[Phantom Hoover]

Buffed, nerfed, buffed, nerfed - the Valerie has gone back and forth so many times (rather like that entire mission). You realize that 'buff' can mean a lot of things, right? Better tactical position, better orders on the air wing, better maneuvers during the engagement. You're talking about it like it's some kind of buff from a neutral baseline instead of 'buffed from wherever it was before balance iteration #217'

I'm talking about it based on how you described it to me, that you had to guardian the Valerie's engines and do some other stuff to keep it getting crippled by the Indus.

[General Battuta]

Sure - which is a buff from its previously nerfed state of 'start engagement at dead side aspect with no immediate countermaneuver and a frigate coming on your point defense blindspot', pretty much the worst situation the Valerie could end up in short of a destroyer dropping on its lap.

[WorldsDawn]

Player reaction to the Dio has been an interesting experiment in human psychology, since people believe it gets a 'weak showing' even though it has more chances to actually defeat the player than the Atreus and all of Serkr team combined - none of which can actually engage the player in a success/fail sequence until late in Act 3, and even then only under very limited conditions.

I can see what you mean, because of the narrative performance like "The 14th Battlegroup consists of the GTVA's finest and most powerful warships" (don't quote me on this ), yet no Diomedes in it

On top of that the weak performance on several missions, resulting in catastrophic failure everytime without killing anything.
I can see where the ideas come from

I don't hate the ship, i love it actually... it plays like a little Orion because you need a perfect positioning for it to bring your guns to bear, not like all the other ships "mimicking" the shivan's desings.
And damn dat ship is sexy

*whispers to Battuta*
Give it a ass-kicking mission and throw those Diomedes-haters out of the sky :3

[General Battuta]

The Diomedes has already had several ass-kicking missions, missions where it could actually cause the player to fail. People are able to recognize the Nyx as an excellent design even though you can blow up pretty much every single Nyx that comes at you, because the Nyx is tough to fight, and if it's not treated with respect, it will shoot you down. In a video game, that's a more meaningful kind of challenge than 'wow I have an invincible plot flag.'

People are also hung up on this comic-book idea that military hardware must be presented as an invincible faceroller to be valuable and interesting. Perfect, super-powerful ships are as dull as perfect, super-powerful characters. For instance: the 14th didn't fly with any Dios because a combination of Fleet politics and design history branded the Dio as unsuitable for the mission profile (as its lengthy tech room description shows).

BP is always interested in more nuanced, complicated views of the world, and that includes the tactical realities of the battlespace. The Dio is a ship with its own particular strengths and flaws, operating under a tactical doctrine that doesn't really know what to do with it. That's a much more successful narrative than 'the Dio is a blue beamed meat cleaver that can't be beat.'

And, again, this is a video game. Every time a Diomedes blows up the Indus, causing a mission failure, that's an end to the Wargods' story. That's not 'weak performance' or 'catastrophic failure without killing anything' - that's a massive GTVA victory.

[Phantom Hoover]

You're expending an awful lot of effort in explaining to people why their perception of the story you helped write is wrong.

[Luis Dias]

BUT THEY ARE WROOOOOOOO

[General Battuta]

You're expending an awful lot of effort in explaining to people why their perception of the story you helped write is wrong.

I could be lazy about explaining it instead? I'm not sure what you want here.

I firmly believe that readers need to be challenged to step up their game and think about what they're consuming.

[General Battuta]

People also spent the better part of ten years calling Command dumb and, well, that is not super substantiated in the text either.

[Phantom Hoover]

"Thinking about what you're consuming" does not, to me, equate with the kind of metagaming perspective you're talking about here. "The Diomedes is a versatile, powerful but unorthodox class which often ends up in risky deployments" is an analysis I can get behind. "When the Diomedes appears in a mission you end up in a failstate so it's actually more potent than Serkr or the Atreus" is not; it doesn't jive at all with the way experiences a tightly-scripted narrative like WiH's.

[General Battuta]

Really? Again, the Nyx: you can theoretically blow up every single Nyx you see. Yet players consistently learn to respect it, because it can put them into a fail state.

Games are still battling to reconcile the scripted narrative with the ludic narrative. The ideal outcome is a ludonarrative reality that produces story beats entirely through its gameplay systems (much like real life!), but this is very difficult to achieve due to combinatoric challenges and our lack of strong AI. We can't produce authored content with sufficient reactivity.

If the only way to exhibit a warship's power is through tight scripting, then, ironically, the warship has no power at all. It does not exist as a ludic element; it cannot interact with the gameplay systems in a meaningful way. This isn't to deny that it's interacting with the narrative, which is fine...but it's clear to me that games should be headed towards ludonarrative integration, a tight coupling between what is said and what is played. A ship's performance in the gameplay space is meaningful narrative. If an enemy ship puts a mission into a fail state, then it has achieved its objective; that is narrative feedback from the gameplay. Discarding that feedback as somehow irrelevant is a causal error, a mistake that flattens the game into merely a linear story, a retrospective attempt to treat the success state as the only possible state - anathema to everything interesting about games.

The dogfight with Xinny and Zero is a perfect example. There, we were able to feed forward from the fail state because it didn't preclude our authored content from continuing. If we could afford to branch our story every time a Dio blew up the Indus, if there were no reversion or retry mechanisms, then players would be forced to confront the Dio as an object of dread. The Valerie would fork a lot of campaigns into a very dark place, and the Eris' strike package in Aristeia would be an urgent and overwhelming solution to an urgent and overwhelming problem.

(From another angle - the very nature of a story about war requires both sides to make moves and countermoves. The presence of a countermove does not somehow obviate the strength of the move it's reacting to. Good stories require conflict. Conflict comes from tension. Tension comes from the possibility of change.)

If this isn't how players experience game narratives then I'd challenge them to stop experiencing game narratives the wrong way. A game creates a phase space and then the player's actions help select a resolution. You can't retrospectively treat that resolution as the whole population of the phase space.

[General Battuta]

Command's actions in FreeSpace 2 lead to a catastrophic defeat and the destruction of an entire star. The GTVA loses the Colossus and most of its fleet.

Command made good decisions based on the information it had.

Is Command stupid? The creeping determinism of hindsight bias says yes, because the brain says 'bad outcome? Must have been a bad process.' So you get ten years of ****ty, thoughtless forum posts along that line. Break down what actually happened, take the time to look past that useless heuristic - and you hit a very different conclusion.

[Phantom Hoover]

I'm just going to focus on the Nyx here, because it essentially demonstrates what my grievance is: people learnt to respect the Nyx. They did not learn to respect the Dio, at least not until it was rehabilitated in later forum discussions. So clearly there's some ludonarrative distinction here: you got the synthesis you were aiming for with the Nyx, but the Dio missed the mark for whatever reason. But in this thread you just seem to say "well, players aren't going to think about this the way I want them to so all that can be done is to tell them off for it on the forums", as if the way WiH presented the Dio (especially in the early releases, when it just had a bare-bones tech entry before you rewrote it in response to people discussing its effectiveness) had nothing to do with it.

[niffiwan]

Maybe something that contributes to the "Dio is weak" perception is that the player (within the confines of the "fighter combat" genre) does not directly defeat the Dio. The Nyx is perceived as a threat because you need the games primary skill to defeat it. The Dio on the other hand is defeated through other means, either through no action on the part of the player (Valerie) or via a "tactical rather than twitch" mechanic (selecting an appropriate strike package via a menu for the Medea). The "indirect" defeat of the Dio's lessen their impact on the player (but of course its more realistic in that Dio's doesn't solely exist for the player to blow up!)

And to respond to the recent posts (damnit, I started writing this AN HOUR ago, man I'm slow), I'm uncomfortable with equating a superficial interaction with a game as being "the wrong interpretation".  I don't believe there's anything wrong with game playing as escapism.  I don't always want to face "real-life-like" problems, sometimes I want to disengage my brain and not have to think about complexity like that which I deal with in the rest of my life. (OK - so when that's my goal then maybe BP isn't the game I fire up Because don't get me wrong, I really like BP & its logically/meaningfully laid out backstory).

On the topic of failstates with a branching campaign (that may end up in complete failure), yes they would reinforce/enhance the impact/power of the Dio. But they are also incredibly frustrating for players, e.g. I'd be fairly confident that the majority of players hate (WC3) skipper missiles, even though they give the player incredible urgency (*you* must shoot down this missile or enter the failstate where humanity is destroyed!) So there seems to be a conflict between the goal of seeing the narrative as more than the linear "one true outcome" and player satisfaction.

[General Battuta]

I'm just going to focus on the Nyx here, because it essentially demonstrates what my grievance is: people learnt to respect the Nyx. They did not learn to respect the Dio, at least not until it was rehabilitated in later forum discussions. So clearly there's some ludonarrative distinction here: you got the synthesis you were aiming for with the Nyx, but the Dio missed the mark for whatever reason. But in this thread you just seem to say "well, players aren't going to think about this the way I want them to so all that can be done is to tell them off for it on the forums", as if the way WiH presented the Dio (especially in the early releases, when it just had a bare-bones tech entry before you rewrote it in response to people discussing its effectiveness) had nothing to do with it.

The rewrite had nothing to do with people discussing its effectiveness - Aesaar just asked for a new tech description to go with the new model, and it was a chance to revisit something that had been done under crunch.

I completely disagree that the Dio missed the mark. It's exactly where it needed to be - too strong, if anything. Players just need to be challenged to think better, which is something the story will continue to strive to do.

And yes, the branching failstate is unquestionably a pretty ****ty player experience. I think branches should never be 'fail path' and 'success path' - they should be two interesting alternatives.

[General Battuta]

Again I'll point to the 'command is stupid' problem. That was a pervasive, widely held opinion. It was not substantiated. It fell apart under examination.

Sometimes players just have a bad reading.

[Nyarly]

Allied Command's stupidity (which was not a fundamental problem of the organization, just one that recurred during the first half of the game, ie. the late Rebellion/early Incursion) was definitely born more out of arrogance, rather than the senior officers of the Alliance being inbred, out-of-touch elites who were carelessly marching our boys and girls out of their space trenches and into the Shivans' space machine guns.

Once Command realized how outgunned the Terrans and Vasudans were after the Psamtik was vaporized, they legitimately started doing everything in their power to effectively minimize the existential threat that was the Sathanas armada.  I think they did a decent job, all considered; it was simply a matter of numerical and arguably technological inferiority, not competence and intelligence.

[Luis Dias]

Command's actions in FreeSpace 2 lead to a catastrophic defeat and the destruction of an entire star. The GTVA loses the Colossus and most of its fleet.

Command made good decisions based on the information it had.

Is Command stupid? The creeping determinism of hindsight bias says yes, because the brain says 'bad outcome? Must have been a bad process.' So you get ten years of ****ty, thoughtless forum posts along that line. Break down what actually happened, take the time to look past that useless heuristic - and you hit a very different conclusion.

Seriously curious about this, where are these posts you talk about? In all my 15 years of playing Freespace not once have I ever thought Command as stupid. Brash, maybe. Careless about the lives it sends to fight? Oh my. Confident, hubristic, yes sure... now stupid? That's novel to me.

[An4ximandros]

I support the "command is stupid" thing simply because of an incident in which all allied ships were recalled during an attempt to bait the only known Sath. I was literally abandoned with two dragons on my tail. Then those dicks have the audacity to tell me I am a traitor for not jumping out, right after I manage to kill the Shivans that almost destroyed me, and remote-scuttle my Jumper, saying: "You will pay for your insolence, pilot." Ever since that day, (FS2) Command has always and will always be a bunch of idiots for me.

More on topic, The Dio's problem is that it suffers from loads of scripting issues. It had to be Sexp-dumbed down to not outright annihilate the player (and I was still shredded countless times by it!) The issue here is simple: most show-offs of the dio have player wingmen that are scripted to cease taking damage after x point. This essentially soaks up much of the Diomedes' damage potential.

[Luis Dias]

They were a hundred percent correct in admonishing you for failing to report on time. And the gall you have to bring up how you were late because of a menage a trois. Insolence was an euphemism.

Regarding the Dio, the number one reason I really didn't care about it at all is because I didn't even fly near it. I just called for reinforcements and let them eat their cake. Ate some cookies while watching the nice fireworks. Looks pretty the shi... oh it blew up. Oh well.

[General Battuta]

More on topic, The Dio's problem is that it suffers from loads of scripting issues. It had to be Sexp-dumbed down to not outright annihilate the player (and I was still shredded countless times by it!) The issue here is simple: most show-offs of the dio have player wingmen that are scripted to cease taking damage after x point. This essentially soaks up much of the Diomedes' damage potential.

This isn't particularly an issue at all. Neither the Dio's mission targets nor most of the ships attacking it are ever guardianed. The ones that are are comparatively inconsequential. Nor is the Dio 'sexp-dumbed-down'; it's sexp-smartened up.