Here's my thoughts.
First I'll just say that I find the scenario a little silly. No Shivans sighted for however long.. and then suddenly a whole fleet + a Sath show up? It's a bit far fetched.
For the FREDing.
The beginning of the mission is weird. The briefing sets it up as a scanning and scout mission, but as soon as I start the mission I pass that objective and am told to warp to the battle group. So I have to ask.. why even have that part of the mission in the first place?
I moved my ship around before warping to the battle group. Good job, BTW, doing an in mission warp! However, moving my ship around caused my ship not to face down the center of the subspace tunnel. You can fix this by setting the player's orientation in the same event were you switch to the subspace warp.
Use the Escort list for friendly capital ships, especially if I'm supposed to be defending them!
The Shivan Ravana and the cruisers that warped in with it were so close together that they collided. You should spread them apart.
So, I'm blockading the node. Massive Shivan force attacks and we are told to retreat through the node. Except... none of the ships warp out in the node.. they just warp out right where they are!
Finally, the mission got stuck when the GTD Athena was guardianed and the Sath couldn't kill it. I suspect it was supposed to warp out too, but the Sath was in the way. This broke the mission and I had to just exit. I'm not sure what was supposed to happen after that, if anything.
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Here's what I would say. You have the skeleton of a decent mission here, even if the premise is a bit far fetched. Work on object placement and focus on figuring out fleet strategies rather than just throwing some capships at each other. Consider doing the mission in stages where the player has a very specific role to fill in the battle. Otherwise, this mission is lingering a bit close to BoE disease.
Keep going! You have the basic know-how to FRED, so practice, practice, practice!
