[Rheyah]

I am not a champion fredder but i am new and ive been giving this some thought.  I came up with a series of guidelines I am following:

1.  Everything has value.  Eventually a force will decide it is no longer worth engaging and will cut its losses.  A wing of 4 scout fighters sent in as force assessment will bug out.  An assault force will bug out if their main strike targets bug out or their mission is no longer viable.

2.  Have a bigger goal.  WHY are they attacking/defending.  What do they want to accomplish?

3.  Be realistic about how enemies engage and how big a role you want the player to play.

4.  Have hard choices.  In one mission ive designed the pc gets to decide whether to activate the guns on two freighters they have captured or send one of them into the enemy formation rigged to explode.  Hopefully that will be what people remember

We will see how much of this I can actually do!

[Rheyah]

One other mission idea I had involved a transport being stuck behind a ring of powerful active sentry turrets.  You then duck between three stations, collecting the digits of a randomised number at each station.

then you have to figure out (yourself) how to enter the code using clues in the mission within the time limit.

All doable with just fred and training messages I think.

[halcyony2k]

Here are my two cents; make campaigns/missions unpredictable for replay factor, and have campaigns/missions that work around the player's choices. If I play through the original freespace campaign, I know who is going to die, what ships will be attacking me , and how the game will end. However; if there was a chance that an enemy wolfpack is lurking around and has an X chance to jump in and hasn't been destroyed on previous missions, and my wing has just been pulverized, I might be a little more anxious. Or what if in the Freespace 2 campaign, I decided to defect to Admiral Bosch's fleet to fight for the NTF? A nightmare to fred and re-work, but this is a choice that has a lot more meaning than "save X ship, X ship returns in Y mission."

[Lepanto]

Here are my two cents; make campaigns/missions unpredictable for replay factor, and have campaigns/missions that work around the player's choices. If I play through the original freespace campaign, I know who is going to die, what ships will be attacking me , and how the game will end. However; if there was a chance that an enemy wolfpack is lurking around and has an X chance to jump in and hasn't been destroyed on previous missions, and my wing has just been pulverized, I might be a little more anxious. Or what if in the Freespace 2 campaign, I decided to defect to Admiral Bosch's fleet to fight for the NTF? A nightmare to fred and re-work, but this is a choice that has a lot more meaning than "save X ship, X ship returns in Y mission."

I think you just might be on to something, with randomizing missions. It would be hard to FRED, and I personally wouldn't want to go through the effort of making full branching storylines, but a little randomness in terms of enemy wing/minor capital ship/ally wing arrivals would help keep the player on their toes and kill some of the tedium of replaying missions. Also, you'd have to take balance into account, of course.

[Lorric]

Maybe you could have two campaigns. One with rigid settings and one where things get shaken up a bit...

It could certainly add some replayability to individual missions.

[Phantom Hoover]

Randomising missions reduces the player's ability to iteratively plan out a strategy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with certain design decisions (some of which are basically hardcoded into FSO) it can make for a very frustrating experience.

[MatthTheGeek]

In a similar mind (improving the experience by having the mission behave differently when you replay it), keep in mind you can have events tied up to the difficulty level

[Axem]

Randomising missions reduces the player's ability to iteratively plan out a strategy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with certain design decisions (some of which are basically hardcoded into FSO) it can make for a very frustrating experience.

Totally agree with this, even as a FREDder who likes to torture his players. If a mission rolls some bad dice for the player, the player's just going to restart the mission until he gets some better rolls, making that extra work put in a mission to be totally useless.

Randomizing arriving ship classes or dialog lines is about as far as I like to go.

[karajorma]

The trick is to use persistence to make it so that when the campaign is replayed the missions are different, but each replay during the same campaign is the same. That way the player can plan for what happens in the mission if they get killed, but can't use that knowledge when replaying.

[Phantom Hoover]

Then you have to make absolutely sure there aren't any configurations of the mission that end up being abnormally difficult, because if a player gets stuck with that halfway through your campaign...

[mjn.mixael]

The trick is to use persistence to make it so that when the campaign is replayed the missions are different, but each replay during the same campaign is the same. That way the player can plan for what happens in the mission if they get killed, but can't use that knowledge when replaying.

But how many playthroughs should a FREDer have to plan for? I have a story to tell with BtA... how much effort should I put into making that story work with so many different options going on? I guess what I'm trying to ask is.. at what point should the player just play... a different campaign?

[MatthTheGeek]

It depends a lot on what you're aiming at. BtA wants to tell a story while having fun gameplay, it doesn't need to go in all the ways proposed in this thread to slightly improve replayability, especially if it goes in the way of balance.

Something in the spirit of Ben Cavalgar, on the other hand, could benefit from such ideas.

[Phantom Hoover]

In general this thread's more about the problem of keeping missions fresh as a campaign goes on, not replay value.

[Lorric]

It's something that would be very situational in where and how you use it.

Maybe the variables don't have to be random. You could produce several versions of the same mission. Difficulty within difficulty...

[karajorma]

Then you have to make absolutely sure there aren't any configurations of the mission that end up being abnormally difficult, because if a player gets stuck with that halfway through your campaign...

I never said it was easy to do.

But how many playthroughs should a FREDer have to plan for? I have a story to tell with BtA... how much effort should I put into making that story work with so many different options going on? I guess what I'm trying to ask is.. at what point should the player just play... a different campaign?

I think the point is to make sure that the game remains fresh if replayed. If you look at the big RPGs, how many replays do you need to see all the content? Not many people will try, but the fact that you find new stuff for the first few time you do so, makes them more interesting to replay, even if you only do it once or twice.

But I never felt that this is something a FREDder needs to do. I know lots of games which are very linear, completely unchanging on a second playthrough and are still hugely fun. I really think it's up to the individual FREDder. I add this sort of stuff to my missions because as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a game with too much replayability. I don't think I've ever had a player complain about a mission being different the next time they played it. So I build in as much as I think I can before it gets to the point that my energy would be better spent making something new.