[Commander Zane]

A good BoE is FastTest, which was used to test Fast Mod's weapon distances, though all the wing and ship names would have to be given something else and have dialogue added to it to make a good mission.
Maybe more capital ships as well.

If the player's actions do squat for the mission, then it's not really good. Even though FastTest is just a BS mission made to test a mod's effects to gameplay, you can still make a difference. Do nothing, your allies still become toast.

The capital ship AI tends to defend itself against the tiny fighters rather than pounding away at the big targets.
The damage these capital ships seem to inflict on each other is minimal compared to the hurt that Alpha 1 can inflict in the same amount of time using a tiny fighter.
The capital ships will sit hovering in space because the AI wasn't given any orders. Other times, ships will end up ramming each other and causing interesting fender-benders and space traffic jams because of flawed AI movement orders (such as move fleet ship 1, 2, 3....101 to waypoint 1).
Either the fighters will die quickly to leave the capital ships hovering unprotected in space or the fighters will respawn wave after wave after endless wave.
The mission is either too hard (capital ships kill Alpha 1 instantly) or too easy (Alpha 1 can destroy lots of capital ships).
Few events, if any, exist to make the mission dynamic and interesting.
Few missiles, if any, are available on the ship loadouts to arm the player.
Often, bombers will be available but no missiles will be available to fill the bomb bays.

That just sounds like the result of someone who didn't take the time to properly fine-tune ship roles.

[Dilmah G]

Yeah, basically

Don't attempt to make a huge 20 capship battle in a few days or so. Hell, don't even attempt 20 capships, limit even with SCP should be around 6-10 ships over cruiser class. It becomes waaaay to much effort with that many, you have to give them "I'm taking hits!" messages and "We're going down!" messages, and believe me, it becomes a very time-consuming process.

See the attached mission, put it in your mediavps/missions folder and play with the mvps folder selected. It's a mission I made in the middle of last year (so ignore the Command Briefings, they're poorly written anyway). In short, it's an epic BoE that I made as part of a campaign I was putting together. It should serve as a warning to everyone going to attempt a BoE with little experience (less than 6 months) with FRED-ing. I had to tone it down many times, it was pretty much crashing FRED.

It's a good example of an over the top BoE, and probably what many people think of regarding BoE's.

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[Commander Zane]

Decent mission, though three things that are present that really bug me, 1: Distance. Even with Fast Mod I was completely useless in the role of doing anything outside of shooting down beam cannons. 2: Allied Shivan ships, though I assume it's because ETAK was mentioned being used by the Vasudans? 3: Abrupt mission ending. After the Memphis was destroyed the mission ends, main menu, bam, done.

Very dialogue heavy, but it makes the mission sound like ****'s going on, and voice acted, I'd bet it would actually make the mission sound like a war scene.

[Dilmah G]

Thanks

The distance thing was something I had to do to make the mission playable, that many ships closer together really makes it crawl fps-wise.

As with the ending, I had a look at the other mission files and realised I'd made a cutscene mission directly after, I'm not sure if it's finished or not, but it's the last mission in the folder so I'm going to assume it isn't. I've attached it.

-

Just played it, I'm going to give it cutscene bars, it's not such a well done cutscene, but it was meant to lead to a "Upgunned Orion" which I basically was going to take care of plotwise in later missions as a side-project to the Colossus, packing only LRBGreens and several minor weapons. BTW if you want music you'll have to dl it from here: http://freeplaymusic.com/search/download_file.php?id=3271&dur=0&type=mp3 as it's too big to be attached
anyway back on topic

BoE's are basically hard to do in terms of making the player's presence meaningful. As a n00b fred-3r I decided to make the player's job in that mission destroying bombers and taking out beam cannons you had to turn on time-compression to reach

Everything with large numbers of capships suffers from a bit of "I have nothing to do but chase down fighters/BoE" syndrome, there's only so much Alpha 1 can do.

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[Commander Zane]

Chasing down fighters is fun.

[Dilmah G]

Chasing down fighters is fun.

I concur, it made Forced Entry what it was.

Bad ass
Mother****ing
Fun

[Narvi]

I don't think they ran out of time to build the mission. The mission itself doesn't seem rushed.

To me it seems like they discovered a bug after the mission was finished and the only solution they had time for was a hack.

To me it seems like they had a much more ambitious plan for it, but only had time to gameplay test a cut-down version.

[Scotty]

Has anyone tried to do something where the player can affect the combat effectiveness of ships?  I was going to just mess around with a BoE, but got to thinking:  What would happen if you were able to say, scan the weapons subsystem and have it disable half the turrets on the ship?  That would go a long way to having the player make a difference.

[Dilmah G]

Has anyone tried to do something where the player can affect the combat effectiveness of ships?  I was going to just mess around with a BoE, but got to thinking:  What would happen if you were able to say, scan the weapons subsystem and have it disable half the turrets on the ship?  That would go a long way to having the player make a difference.

You can do that, but I'm thinking, why and how? How does Alpha 1 scanning a subsystem disable half the turrets on a ship, and in which case could this be put to use?

[Killer Whale]

TAGs

[Commander Zane]

Virus uploading ala Descent 3.

[karajorma]

There are lots of ways you can make the player have some influence on the battle. The player doesn't necessarily have to be the factor that wins the battle, he just has to have some effect (Keeping bombers off a retreating capship long enough for it to get away for instance).

[Androgeos Exeunt]

There are lots of ways you can make the player have some influence on the battle. The player doesn't necessarily have to be the factor that wins the battle, he just has to have some effect (Keeping bombers off a retreating capship long enough for it to get away for instance).

That would be almost all the missions in FreeSpace 2 then.

[karajorma]

None of the FS2 missions suffer from BoE Syndrome. That describes making a very big mission, with lots of capships, and virtually no importance in anything the player does.

[Dilmah G]

None of the FS2 missions suffer from BoE Syndrome. That describes making a very big mission, with lots of capships, and virtually no importance in anything the player does.

Done right and they are a lot of fun though

300+ Ships, two events and a poor briefing do-not constitute a "Good" BoE. If some people find BoE's fun at all, I'm one of them however.

[karajorma]

A BoE mission can be good. A mission with BoE Syndrome is bad.