[Black Wolf]

How many friendly fighters are too many friendly fighters? I'm doing a system invasion mission, and I want to put three full squadrons in there (ie. 36 fighters), but it strikes me that that's rather... a lot. Probably more firepower than the capships doing the invading.

The problem is that I hate seeing the GTVA being retarded and saying "OK, so we have to invade this system... let's send three capships, one of which has a cavernous fighterbay, and deploy 8 fighters to protect all three of them from bombers."

So, am I being unrealistic expecting the mission to work well if I try to be realistic?

[TopAce]

FreeSpace and realism are two different things. Use 3, four-man wings with multiple waves.

[Black Wolf]

That's sensible... thoiugh rather thnan waves, I might set it up so that when Delta dies, Epsilon Arrives, so that I don;t end up with Dellta 12.

[TopAce]

I don't see why having a Delta 12 is a problem. Does it cause problems? I don't know, this has never caused trouble for me.

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by Black Wolf
That's sensible... thoiugh rather thnan waves, I might set it up so that when Delta dies, Epsilon Arrives, so that I don;t end up with Dellta 12.

That seems the most reasonable and believable. Having more than three or four friendly wings is not only imbalanced, but its hell to control the individual wings in anything but a peaceful part of the mission.

[Starman01]

Originally posted by nuclear1


That seems the most reasonable and believable. Having more than three or four friendly wings is not only imbalanced, but its hell to control the individual wings in anything but a peaceful part of the mission.

Actually it works good, you just need to give them good goals. In peaceful times select one or two leaders, give them waypoints and let the others follow them. We are making the same in our missions.

As for big battles and the balancing problem, here is what I do :

Just add some additional weapons.tbl entries for fake-weapons. Same visual than normal weapons, but very less or even no firepower. That similuates an heavy battle, but you don't have incredible firepower in the mission. Of course you should place the so unarmed fighters throughout the sector, so that it will not be to much noticable to the player that these ships are only statists.

[NGTM-1R]

The most friendly fighters I've ever added in a single mission is 24, counting the player. At that number you start edging out hostiles, though, and it gets too easy. 16 or so is probably a good number.

Since this is, presumably, an assault on a node blockade, combat should be taking place in a fairly small area and the visual effect of a lot of combatants ought to be achieveable with a smaller number of friendlies.