[Lepanto]

What do you think should be done to keep missions interesting and engaging the whole way through?

I've been playing some old campaigns recently, and their constantly-respawning waves of enemies just keep bugging me. Don't know about you, and I'm rather impatient, but I feel like the old "guard allied ships from endless waves of fighters and bombers while they do their thing" model of missions is nothing more than a chore. In killing these waved wings, you're performing the same gameplay over and over again, the same gameplay you've already done countless times in other missions and campaigns. Not to mention, these wing slaughters (IMO) don't feel like you're actually accomplishing anything; you're just avoiding failure and marking time while your escort ships do whatever they're doing. Also, it makes the enemy commanders look incredibly dumb for sending their massive force in piecemeal. Admittedly, it is much easier mission-design-wise to just throw in eight waves of Taurus and Cancer wing and have them attack your escort ships, but personally, I'd rather have a few well-FREDded and actually interesting missions than have an entire campaign of wave monotony.

Personally, I think that missions can be kept more fun by switching tasks often mid-mission and not letting any one type of gameplay drag out too long. Dogfight these fighters, de-beam this cruiser, intercept a couple bomber waves, dogfight a few more fighters. By breaking a mission into segments, you're kept continually engaged, avoid boring repetition, and have a greater feeling of accomplishment by clearing each individual segment. A personal rule of thumb is to keep enemy wings to two waves, max.

While it's been a while since I played WiH acts 1+2, I think their gameplay was tight enough that I don't recall being bored. I approve of that model of mission design. Still, IMHO, modern campaigns in general should be careful to avoid repetition; Shadow Genesis and your endless waves of Gualis, I'm looking at you.

I'd like to hear the community's thoughts on this question of mission design philosophy. Are you sick of the traditional FreeSpace mission model, or do you think it's fine and I'm being whiny? If you think it should be improved, how so?

[An4ximandros]

This is something that has bugged the heck out of me for a while. I am sure I have some paper somewhere around with an idea for a sort of arena mission. Where neither you or your enemy had backup. It was all going to come down to squad effectiveness... I gave up because lol AI.

I might try something after butchering Al-Da'wa for info on how to Sex Pee your wingmates into being FREDasses.

This is literally the one thing that stops me from actually finishing stuff in FRED.

[The E]

I think this is an issue where proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

By which I mean that, if verisimilitude is your goal (i.e. building and portraiting a believable world), then you have to put in a lot of planning work. You basically need to figure out the logistics of the campaign you're making, figure out how one side would react to a given action by the other, and work from there. This also ties into the need to define objectives for each major actor in the campaign, what they want to accomplish, and how they want to do it.

[Axem]

There's a place and time for endless hoards of fighters, but that's usually with Shivans. And sometimes you're stuck with the fact of having your low-number but intricately scripted fighter AI go for naught when they all die in 2 minutes, leaving you with another 3-5 minutes to cram something in there. So like all thing its a balancing act.

I too, like to divide my missions into parts where the player does different things. It allows the player to feel like he's progressing in an action and not running a marathon of pain. But sometimes the hardest part is to go "what new little trick should I use?" I always try to strive for a unique take on a mission, but sometimes that can be tricky since there's only so many ways to try and make an escort mission seem "fun".

[Lorric]

Fortunately for me I'll be able to get away with this in my campaign to an extent. The Cordi and Nordera are not exactly known for their brains, they're as bad as the Shivans when it comes to sending their forces into battle. Since it's also a retreat with the aliens spread all over the place hunting and killing, it's believable to a further extent that forces will be trickling into the battles. I still will try and switch things up though, I don't like lots of waves either.

[The E]

But here's a simple question: Why do they keep sending more and more ships, given that all previous sorties against the target have been eaten by the defenders? Why do they keep sending similarly-sized packets of ships out?

If you think about it, that's not what a real commander would do. If you see your force get slaughtered by the defenders, you either pull back, or if the target is valuable enough, gather more forces for a crushing blow. You don't send out wave after wave of attackers in the hope that pure attrition will at some point start working for you.

That's the kind of question that you need to answer in order to make enemy waves work.

[Lorric]

I don't know if that's directed at me or a general comment, but it's okay in my campaign because the aliens are winning. In most cases they are simply hunters chasing down prey. The tactics are working for them.

And of course they have their masters' whips at their backs.

[The E]

If they are winning, and if they "have their masters' whips at their backs", why don't they assemble an overwhelming fighter force to take out the target? Why commit to penny-packet assaults that can get beaten back by the target?

I know that part of this answer is "gameplay balance". If the enemy always chose the optimal strategy, the player would be overwhelmed very soon, and no fun gameplay would emerge.

But the question is, how is this tactic justified in-universe? I can think of a few scenarios where it might be made to work, Like, say, a frantic chase with several in-mission jumps, trying to evade enemy scouts and dispatching them if necessary and jumping out before enemy reinforcements arrive, but it's something that has to be thought about if the intention is to create a believable scenario.

[Lorric]

If they are winning, and if they "have their masters' whips at their backs", why don't they assemble an overwhelming fighter force to take out the target? Why commit to penny-packet assaults that can get beaten back by the target?

The Terrans are in full retreat. It's basically a rout. The aliens are rushing forward to kill as many as they can before they escape. They only face pockets of resistance here and there. That's why they're not organised, for the most part they don't need to be.

Also, funnily enough, I've been thinking. I have three combat missions in my demo release, and a further three combat mission FREDded unreleased, and I haven't used this in any of them! 

[The E]

Okay, but don't they have communication equipment? Is there no point in the chain of command where someone takes a look at the data and says "Gee, seems like whenever we send something out to that location, it gets dead real quick"?

I mean, there very well could be, don't get me wrong. It's just that I like to justify a decision like this in in-universe terms, even if that justification is never communicated to the player, because that sort of thing informs how other parts of the universe work. It gives me an insight into the enemy's thought process, and I can use that to build story hooks around it.

This is part of the process we used to deconstruct Age of Aquarius and build War In Heaven.

[Phantom Hoover]

The obvious justification to me is that the enemy are launching fighters as soon as they're fit for combat out of urgency or whatever, something you can indicate in-game by making waves arrive at irregular intervals and with varying sizes and compositions.

[The E]

Well, if you were to get really fancy, you could construct a mission where you have to alternate between defending your capital ships and striking out against targets of opportunity yourself in order to keep the enemy off-balance so that he can't mass enough strength to deliver a killing blow.

[docfu]

Waves of fighters are definitely one thing, I think taking down typhons in the original Freespace was the other. Nothing like blasting at a cruiser with a toothpick while waiting for the supply ship to refill you with bombs for the nth time because somehow you are the only one smart enough to actually launch them...

The best way to make something interesting isn't by making more of it. Waves of fighters are boring? Ok, waves of fighters now with cruisers beaming you? That's even more boring.

Transcend was awesome in a nightmarish sort of way with the ridiculous number of waves of ships you shoot down but the problem is that "waves" of fighters are not even remotely realistic. Nowhere in any military engagement will a commanding officer say "send out two more fighters/soldiers/boats" to replace the ones that just got blown up.

The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation. There was a limit to how many ships could be on the screen without killing the CPU and making the game unplayable. In reality, all ships would be launched before any major operation and be somewhere on the map, and with jump drives, especially within striking distance. Massive waves of enemies getting shot down just mean they are incompetent at taking out one fighter(you.)

So how do you make this more interesting? You have to find a way to make it harder. Make accomplishing one small goal, like killing a fighter, or a cruiser so incredibly difficult that it warrants your attention.  You also need to avoid black and white scenarios and move into grey zones, so no clear win/loss situations, but trade-offs.

The biggest problem with Freespace right now, even FSO, is that the ships are too perfect. There are no problems with take offs/landings because there aren't any...there are no engine problems/failures, colliding with ships doesn't kill you outright, shields never fail, missions always end "perfectly" which is to say either you win and proceed or you don't win and repeat. Even if the mission requires you to lose to proceed it's all "planned."

I'll say something odd and I hope it makes sense: in order for the game to feel alive, it needs to be capable of dying. Not just stopping and restarting and taking more time, but dying, with consequences for doing so.

I hope these ramblings provide some useful insight...

[Phantom Hoover]

I'm thinking more in terms of the scenario Lorric's presenting, of a fairly disorganised invading force trying to maintain pressure on a retreating enemy with a battle-worn fleet. In that case it seems reasonable that they'd be sending fighter wings in haphazardly as soon as they were repaired.

I'm not making excuses for Transcend's mission design, but it is to an extent excused the burden of verisimilitude, because the world is meant to be deliberately jarring.

[Lorric]

I guess since I haven't actually had to resort to using waves yet, we'll just have to see how it goes if and when I do. I do have one mission in the works that will involve them, and the idea is that your force jumps into a sector, and projects a signal out to the enemy that the force is much larger. It's basically a kick me sign to draw the enemy off the retreating convoys. So the enemy will be coming in from all over. I plan to have the waves set to arrive in some cases after certain waves are destroyed and in other cases set on timers. Of course that's the plan, I just hope it works when I try to implement it. 

Anyway, I am a soldier in the war on tedium:

You've done well with the timing of the chatter and the missions don't have any 'dead time' in them. So keep it up.

Avoiding "dead time" is a strong goal of mine.

[docfu]

Ok, let me put this another way:

You can sit around making excuses as to why "waves of ships" are a viable and realistic option for the game, then setup a wave and set it to repeat some 5-10 times...

Or you can try to program every wing of ships to be unique and interesting, in addition to worth killing.

The big thing is that the word "WAVE" itself should never be used in this game ever again because wave automatically implies multiple wings of fighters, set to deploy, one after the next, repeatedly, only after the previous wave has been destroyed.

If the levels were programmed properly, you'd quickly have 50-60 swarming you because you didn't shoot them down fast enough. Reinforcements would actually grow in size and number or at least vary from time to time and would occasionally overrun the player.

Waves of fighters are just poor programming. poor programming to keep the player busy in the game because the developers/level designers didn't feel like putting the time in to make the scenario unique and interesting.

[Lorric]

You can sit around making excuses as to why "waves of ships" are a viable and realistic option for the game, then setup a wave and set it to repeat some 5-10 times...

That will never happen with me.

[Darius]

I didn't mind Diaspora's use of waves, but it may have been due to the novelty of the combat at the time.

[karajorma]

In R1 it fit in with the campaign too. Raiders were being dispatched against the Theseus as they returned from engaging other Colonial targets. The Cylons already had everything in the air, they were refuelling and sending them out against the player as soon as they were available to do so.

[Axem]

I'd say the method of unleashing fighters also matters on the "context" of your campaign. If its something more like soft-story telling, you can probably get away with outnumbering the player with easy to kill fighters without much context. If you're going for a stark and gritty campaign, you might need to give a bit more thought to how fighters and forces are deployed.