Even more so to the point: Why does it feel like we are being briefed on a mission AS it's taking place? This was easily the biggest failure of the mission design. You do not brief your special forces on a major battle, then update them as it happens, then say "Ok, well, we waited for it to get THIS BAD, now go clean up the mess, and you can play with the artillery guns or upload the virus...do whatever you feel like...including capturing or killing the carthage...IT'S UP TO YOU."
It doesn't take any hindsight to see that this kind of mentality does not even remotely exist in any chain of command. If Laporte's squadron of special forces is supposed to be the game breaker in this mission, why did they wait until the mission was broken and there was only a 13 minute window to deploy the virus, gun down all of the major warships and then do whatever with the Carthage?
Major operations like this aren't planned in the 5 minutes it takes to read the briefing, there should be no reason that the player feels like "Oh, sorry I'm late to the party..."
There's a few things you should consider here before you start damning every aspect of this mission's setup. The two most important ones being - 1) Given the speed combat in WiH tends to occur at, it is not unfeasible that the battle at neptune had been occurring for mere minutes before your briefing and arrival, and considering that in-system jump travel has been shown to last seconds at longest, it is also not unfeasible that you were out the briefing room door and fighting at neptune in another five. I'm sure the Fedayeen is intelligent enough to have kept your Ainsariis prepped and ready in case it
was necessary to send a wing, so you're only "late to the party" in the sense that you didn't go in with the first wave, and 2) Ask yourself - why would you commit surgical strike stealth forces to the first wave of a mass assault, especially forces that cannot be replaced in a timely fashion? You're Fedayeen - not only are you the best of the best, you're part of what amounts to a paramilitary shadow organization utilizing technology and tactics far beyond the norm for for your faction. You don't waste assets like that by jamming them into a prepared enemies face - you commit them when necessary, and with proper cover so they can turn the tide for you. Say, cover like an enormous conventional push against said prepared enemy, which, as I'm sure you're aware, creates massive amounts of confusion, slowing enemy reaction times and allowing stealth assets to work with a bit more breathing room.
Even with the assassination mission, Laporte is able to scan the comm tower on an enemy installation BEFORE the mission starts. There is no reason she shouldn't have been given a head start in the neptune mission which is FAR more important.
See above. You're not with a squadron of gunships anymore, and you're not an asset to be flung stupidly at well defended military targets without support. The assassination was a wildly different sort of attack with wildly different stakes.
As for the "GEF" having been introduced in WIH, yes, they were there. But there is a huge difference between a bunch of random fighters/pirates and a religious fanatic who builds a hyperspace capable asteroid with the sole purpose of smashing it into the Earth. One is people thrifting and scraping to survive, the other takes a massive war machine.
The Gefs dwelling in comet farms and the like has been around since they appeared in WiH, and all it took to be aware was looking at the fiction viewer the BP team has constantly told everyone to look at. Whats more, the Kostadin Cell being crazy, well equipped, and willing to do stupid **** in the name of ecoterrorism has been in dialog since act 1. If you missed it, that fine, but you can hardly claim they came out of nowhere. On top of that, given how little is actually known about Subspace travel and it's limits, saying it's out of the realm of possibility for an entire society of thousands of individuals to equip a decent sized asteroid
they've been living in for decades with one-shot subspace engines is kinda dumb. You're allowing your head-canon to overwrite someone else's storytelling.
Plus, and this has been mentioned before several times, the fact that no one in Freespace ever thought to just jump a rock into a target is kinda baffling. It would be ridiculously cost and time effective, even with how little canon information there is in Subspace drives.
Maybe this was in Blue Planet's original design, but that makes the original design now faulty because instead of being a Space Combat Simulator BP is just whoring itself out to any franchise, story or style of gameplay that gets fanboys on this forum. We now have a capital ship simulator, a tower defense game, some kind of weird virtual internet simulation (Yeah, I remember when people thought there would eventually be a 3D internet, anyone remember that?) and a flying nightmare simulator. Freespace pilots aren't human anymore, they are tripped up implanted cyborgs that connect to the Shivan hivemind, or psycho killers who've fallen from the ranks of the masses.
This isn't a believable fantasy anymore.
I'm going to address the second part of this rant first - the topics presented in Tenebra are actually pretty damn hard on the Science Fiction scale - most, if not all of it, has been in speculative fiction for years. Whats more, you seem to either have not understood most of them, or are trying to simplify them in order to make your criticism work better. If it's the former reason, then use the internet. You were on it to post, there's no reason you can't use it to educate yourself. It's much easier than complaining, and on top of that not using the wealth of information literally at your fingertips is criminal. If your choice of description is due to the latter reason, then shame on you, that's a terrible way to discuss a topic.
As for the first couple of sentences, it seems as though you'd prefer your Freespace as the same semi-mindless shooty space-sim as it was when it released - which is fine, Freespace 2 is an excellent game that did a ton of things right and there's no reason not to enjoy it. But, if thats the case, why come into a thread about a mod that has explicitly stated they're trying to be different and blast them for, well, trying to be different? The varied mission types and gimmicks are excellent examples of what can be done with the engine now, and most of them were even justified in the storyline, if that's your issue. But instead you seem to be angrily attacking Tenebra because of these different approaches, ranting about whoring and fanboys. That's not a great way to get your points across. If you feel there's legitimate issue to point out, tone it down a bit and discuss it, because right now you look like a more verbose Gamefaqs poster.
