[Game_Master64]

if the morning stars piss you off, cheat one of your weapons to the shivan super laser and push back

[CP5670]

Well I like the story and background for the campaign, but I can honestly say I've never been so frustrated playing a FS2 campaign, even Aeos Affair was nowhere near the difficulty level of this campaign.  The "4 minutes to destroy the corvette and Aeolus" is possible to do if you play it absolutely perfectly to the letter, sort of like taking out all 5 beams on Bearbaiting, except in this case its mission fail if you end up one bomb short.  Then the next mission you get treated to trucking around in a Bakha getting blasted by 2 or 3 Erinyes armed with morning stars.

This is a venting post, I'll likely be more positive on the campaign when I get to a mission I dont have to play 10 times to get past.

I had the time limit for that mission higher at one point, but there is a simple trick to it that I thought everyone else would be also able to figure out. If you order the other bombers to attack the Aeolus some time before the Deimos is destroyed, when it's at 15-30% strength, you can get them both with quite some time to spare. However, I'm glad you brought it up and will increase the time limit with the difficulty levels on the next revision, with more time available on lower difficulties.

The next mission is among the easiest in the campaign. The Erinyes generally ignore you except for one near the beginning. What difficulty are you playing on? I think you may have set it too high.

[Stomp357]

  How do you enable cheats in this campaign? I've been trying to pass mission 15 where you must destroy 20 turrents on the Saturn, and I can't. Been trying for days, and I'm about to can this campaign. I don'tcare if I ruin the "fun", but I have a hard enough time trying to play games these days as my MD has gotten worse, and I don't have the ability to use my controller like I once could.

[CP5670]

Just the usual way, type "www.freespace2.com" and then hit the various cheat commands (~I, ~W, and so on). An infinite supply of Stilettos works well.

You only need to get 15 turrets in that mission to complete it, by the way. The other things are secondary objectives and aren't mandatory.

[FlyingBadger]

I'm on medium difficulty, and I guess I'm stubborn but I don't want to go to Easy because it feels like cheating.  I must have played that mission after chasing down the corvette and cruiser a dozen times.  I finally switched to a Sekhmet bomber and then it took me another four to get through it, although the last few times I was an idiot and forgot how to properly bomb a cruiser without either getting eaten alive by flak or hearing "avoid the beam and you won't get hit, pilot!" in my head as I restarted.  My biggest problem was getting swarmed while trying to take out the cargo depot.  That became less of a problem once I loaded Kaysers and could breeze through the cargo and close range fighters really quickly.  But if one or two of them got behind me with their morning stars, I was toast. 

As for that chase mission, the only way I could do it was to immediately take out the major rear turrets of the corvette with stilletos, then spam stilletos into the cruisers engines to disable it for later.  Even then the corvette got away a couple times if I got set upon by some fighters that I couldnt kill quickly.  You're right though, once you figure out the procedure to do it, its not that hard, but I guess I just don't like playing a mission repeatedly to figure out the optimal strategy, I'd like to be able to beat it the first or second time.  Dying all the time does take out some of the "immersion" factor.

I don't know, maybe I really dropped off in skill level, but Main Campaign or Derelict on hard was rarely much trouble for me.  Another issue might be my shield equalization button is crapping out on me.  I should quit whining and get myself a new joystick so I can enjoy the campaign
 

[jr2]

Alt+D, use your left hand, pilot! 

[CP5670]

I'm on medium difficulty, and I guess I'm stubborn but I don't want to go to Easy because it feels like cheating.  I must have played that mission after chasing down the corvette and cruiser a dozen times.  I finally switched to a Sekhmet bomber and then it took me another four to get through it, although the last few times I was an idiot and forgot how to properly bomb a cruiser without either getting eaten alive by flak or hearing "avoid the beam and you won't get hit, pilot!" in my head as I restarted.  My biggest problem was getting swarmed while trying to take out the cargo depot.  That became less of a problem once I loaded Kaysers and could breeze through the cargo and close range fighters really quickly.  But if one or two of them got behind me with their morning stars, I was toast.

As for that chase mission, the only way I could do it was to immediately take out the major rear turrets of the corvette with stilletos, then spam stilletos into the cruisers engines to disable it for later.  Even then the corvette got away a couple times if I got set upon by some fighters that I couldnt kill quickly.  You're right though, once you figure out the procedure to do it, its not that hard, but I guess I just don't like playing a mission repeatedly to figure out the optimal strategy, I'd like to be able to beat it the first or second time.  Dying all the time does take out some of the "immersion" factor.

I don't know, maybe I really dropped off in skill level, but Main Campaign or Derelict on hard was rarely much trouble for me.  Another issue might be my shield equalization button is crapping out on me.  I should quit whining and get myself a new joystick so I can enjoy the campaign

I just tried that mission again on medium to make sure nothing was amiss and didn't have much trouble with it. You can check the walkthrough on the website (referred to in the debriefings) if you're getting stuck, which describes the required sequence of actions. It's interesting that you mention destroying the Aeolus's engines with the Stilettos though, since I never thought of that myself. I need to give that a try and see how well it works.

I intended the campaign to be a bit of a challenge, enough that it would be worthwhile to try thinking of specific strategies to complete the missions, but it's not supposed to be that hard. Most of the stuff described in the walkthrough wasn't actually intended while I was designing the missions and I essentially only discovered those things as a player on the first couple of test runs, so I assumed others would do the same. The only mission that I find somewhat hard is the 6th one and I expected that a few people may complain about that one, but interestingly enough, nobody seems to have had much trouble with it so far.

[Goober5000]

I agree with those who say the difficulty level is too hard.  I'll post a full rant when I've finished the campaign, but I've been playing it ever since the 1.02 patch was released and only just completed mission 14d tonight.  I have refused to activate cheats or play at a difficulty level below Medium.

For the time being, I'll say this.  There are some bugs still in the campaign, most notably dead-end traps at certain points and the frequent failure of the "nearest ship" sexp trick to actually put the nearest ship on your escort list.  But the most frustrating aspect is the consistent requirement to "thread the needle" -- to perform exactly the right actions in exactly the right sequence, and not only to do this once but to do it at a sustained level of skill over the course of fifteen minutes or more.

EDIT: This was posted while CP was still typing.  Actually, I found mission 6 to be one of the easiest missions in the campaign, probably because I could approach it as a traditional tactical challenge as opposed to a "find the right sequence of actions" trial-and-error game.  I finished that mission on the first try with the Deshret departing at 11% strength.

[The Spac]

Finished it, found it challenging and a bit hard. Some missions took of trial and error to find the right way, thank heavens for Time Compression.

Final Mission when most of your fighters are down and you have 4 heavy fighters fire at you, you barely survive their blasts.

[NGTM-1R]

The covert missions were surprisingly easy; I failed one due to my own dumbness (hit the burners) and one because I walked away from the computer with it paused and situational awareness doesn't retain well over gaps of time.

The Saturn mission is driving me ****ing nuts though. My wingmen are absolutely useless. All jokes aside, this is not something I normally find myself saying. Even when I send them all after a specific turret via the destroy subsystem command, they've never taken one down. I've never managed to live to the 10 minute mark, but I doubt it would matter if I did, I can't take the turrets down fast enough all on my lonesome from range (the Maxim is proving surprisingly ineffective against the turrets at range) and getting up in the Saturn's face invariably kills me.

[perihelion]

I was having the same problem.  So I finally got annoyed and switched to a Herc2 with 2 fully loaded banks of trebuchets.  Still took a couple tries, but I eventually was able to get 18 turrets down within 10 minutes.  I just felt kind of like, "Is this really how I'm supposed to be playing this?" 

My wingmen were useless as well.  Unless I'd taken a turret down to 10% or less, they could do nothing.  I'm not positive, but I don't think I ever saw one use missiles against the Saturn, just against fighters.  'twas frustrating, but I'm still enjoying the campaign.

[CP5670]

It appears that people are having more trouble with the campaign now than when it was first released. I'll try to clear up a few specific issues:

In 15, use the Akheton on the turrets, not the Maxim. The Maxim is too inaccurate to destroy them at a distance. The Akheton is in your default loadout and is after all, designed for this purpose. It should allow you to destroy enough turrets (by sitting just outside their range) by around the six minute mark, and you can then decide whether you want to go for the extra objectives or not. The main challenge in that mission comes from the enemy fighters, and even then, only in the first three minutes or so.

I'll admit that the wingmen are pretty useless in that mission. I couldn't get them to do anything for the subsystems either, despite various AI hacks I tried to implement. They mainly serve to keep the enemy fighters occupied, although that is important in itself.

I'll replay this mission myself later today and see if I find anything wrong. The campaign's development has been so prolonged that it wouldn't be entirely unexpected if some table changes I made for something else screwed up this particular mission.

I agree with those who say the difficulty level is too hard.  I'll post a full rant when I've finished the campaign, but I've been playing it ever since the 1.02 patch was released and only just completed mission 14d tonight.  I have refused to activate cheats or play at a difficulty level below Medium.

For the time being, I'll say this.  There are some bugs still in the campaign, most notably dead-end traps at certain points and the frequent failure of the "nearest ship" sexp trick to actually put the nearest ship on your escort list.  But the most frustrating aspect is the consistent requirement to "thread the needle" -- to perform exactly the right actions in exactly the right sequence, and not only to do this once but to do it at a sustained level of skill over the course of fifteen minutes or more.

Are there any missions in particular that you found required this sort of trial and error? The only one I can think of that can be described in this way is number 4, and perhaps 12 to a lesser extent. The others are all fairly straightforward. The tricks required in a few of the other missions like 10 seemed fairly intuitive and obvious to me, and indeed, most people earlier didn't seem to have much trouble. Now there may be something going on with 15, as more than one person has complained about it now, and I'll take a closer look at it.

That being said, if you're finding it as frustrating as you say, you should turn the difficulty level down. The whole point is to have fun with it, after all.

Could you elaborate on the bugs you found? If you're talking about the events in missions 13 and 14, I don't think I have ever had those particular ones fail to work, but I have seen strange behavior with the every-time sexps in other situations. I believe the frequency of every-time is dependent on the framerate, so the only thing I can think of is that it is something system-specific. I can imagine that those missions would ridiculously annoying if those sexps were not firing properly though.

[Goober5000]

I have a hunch that the reason people are only starting to have trouble now is because everyone who zipped through in the first few days used cheats and/or Very Easy. The people who don't take shortcuts have to plow through the campaign the regular way.  I don't intend to turn the difficulty down because I want to prove that it can be done on Medium.  At this point, it's a matter of personal pride.

I think you might approach difficulty in a different way than most people.  I don't know, maybe you play while on speed or something; or maybe (hopefully more likely) your familiarity with your missions is hampering your objective perspective.  I can complete the FS1 and FS2 campaigns on Insane, and I find Aeos Affair a challenge but still beatable.  I thought Shrouding the Light was tough when I first played it, but after I figured out Blaise Russel's methods, it's not that bad.

PI, though, is simply frustrating.  It's the kind of frustrating that causes me to give up on lesser campaigns and cheat my way through, just because I've had enough and want to see how the story ends.  Fortunately for you, the story in PI is not only good, it's top-notch.  So I have a love/hate relationship with the campaign -- the story is as fascinating as the difficulty is frustrating.

This is turning into the review I wanted to write when I finished the campaign, so I guess I'll just review what I've seen up until now:

1) A bit harder than I thought, but beatable once I adjusted my initial assessment of the difficulty.  I thought it was about twice as long as it needed to be, though; I got really annoyed when I reached the halfway mark and heard there was still another half to go.  Dogfighting for more than 5 minutes at a stretch gets boring.

2) Not that bad, but still kind of long.  I appreciated getting the message about support ships repairing hull to 60%.

3) A cool mission, but the difficulty kept me from having fun with it.  I died a couple times when the main action was over but the incoming PCA wings were trying to sanitize the area.

4) This one took me several tries until I ordered everybody to protect the Unut and just protected the Diomedes myself.  I got really annoyed at how incompetent my wingmen were here. 

5) This one was fun.  I had a pretty easy time destroying all 18 ships, but the incoming fighters made it challenging.  The main bug I noticed here was that someone destroyed the meson bomb almost immediately after it arrived, causing two conversations to overlap.

6) As I said before, challenging, but very doable.  Finished it on the first try with the Deshret at 11%.  It might have helped that I took Tornadoes instead of Tempests.

7) No major problems here, although it would have been nice if Command had responded immediately to Alpha 1's protest at chasing the Agni.  I had to restart the mission because I zoomed over to try to scan it.

8) Very, very frustrating.  I tried making my way toward the Amenemhet, dogfighting fighters and destroying turrets as the walkthrough said, but the Amenemhet always jumped out before the first engine reached 50%.  The Phalanx wasn't a great help here, as the first shot takes a Thoth down to about 5% and then I have to wait before I can fire a second shot to finish it off.  My wingmen were positively useless.  I had to play this mission about a dozen times before I just decided to hang back and snipe at the Amenemhet using Trebs, ordering everybody to engage the enemy.  I also thought the requirement to take out the nav and reactor in addition to the engines was rather arbitrary.

9) This mission was positively impossible, even though I was playing the patched version.  I must have played it fifty times, getting the same result each time, plus or minus several seconds: the Minotaur went down shortly after the Thyrae arrived.  I tried it in a pure bomber role, destroying all beams and ships; I tried it in a pure fighter role, intercepting all the bombers.  (I thought it completely ridiculous, and utterly unnecessary, to have all those waves of bombers going after the Minotaur -- the bombs always got through even when I ordered every single ship to protect it.)

I finally realized that the bombers targeted the Minotaur only after the Khepri was destroyed, so I ordered everybody to protect the Khepri while I did my bomber thing.  That, paradoxically, worked superbly.  The Minotaur was still over 50% (and the Khepri over 30%) by the time the Saturn arrived; which led to an amusing awkward pause while the Saturn wore the Minotaur down with its beams.

I also thought it was wrong to have the protection of the Minotaur as a secondary objective.  If its destruction triggers a mission abort, it should be a primary objective.

10) Same troubles as others have reported.  In order to destroy both ships at the beginning, the execution had to be done perfectly (even though I followed the walkthrough).  It was fairly easy to destroy either ship alone, but destroying both required a bit of luck.  Destroying the Enceladus was slightly easier, even though I had to do all the work myself -- my wingmen were good for nothing other than being targets for its turrets.

One potential bug here (I didn't check, but you should probably test this) is that the navigation subsystem only governs warpout capability if it's set that way in ai_profiles.tbl.  Since you didn't include an ai_profiles.tbl, your walkthrough wouldn't have worked.  I didn't want to risk having to replay the mission just to test that out, so I always went for the engine.

11) This was not hard or frustrating so much as very annoying.  I was clever enough to use Stilettos to knock out all the AAA beams in the mission, including the Nepits' and the Leviathan's, so my wingmen had an easy time.  Unfortunately, I got swarmed by about 100 Herc IIs and Persei armed with EMP missiles on the way to the cargo depot, so I had to spent about 20 minutes (not kidding) fighting them all off.  Then during the first time I got to see the Hybris jump in I started getting EMP'd again, causing me to miss the order to warp out and get vaporized by the Saturn.

12) Not as hard as the others, but I hit another mission bug here.  When the Serket was disabled, I stayed halfway between it and the convoy so I could come to the assistance of either if needed.  That caused a dead end.  I looked at the mission in Notepad and found that the mission would only proceed after you closed to within 1200m of the convoy.

13) The most frustrating mission since 9.  I tried going in through the bottom like the walkthrough said; it didn't work.  I tried going in from the top, sides, front, etc.  I finally opened it in FRED and looked at the waypoint paths.  I ended up deciding that a sideways-downwards path on the right was the best approach, but I still couldn't make it work.  I played it dozens of times, occasionally getting to the center but not out again.  Finally I managed to do it by fluke as much as anything else.  Then after the conversation was over, I was petrified that I'd get killed by the fighters, so I just ran away as far as I could.

It was here that I discovered that the escort list sexp trick didn't work reliably -- in fact, most of the time I got caught, it was by a ship that was not on the list.  I also found the failure debriefing very insulting here, considering the difficulty of navigating the sphere.

14a) No complaints.

14b) Not that hard, but the escort list trick still didn't work.  And from a canonical standpoint, AWACS is supposed to reveal any stealth ship in non-nebula space, not just those within 2500m.  Unless the AWACS only has a range of 2500m, which doesn't seem likely.

14c) The most frustrating mission since 13.  My wingmen were absolutely no help at all in destroying any enemy fighters -- I always got every kill, or occasionally every kill save one.  I even tried hanging back one time to see if they could do it themselves... even after 10 minutes, they hadn't gotten a single one.  Then when I got to the Agni, I thought I had found another bug... no matter what I did, as soon as I got close enough to the Agni to hear the communications, I always got beamed.  If I hung back out of communications range, the mission wouldn't continue.  I finally figured out, after several frustrating restarts, that occasionally I could afterburn in and afterburn away without getting killed, but this wasn't obvious, nor was it explained why the Agni would randomly beam me.  Then I discovered that, contrary to the walkthrough, I had to scan an Ancient fighter first, since they would invariably be destroyed by the time I scanned a bomber or a corvette.

I was rather annoyed that I had to scan everything personally, since the set-scanned and set-unscanned sexps have been in FSO since forever.  And it was extremely frustrating to sit through 15 minutes of fighting and dialogue before I got to the point where I could try something different.  And once, when I did everything perfectly, I got killed by the two Shivan wings at the nav point, which seriously, royally, pissed me off.  Giving the player a serious risk of failure at the 20 minute mark, after considerable fighting, scanning, and dialogue, is an evil, evil, evil, evil move.

14d) It took me about five tries to escape this one successfully, which is completely unreasonable.  All the more so because I had finally managed to get through the previous mission with 74% hull.  If a player got to this point with a seriously damaged fighter, say at 10%, he would quite likely not be able to survive, and he wouldn't be able to replay the previous mission to try again (not that he should have to) because there's no briefing.  Very, very poor design here.

EDIT: Now I've spent almost an entire day trying to beat 15.  I tried doing it the walkthrough way; and I tried playing sniper with dual banks of Trebs.  I have not been able to live beyond 7 minutes, let alone get more than 10 turrets.  It takes the prize from 9 as the single most frustrating mission in the campaign so far.  If you can complete all the objectives on Medium within two or three tries, you need to post a video.

[ARSPR]

Hi CP5670, I'm actually testing DaBrain's new mediavps set and I've seen that PI is going to be incompatible with it.

You are using modular tables with "official" mediavps names (example mv_models-shp.tbm in PIassets). So you are overriding mediavps ones. You have tested that behaviour with actual media vps set but you can miss or brake future additions.

As an example, there's not going to be any bomberxxhp.pof models. So PI is not going to work with next version (GTB Medusa is going to use an non-existent pof).

Also, as you are overriding the WHOLE mediavps tbm, you can miss new effects or other important settings.

If you want a particular change, you can always force it through your own tbm with your own name. As it is in a higher priority folder, its changes will work despite the original tbms, (and their settings), in mediavps folder.

And I also feel that most of these mv_ tables are redundant. You are setting mediavps as a secondary mod in mod.ini so you are always going to load them. I mean, you don't need to say that Levy's model is cruiser01x.pof because that is already said in media vps.

(Another conflict example, maybe in future versions, cruiser01x.pof is going to disappear replaced by texture replacement over cruiser01.pof, read from this thread about a feature Taylor is coding).


In simpler words, let mediavps improve FS2 effects/models for existing ships and weapons. It will NEVER change their game balance features (strength, range, ...) So you just have to worry about these game balance features or about the few effects/models you DO want to change (but in the latter, you'll have to include all needed textures or pofs; mediavps ones can change at any time). But you don't need to include overriding tables just to prevent that someone change some critical ship or weapon feature sometime somehow somewhere.

Please, update, simplify and rename your tables to make PI compatible with any version (future or past) of mediavps.

[Centrixo]

i have played the campaign again this is my list of tweaks and fixes.

1. A few heavy tweaks the the ai, they now fight properly. i have re-enabled your weapons table and the playing field is more stable.

2. Impossible objectives are still impossible but tuned down slightly, instead of 0% survivability chance, it's now 2% at least. (But even if there is a 1% chance i can now cause choas even with that) see point 1.

3. Escort bug, resolved. 2 missions were your completly and uttly screwed is less then before.

4. i added a replay the last mission on your last mission.

5. my survivability has jumped from 22.6% to 60.7%.

6. My accuracy has also jumped up slightly.

7. i can now play insane skill level, and i mean this is proper insane skill, So far i have died 21 times .

8. i have fixed several bugs within several ships that allow destruction of their cannons and a drop off of accuracy.

these are just a few loose nuts, blots and screws. if i look down what i did there are more then 30 revisions.

[CP5670]

I think you might approach difficulty in a different way than most people.  I don't know, maybe you play while on speed or something; or maybe (hopefully more likely) your familiarity with your missions is hampering your objective perspective.  I can complete the FS1 and FS2 campaigns on Insane, and I find Aeos Affair a challenge but still beatable.  I thought Shrouding the Light was tough when I first played it, but after I figured out Blaise Russel's methods, it's not that bad.

I think it would be the latter. However, I have a feeling that something is not working correctly on your end (and possibly for others as well), since some of your assessments of the missions do not correlate at all with what I have experienced. I may know what's going on in the mission, but my style of gameplay cannot be that much different from everyone else's. There is also the fact that you're saying the escort list thing does not work, which I have never had any problems with myself. You are using RC7.9X, right?

I'm a bit tied up right now, but let me address some of your points and see if I can figure out what's going on here.

PI, though, is simply frustrating.  It's the kind of frustrating that causes me to give up on lesser campaigns and cheat my way through, just because I've had enough and want to see how the story ends.  Fortunately for you, the story in PI is not only good, it's top-notch.  So I have a love/hate relationship with the campaign -- the story is as fascinating as the difficulty is frustrating.

I will say this: you certainly have more patience than I do. I would have given up long ago if I ran into all the crap you describe.

At any rate, it looks like the next revision of this will have to include some major changes. It all seemed to work perfectly on my final test run; I don't know what could be happening.

4) This one took me several tries until I ordered everybody to protect the Unut and just protected the Diomedes myself.  I got really annoyed at how incompetent my wingmen were here.

Interesting observation, since this is the one mission where the wingmen always seemed to be almost too effective, more than I would have liked. They typically end up getting at least 75% of the total kills for me.

5) This one was fun.  I had a pretty easy time destroying all 18 ships, but the incoming fighters made it challenging.  The main bug I noticed here was that someone destroyed the meson bomb almost immediately after it arrived, causing two conversations to overlap.

Strange, I have never had that happen. You might have run into a fluke where the bomb hit a piece of debris from something else as it was coming in. I believe I have actually protected it at the beginning, so the wingmen won't attack it.

8) Very, very frustrating.  I tried making my way toward the Amenemhet, dogfighting fighters and destroying turrets as the walkthrough said, but the Amenemhet always jumped out before the first engine reached 50%.  The Phalanx wasn't a great help here, as the first shot takes a Thoth down to about 5% and then I have to wait before I can fire a second shot to finish it off.  My wingmen were positively useless.  I had to play this mission about a dozen times before I just decided to hang back and snipe at the Amenemhet using Trebs, ordering everybody to engage the enemy.  I also thought the requirement to take out the nav and reactor in addition to the engines was rather arbitrary.

After reading this, I'm beginning to wonder if you are in fact playing on medium difficulty, as this almost sounds like an entirely different mission than what I'm used to. I have played that mission at least 30 times over the years and always found it a little too easy. I can eliminate the five turrets with the Akheton (the ones mentioned in the walkthrough) without taking any return fire and destroy the engines with plenty of time to spare, enough that I don't need to rush with it at all. I generally use two banks of Stilettos, although a single bank is more than enough, and I never bother giving the wingmen any additional orders. I would actually rate this as the third easiest mission in the campaign, next to only 1 and 7 (and those two are so easy that you can sometimes get away with just sitting still and doing nothing for the entire mission).

It might be helpful if you could post a short FRAPS clip of what exactly you're doing here, since this has left me completely puzzled.

9) This mission was positively impossible, even though I was playing the patched version.  I must have played it fifty times, getting the same result each time, plus or minus several seconds: the Minotaur went down shortly after the Thyrae arrived.  I tried it in a pure bomber role, destroying all beams and ships; I tried it in a pure fighter role, intercepting all the bombers.  (I thought it completely ridiculous, and utterly unnecessary, to have all those waves of bombers going after the Minotaur -- the bombs always got through even when I ordered every single ship to protect it.)

I finally realized that the bombers targeted the Minotaur only after the Khepri was destroyed, so I ordered everybody to protect the Khepri while I did my bomber thing.  That, paradoxically, worked superbly.  The Minotaur was still over 50% (and the Khepri over 30%) by the time the Saturn arrived; which led to an amusing awkward pause while the Saturn wore the Minotaur down with its beams.

I also thought it was wrong to have the protection of the Minotaur as a secondary objective.  If its destruction triggers a mission abort, it should be a primary objective.

Clever idea, I didn't think of that. But once again, I'm wondering why the Minotaur is going down so easily for you. It typically ends up at 10-15% for me, and I don't even pay attention to it or the bombers at all and only look for warship kills. The bombers are essentially only there to have it look like a battle in the background, and you shouldn't need to worry about them at all unless they happen to attack you.

Your point about the objective is well taken, and I will change it in the next version.

10) Same troubles as others have reported.  In order to destroy both ships at the beginning, the execution had to be done perfectly (even though I followed the walkthrough).  It was fairly easy to destroy either ship alone, but destroying both required a bit of luck.  Destroying the Enceladus was slightly easier, even though I had to do all the work myself -- my wingmen were good for nothing other than being targets for its turrets.

One potential bug here (I didn't check, but you should probably test this) is that the navigation subsystem only governs warpout capability if it's set that way in ai_profiles.tbl.  Since you didn't include an ai_profiles.tbl, your walkthrough wouldn't have worked.  I didn't want to risk having to replay the mission just to test that out, so I always went for the engine.

The navigation thing is coded into the mission itself, so it should work fine. You don't actually have to destroy the Enceladus though.

11) This was not hard or frustrating so much as very annoying.  I was clever enough to use Stilettos to knock out all the AAA beams in the mission, including the Nepits' and the Leviathan's, so my wingmen had an easy time.  Unfortunately, I got swarmed by about 100 Herc IIs and Persei armed with EMP missiles on the way to the cargo depot, so I had to spent about 20 minutes (not kidding) fighting them all off.  Then during the first time I got to see the Hybris jump in I started getting EMP'd again, causing me to miss the order to warp out and get vaporized by the Saturn.

Those additional fighter waves are essentially a type of time limit. Basically, I was finding that I could destroy almost everything in that mission without much effort, and expected that other players would do the same. On the other hand, if you just go straight to the cargo depot (as Command tells you to) after taking out the AWACS and attack the containers, the enemy fighters never come. The two minutes still leaves you with enough time to take out the cruiser and get the bonus objective. They shouldn't be attacking you at the end though; in fact, they are supposed to leave at that point.

12) Not as hard as the others, but I hit another mission bug here.  When the Serket was disabled, I stayed halfway between it and the convoy so I could come to the assistance of either if needed.  That caused a dead end.  I looked at the mission in Notepad and found that the mission would only proceed after you closed to within 1200m of the convoy.

I didn't consider that possibility. I basically did not want the player to end up in a situation where he is stranded somewhere far away from the convoy while the dialogue is proceeding. This should be easy to fix, however.

13) The most frustrating mission since 9.  I tried going in through the bottom like the walkthrough said; it didn't work.  I tried going in from the top, sides, front, etc.  I finally opened it in FRED and looked at the waypoint paths.  I ended up deciding that a sideways-downwards path on the right was the best approach, but I still couldn't make it work.  I played it dozens of times, occasionally getting to the center but not out again.  Finally I managed to do it by fluke as much as anything else.  Then after the conversation was over, I was petrified that I'd get killed by the fighters, so I just ran away as far as I could.

It was here that I discovered that the escort list sexp trick didn't work reliably -- in fact, most of the time I got caught, it was by a ship that was not on the list.  I also found the failure debriefing very insulting here, considering the difficulty of navigating the sphere.

I've said a lot about this mission by this point, but the escort list thing sounds like a serious problem. If you couldn't check what was near you, it's no wonder it took so many tries. Was it ever working at all?

Your ship is made a guardian at the end and cannot die, in the rare event that the enemy fighters even shoot at you at all.

14c) The most frustrating mission since 13.  My wingmen were absolutely no help at all in destroying any enemy fighters -- I always got every kill, or occasionally every kill save one.  I even tried hanging back one time to see if they could do it themselves... even after 10 minutes, they hadn't gotten a single one.  Then when I got to the Agni, I thought I had found another bug... no matter what I did, as soon as I got close enough to the Agni to hear the communications, I always got beamed.  If I hung back out of communications range, the mission wouldn't continue.  I finally figured out, after several frustrating restarts, that occasionally I could afterburn in and afterburn away without getting killed, but this wasn't obvious, nor was it explained why the Agni would randomly beam me.  Then I discovered that, contrary to the walkthrough, I had to scan an Ancient fighter first, since they would invariably be destroyed by the time I scanned a bomber or a corvette.

I was rather annoyed that I had to scan everything personally, since the set-scanned and set-unscanned sexps have been in FSO since forever.  And it was extremely frustrating to sit through 15 minutes of fighting and dialogue before I got to the point where I could try something different.  And once, when I did everything perfectly, I got killed by the two Shivan wings at the nav point, which seriously, royally, pissed me off.  Giving the player a serious risk of failure at the 20 minute mark, after considerable fighting, scanning, and dialogue, is an evil, evil, evil, evil move.

This is another comment that makes me wonder if we're actually playing the same mission. I found it rather hard to get detected around the Agni even if I tried to get near its fighters, who were frequently not as close to the cruiser as I would have liked. I could often see them almost right in front of me, but they were still well outside the 120m range.

You're right about the wingmen, but...there are hardly any enemy fighters to kill in that mission. As for the scanning, you only have to scan one ship and Alpha 1 then tells you to leave the area. The rest are just for the bonus objective. In fact, one of the bombers stays invulnerable to make sure you always have something to scan.

Now your ship is supposed to be a guardian at the end, just as in 13. I thought I had made that change a while ago, but looking at the mission it appears that I somehow forgot about it. I must have overlooked this in my testing since I don't think I ever died at that point myself. The change has been made and will be included in the next revision. The Shivan fighters need to be there for a minor story detail to work out, but certainly shouldn't be causing any threat.

14d) It took me about five tries to escape this one successfully, which is completely unreasonable.  All the more so because I had finally managed to get through the previous mission with 74% hull.  If a player got to this point with a seriously damaged fighter, say at 10%, he would quite likely not be able to survive, and he wouldn't be able to replay the previous mission to try again (not that he should have to) because there's no briefing.  Very, very poor design here.

I had actually done all my testing in this mission with exactly that much hull strength (10%), and found that I could almost always complete it with only some shield damage (which you are maxed out on) and without losing any strength. Now I'm really starting to think that there is some discrepancy here. Surely I am not that much better at dodging enemy fire than everyone else.

[CP5670]

Hi CP5670, I'm actually testing DaBrain's new mediavps set and I've seen that PI is going to be incompatible with it.

You are using modular tables with "official" mediavps names (example mv_models-shp.tbm in PIassets). So you are overriding mediavps ones. You have tested that behaviour with actual media vps set but you can miss or brake future additions.

As an example, there's not going to be any bomberxxhp.pof models. So PI is not going to work with next version (GTB Medusa is going to use an non-existent pof).

Also, as you are overriding the WHOLE mediavps tbm, you can miss new effects or other important settings.

If you want a particular change, you can always force it through your own tbm with your own name. As it is in a higher priority folder, its changes will work despite the original tbms, (and their settings), in mediavps folder.

And I also feel that most of these mv_ tables are redundant. You are setting mediavps as a secondary mod in mod.ini so you are always going to load them. I mean, you don't need to say that Levy's model is cruiser01x.pof because that is already said in media vps.

Yes, I know. I was planning to release an update to PI once the new VP set is out, which should make it work fine.

However, it looks like something was changed with the game's behavior at some point, since it used to be different when I tested it out about two years ago. I remember that I was unable to override anything in the media VPs unless I did it this way, which included the stats in the weapon selection screen and some other things. If this has changed at some point, it makes things rather more convenient.

The modified tbms each have some minor change in them to incorporate something in PI.

[ElectricEel]

Just finished playing through this campaign. Most of the missions were entertaining, and the story was excellent, though some missions were frustrating. (I only looked at the walkthroughs for the last mission.) I'm not a particularly good player, but good enough to finish the original campaign on Medium without any major difficulties.

Comments on difficulty:

The difficulty level I'm playing at is Medium, unless otherwise indicated. I didn't go out of my way to get the bonus objectives.

Missions 1 & 2: No particular difficulties.

Mission 3: I needed a fair amount of tries to get this right. This one may have frustrated me a bit, but was not all *that* bad. I'm not sure if I finished it on Easy or Medium.

Mission 4: This was not terribly difficult, I think I finished it in three or four tries.

Mission 5: Wow, Command has high requirements. I'd consider a mission that interdicts 70% of a supply convoy a success, but okay. Still, this wasn't spectacularly difficult - I'm pretty sure I managed it on Medium after a couple of tries.

Mission 6: I needed a couple of tries to complete this one (with the 10% hull objective), but don't recall it being all that hard. I'm positive I played it on Medium.

Mission 7: Honestly, I have only a very vague recollection of this one. I probably finished it on the first try, but didn't get the escape pods.

Mission 8: I don't have much of a recollection of this one, so it can't have been too difficult.

Mission 9: First really frustrating mission. I could defend the Minotaur until the final wave, at which point its hull integrity was low enough that the corvette could finish it in a couple of salvos. I finally managed to finish this on Very Easy. Frustration was increased by the point of decision being at the very end of the mission.

Mission 10: This can't have taken more than a couple of tries. I'm not entirely sure if the difficulty was Easy or Medium.

Mission 11: It took several tries where I got gangbanged by enemy fighters before I figured out I had to destroy the cargo depot for the reinforcements to show up. Once you realize you have to head straight for the depot after destroying the AWACS ships, this mission isn't too difficult. Not very logical.

Mission 12: This was difficult, but doable.

Mission 13: I'm not a fan of covert missions, and I didn't feel like replaying the mission several times so I started straight at Very Easy. I got it right after a couple of tries due to having read the tip about cimcurventing the sphere posted on this thread. The fight after the conversation was trivially easy.

I've said a lot about this mission by this point, but the escort list thing sounds like a serious problem. If you couldn't check what was near you, it's no wonder it took so many tries. Was it ever working at all?

I think my failures in this mission were caused by the escort list not working. It does work more often than not, but just one failure has high chances of causing the mission to fail.

Mission 14:
I finished parts 3 & 4 on Very Easy, not sure about 1 & 2.
-Part 1: Trivially easy.
-Part 2: I got detected on two tries, the third time was the charm.
-Part 3: Got beamed by the Agni several times, then started paying more attention to the fighters. Then I got beamed by one of the Shivan cruisers several times, and started paying more attention to staying out of its line of fire. The rest was easy. Waiting to get the premilinaries out of the way got old fast; other than that, this was a good mission, with an excellent atmosphere. Good use of music.

Like Goober, I noted that the wingmen had serious trouble killing anything in this mission.

-Part 4: Got out on the first try, I don't think I even got any serious damage.

Mission 15: I think I completed this on Very Easy. The wingmen were utterly useless here, I don't think they ever took down a single turret. After many tries, I switched to a trebuchet-loaded Herc, and took down enough turrets to succeed the mission on the second try with that configuration.

Mission 16: Rather boring. I wasn't impressed with the Amun MkII here (though I learned to like it in the next mission), so I took the heavier of the other bombers. I think I finished this on the second try. I think I was playing on Very Easy, though.

Mission 17: Played this on Very Easy. Highly frustrating. I don't think I could have finished this if I hadn't looked at the walkthrough. The escort fighters were failing their task dismally, as there were two enemy craft pounding me for most of the mission, and it is impossible to both bomb and dogfight at the same time. I think the other bombers inflicted decent damage on the Saturn, though. I finally managed to finish the first part after trying the tip in the walkthrough several times, after at least a dozen attemps to finish the mission using conventional tactics. Part 2 was not difficult, I only had one close call.

[Admiral Edivad]

Welcome to the HLP Station. Exits ..... 4th-dimensionally....Please keep all appendages within the installation ... Do not feed the resident Shivan Carl ... Flamethrowers can be found under your seat ... holy water.... Please remember that any attempt to use the ASCII characters 0046h, 0053h, and 0033h in sequential order will result in you being trampled by the whole FreeSpace community.... Vasudan section ....“Headz”....Thank you and enjoy your stay at Hard Light station as long as you will!

this page seems to me already very long, so i cut a bit the welcome speech. see my old posts if you want the full version!

[Centrixo]

i have picked up a few bugs on one certain mission, following the agni.



1. a missing trigger, as you see i have been sitting around waiting for the final piece of this mission to be complete. the thing is i have been waiting for more than 10 minutes for the trigger to activate. i do not think it will activate again until i restart that mission.

2. warping out squadmate. i do not think the squadmate is ever supposed to warp out in this mission unless the mission is complete and all 3 are in one place. this trigger kind of spoiled the good plot of playing the game.

3. according to what one of my squadmates said, i must be just 125 meters outside the boundries, but the thing is following a ship and i cannot activate my thrusters. and as you see 87% health on this mission is not good, considering i am playing insane skill! but i got hit by fighters and i was nowhere near them...