I'm afraid I'm going to have to come down in favour of AWOL Debriefings I'm afraid. Yes they're a simplification but I find them more sensible than the alternatives you've mentioned here.
Originally posted by Goober5000
Consider it from a military point of view. If a friendly force is hopelessly outnumbered with no possibility of success, a retreat is the best tactical option. "Fight to the last man" may be dramatic, but it's not rational. It's in the best interest of the GTVA (or whoever) to preserve fighters and pilots, as it's far more economical to repair broken fighters than build new ones out of scratch. Similarly, it takes years to train pilots, and the GTVA has a vested interest in getting them back alive, particularly ones as skilled as Alpha 1.
I agree with all that but except for the mission Lions Den, Command has always been in contact with Alpha wing and is always fully aware of what the situation is. The decsion to withdraw would never belong to Alpha 1. We rarely face a mission where Alpha 1 is in fact in charge of the situation. The only time where it is up to Alpha Wing to decide to withdraw is in Lions Den and [V] took great pains to set up the mission so that the 15 minute recharge time for Alpha's engines were actually in charge instead of the player's whims.
So since from a military point of view Alpha must always wait for Command to issue him with orders (or at least an option) to retreat, the error is not with the AWOL debrief but in the mission itself for not offering the player the option to retreat if he wishes to.
However offering the player the option would hugely complicate mission logic and even as someone who likes to design very complicated missions I would baulk at the idea of having to write every single event and message in my missions with an eye to whether Alpha had been given the option to RTB or not.
Originally posted by Goober5000
Now consider it from a gaming point of view. If the player failed to respond appropriately to the mission situation or simply made a bad mistake, he might like hints on how to improve his performance the next time around.
I actually hate reccomendations far more than you hate AWOL Debriefings as they are now. I feel that many times they destroy the immersion of the game. Reccomendations should always be presented as suggestions for what the PC
should have done. Quite often they are presented as what the player
should do. If we're talking about reality in debriefings lets not have the admiral talking to the pilot as if he expects him to be able to leap into a time machine and rewrite history.
Getting back to the subject however I tend to feel that if the player needs the reccomendations at all then the mission isn't properly designed. All the information the player needs to solve the mission
first time should be present in the mission briefings or in-game messages. If the player hasn't brought trebs a fellow pilot moaning about his stupidity in not loading up with them is far more immersive than a spooky red voice from beyond advising him that he should have brought them.
Reccomendations should exist solely to suggest ways that the player can improve his standing in the mission if he has already failed (or in some cases partially completed the mission), not as a way to leap out early and gain insights into how the mission works from a mysterious oracle who knows everything.
Originally posted by Goober5000
If you failed the mission, whether you died or made it back safely, you always had the option to ask for help, and the officers would suggest strategy for each part of the mission. This was a very user-friendly approach. It might give away spoilers for the part of the mission that the player hadn't encountered yet, but if the player has failed the mission 10 times he probably doesn't care about spoilers anyway.
But who's saying anything about the player having failed 10 times? The way you're suggesting would result in the player having the reccomendations available if the player shot one enemy fighter and then jumped out. You'd get a lot of players recieving spoilers about events that they hadn't seen yet.
On top of that many players use the option to jump out as a way to get back to the briefing screen to change weapon loadout. These players would now be subjected to actual information about the mission instead of the boilerplate AWOL message you're on about.
Originally posted by Goober5000
I've played missions that have had two debriefing stages: one for all objectives accomplished, and one for AWOL.
You can bet that I come down almost as hard on that as I do on no AWOL when I see it in FA missions. It's basically the same problem with a different spin on it. A lack of thought into other possible outcomes for the mission as you say.
Originally posted by Goober5000
Take a look at the user-created FS1 missions and compare them with the user-created FS2 missions. The FS1 missions had varied, often imaginative ways of dealing with incomplete outcomes. But the FS2 missions all use the standard boilerplate.
Mine don't. Last mission I wrote had 4 seperate AWOL debriefings depending on what had happened in the mission so far, all of which had reccomendations (I hate them but everyone else expects them so they're there).
I'd be surprised if other top 10 FREDders weren't doing something different to a single monolithic AWOL debrief.
Originally posted by Goober5000
In my opinion, the AWOL stage should be used only if the player departs without engaging anything. If the player has engaged, we should assume he's made a good faith effort to complete the mission and simply needs help.
And in my opinion if he needs the Debrief to help him the mission is poorly designed and we should concentrate our efforts on improvng that. The player shouldn't have to fail the mission to be warned that the enemy bombers are concentrating on a single warship. That warship should be screaming that fact out during the mission!
Originally posted by Mongoose
I like where you're going, Goober; it would add a significant element of realism to missions. Real war does involve retreating to preserve one's assets (and life, for that matter), and no real commander would call a soldier a traitor for running from the battle after being shot in the arm (GTVA Command being the obvious exception
). A creative campaign designer could actually work AWOL situations into their campaign. Say, for example, that you're part of a task force charged with taking out a Shivan cruiser wing, but you're all but torn to pieces and barely manage to escape. Instead of being forced to replay the mission, you can move on, but the cruisers you were trying to kill will make an appearance in the next mission or two. I'm sure that some of you creative people out there can think of far better examples than that, but you catch my drift.
Thing is that what you're suggesting isn't actually very much to do with what Goober was on about. If the designer chooses to plan the mission with such occurances possible then the debriefings will also take that possibility into account.
Goober is talking about situations where the AWOL debriefing isn't triggered but the player still fails the mission and has to replay it.
Originally posted by Solitaire
Being a newb, I'm not sure whether its already possible, or whether you'd have to beg the SCP team to try and add the feature, but it would be nice to make missions vary more by getting the success/failure of certain objectives to set flags in the pilot file which subsequent missions could check and the presence of certain flags could change the mission slightly.
Read the section on persistent variables in my FAQ if you're a FREDder. It's possible but no campaign released so far has used it as far as I know.
In fact AFAIK only myself and IP Andews are actually using them (Although it's a fair bet that Goober is too since he coded them in the first place).
