Knossos.....
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Letting.
Bosch.
Open.
The.
Knossos.....
Well they didn't knew that. Not closing it would count. Building one and possibly dooming Sol would too.
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Aw this guy believes the GTVA didn't know!
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Aw this guy believes the GTVA didn't know!
👆👆
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Common, just a tiny-whiny Trinity in the vastness of space~ :D
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Hmm. I found it odd that Kappa and Iota weren't paired together when the Aquitaine started to scout the Nebula. Perhaps if Command let them patrol together, the chance of Kappa going MIA might have dropped a bit.
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A lot of this is showing some selective memory, or at least not presenting the FULL facts of the situation.
The Colossus was designed to be a Lucifer/Great War Shivan fleet killer. It also engaged a Sathanas on favorable terms and won. It's ludicrous to say the ship didn't perform, it was simply overwhelmed by a class of Shivan warship no one could have anticipated.
Command did have a plan to kill the Sathanas in the nebula using positing and tactics, it didn't work. The Sathanas evaded the trap and lure operation Speaking in Tongues. At that point, with the Sathanas barreling down on Capella, yes, it probably was worth throwing a destroyer in front of it to buy time. Everyone has a plan until they get hit.
Command didn't "let" Bosch open the portal. They had no idea it even existed. He was let go to allow SOC to continue their investigations and possibly recover ETAK. Which was stolen technology.
Basically there's a lot of basis of judgement on things we, the player, know, but Command could have had no reasonable chance of knowing. Other than vastly underestimating the scope of the Shivan threat.
Even allowing the portal to stay open was deemed and acceptable risk *because* of the chance of replicating the Knossos, to allow a return to Earth which would help heal all of human civilization.
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A lot of this is showing some selective memory, or at least not presenting the FULL facts of the situation.
The Colossus was designed to be a Lucifer/Great War Shivan fleet killer. It also engaged a Sathanas on favorable terms and won. It's ludicrous to say the ship didn't perform, it was simply overwhelmed by a class of Shivan warship no one could have anticipated.
This. There's a trope from Tvtropes that also sums up the Colossus in FS2: Awesome but Impractical. I'll provide the full quote:
Awesome, but Impractical: The GTVA Colossus ends up being this despite the best of intentions. It follows a standard Terran design despite being co-developed by Vasudans; it can't project very much of its firepower in one direction but can engage multiple smaller ships in all directions at the same time, and is durable enough to win even if heavily outnumbered. This is exactly what the GTVA needs against the NTF, and is exactly what they could've used during the Great War. Unfortunately, the designers never imagined it would ever have to fight something of comparable size and durability, where its inability to deliver most of its firepower into a single target turns into a massive handicap.
This is exactly right. Remember, the GTVA had been fighting the NTF for 18 months with no end in sight until the Colossus was finally completed and deployed. As evidence that there was no end in sight at this time is this: just before the Colossus was deployed, the GTVA launched a two-pronged assault on Sirius that failed. Just after that, the NTF counterattacked in Epsilon Pegasi, causing more than 75% casualties to GTVA forces. 75%. As I understand it, anything over just 30% casualties to a military force is devastating. (I don't remember the exact circumstances or when it happened, but I do remember a retired general being interviewed on the news saying this.) This proof positive that the NTF was more than holding its own during the NTF Rebellion so the stalemate showed no signs of abating.
But once it was finally deployed, the Colossus made short work of the NTF's fleet in Epsilon Pegasi, finally driving the NTF from that system. Shortly afterwards, Alpha Centauri, Deneb and Sirius finally fell to the GTVA. It's unknown whether the Colossus was redeployed to those systems and had a hand in those victories, but it's probably more than likely. So an 18-month statlemate was broken in a few weeks, if not mere days, by the Colossus. As noted above, this is its intended design function: to take on multiple smaller ships at the same time and prevail even when outnumbered. Manwithamachinegun is exactly right: Up until the Sathanas showed up, the Colossus was functioning exactly as it was designed to do.
Command did have a plan to kill the Sathanas in the nebula using positing and tactics, it didn't work. The Sathanas evaded the trap and lure operation Speaking in Tongues. At that point, with the Sathanas barreling down on Capella, yes, it probably was worth throwing a destroyer in front of it to buy time. Everyone has a plan until they get hit.
Command didn't "let" Bosch open the portal. They had no idea it even existed. He was let go to allow SOC to continue their investigations and possibly recover ETAK. Which was stolen technology.
Basically there's a lot of basis of judgement on things we, the player, know, but Command could have had no reasonable chance of knowing. Other than vastly underestimating the scope of the Shivan threat.
Even allowing the portal to stay open was deemed and acceptable risk *because* of the chance of replicating the Knossos, to allow a return to Earth which would help heal all of human civilization.
+1 to all this as well. No one knew the Knossos device was in Gamma Draconis until Bosch first discovered its existence at Deneb after he had partially conquered the system and plundered its archaeological sites during the NTF Rebellion. As for ETAK, Bosch had been gathering data on Shivan communication for years, if not decades, starting with him being involved in the fight against the GTI rebellion and him rising in the ranks to admiral just so he could get the GTI's research and build ETAK. Even during the start of the NTF rebellion, the GTVA had no (or perhaps a slim) idea of what the hell ETAK actually was. Some in the GTVA speculated that ETAK was a weapon of mass destruction long before it was discovered that ETAK was a Shivan communication device. All the GTVA Command knew was that ETAK was a project that Bosch was devoting all of his resources to. Thus if Bosch wanted ETAK that badly, then it was something that the GTVA needed to find (and acquire intact) pronto. That's why Command let Bosch go and lifted the blockade at the Deneb-Sirius jump node: because if the Iceni was destroyed then, so was any hope of discovering or acquiring ETAK.
Even at Gamma Draconis, the GTVA made the correct decisions according to the knowledge they had: They kept the Knossos device intact long enough to be sure they could construct another and destroyed it before the Sathanas could use it. No one (except genre-savvy out-of-universe players like us) could have predicted that the device would stabilize the Gamma Draconis-Shivan Nebula jump node even after being destroyed.
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The Boanerges.
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If we're talking about Command blunders, how about their inability to deal with Bosch? Who stonewalled the entire combined GTVA despite their best strategies. That's a much more reasonable criticism than the failure to account for the seemingly godlike capacities of the Shivan warfleet. The NTF had no next-gen destroyers like the Hecate or Hatshepsut. No advanced fighters like the spec-ops Erinyes or Perseus. And yet Bosch was not only able to stall any advances into his territory, the entire campaign was teetering on collapse before the Colussus was destroyed, from both the Terrans and Vasudans alike.
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Command no major mistakes in the FS2 story, afaict. They acted well on the information they had. Pushing the Psamtik to get through the second Knossos as fast as possible was maybe a tactical error.
Can't we put a blanket ban on quoting TVTropes yet :nono:
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If we're talking about Command blunders, how about their inability to deal with Bosch? Who stonewalled the entire combined GTVA despite their best strategies. That's a much more reasonable criticism than the failure to account for the seemingly godlike capacities of the Shivan warfleet. The NTF had no next-gen destroyers like the Hecate or Hatshepsut. No advanced fighters like the spec-ops Erinyes or Perseus. And yet Bosch was not only able to stall any advances into his territory, the entire campaign was teetering on collapse before the Colussus was destroyed, from both the Terrans and Vasudans alike.
I think this is largely a function of how strategic warfare works in the FS-verse. Intersystem jump nodes are unavoidable hard bottlenecks, and if you can do what Bosch did and get a few interconnected systems to go rogue in short order, it'd be ostensibly very easy to establish a blockade on your side of the outgoing nodes and make it nigh-impossible for someone to punch through. I'd imagine the main reason the NTF conflict dragged on for so long and cost the GTVA so many resources was because of that fact. It took something like the Colossus, a genuine blockade-buster, to punch a way through and give the GTVA a legitimate opening.
As for the Colossus itself, I fully agree that it performed the task it was designed to do fairly well. The main issue is one as old as warfare, in that generals are always prepared to fight the previous war.
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The Boanerges.
The Bakha.
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Can't we put a blanket ban on quoting TVTropes yet :nono:
What, why??? TvTropes is awesome! :cool: :nod: :pimp: :yes: :yes: :yes:
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Can't we put a blanket ban on quoting TVTropes yet :nono:
What, why??? TvTropes is awesome! :cool: :nod: :pimp: :yes: :yes: :yes:
You could just as well ban quoting forum posts from before 2005 that promote a different opinion than Battutas. ;)
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Idgi.
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People say the Colossus was designed to fight the last war as a criticism, but what should Command have done if they knew what the coming Shivan fleet would look like? It was designed to be as powerful as they could possibly make it, it's not like they got to the level where they thought they could beat the Lucifer and designed to stop there.
All you can really do against a Sathanas fleet is what they did - load up some destroyers with explosives and take the relevant jump nodes out. Having the Colossus didn't stop them from doing that, indeed if you buy what the Colossus said in Their Finest Hour they actually bought time for that strategy to be used effectively.
One mistake I would say Command made is having the Bastion travel from Capella to Epsilon Pegasi rather than having a ship depart from Epsilon Pegasi to Capella. Maybe the Meson Bomb production facility was in Capella.
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The Meson bomb was made in Vega, that's why the Capella-EP node was destroyed first.
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Seems like it would have made more sense to take the bombs the long way round and enter the node from Epsilon Pegasi rather than making an incursion into a system with 80+ Sathanas juggernauts in it.
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It would've taken a while to get around Capella, it's a 5 system long path.
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Traversing 5 GTVA controlled systems without a shot being fired is surely better than jumping into a chokepoint in a Shivan controlled system, then heading for another chokepoint, especially when a Sathanas could jump in at any point and ruin you in 10 seconds.
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Minutes costs lives
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Traversing 5 GTVA controlled systems without a shot being fired is surely better than jumping into a chokepoint in a Shivan controlled system, then heading for another chokepoint, especially when a Sathanas could jump in at any point and ruin you in 10 seconds.
Well Command needed time to set up the destroyers. Elseway they probably would've destroyed the Capella-GD node. By the time they were finished there were alread 80+ Saths for 3 days.