[Iain Baker]

Finished this campaign the other day. What a rush! Some seriously intense and large scale battles, and it looks beautiful. Highly recommended. 

PS - Homeworld called. They want their ships back 

[Nightmare]

Space it rather big.
In the most extreme case, the EA could hide pretty much anything they want either so close to the sun that the radiation shields it from sensors, or far out in the Halo.

Abosulutly correct; space is so huge that you could hide even more gigantic spaceships.

Nevertheless, I tried to think of some arguments...

1. The construction of the Icanus was set at Mars; at least according to INFR1. Low sun orbit or outer rim make sense resource-wise (at least the latter), but they also require a significant workforce for the construction.
2. The economic resources required would make it very hard to hide/disguise even a for military government. You could also wonder whether the NTF was surprised by the deployment of the Colossus, when their construction was known public.
3. I think in the end you could probably find somebody among capture EA staff who knows at least some details about the Icanus.

[Rampage]

The Zods have their own motives, which will be revealed in later releases.

Nobody ever said the Icanus is a ship (in the classical sense).

PS - Homeworld called. They want their ships back 

Finally got their attention!

R

[mr.WHO]

I'm replaying the campain again with bigger attention to details and I spotted several things that might be useful for next release/patch:

In first command briefing there is vanilla music - might be good to replace it with Inferno track.

Mission 1:
- most of the mission has vanilla music, might be good to replace it with Inferno track.
- mission directive suggest to disarm cruiser beams, but this is actually quire hard and useless (cruisers go down shortly after you manage to destroy beams).
- I haven't tried it, but what happend when I try to ambush and destroy the traitor shuttle?

Mission 2:
- would it be possible to make target freighter a random? Currently in every playthrough it's always the same freighter.
- wouldn't it be logical to blow up the freighter after boarding to deny EA the resources? Or is it against BETAC to blow up captured ships (not that we don't witness the huge warcrime in the backround   )?

Mission 3:
- it seems that GTA use one destroyer to attack destroyer, corvette and two cruisers - maybe it would be nice to throw an escort or two?

Mission 4:
- mission communication indicate you shouldn't destroy beams fo Lindos, but focus on clearing the path for actual disarming squad. However I feel that without your active involvement it might be that Lindos will be able to destroy your destroyer.

Mission 5:
- this mission is ulta hard at first run. It seems that comm array subsystems are extremely resilent to Cyclops and Stilletto. Only Arbalest seems to be effective (and fit in bigger amount of Artemis).

Mission 6:
- The part where you are ambushed by 3 missile cruisers is a bit boring - due to their position you take some time to engage one cruiser, but then you're too far to do anything to two others and you just waste time trying to get back to your destroyer. Maybe group those cruisers together but with some better escort to make it challenging.
- in ship command you can give orders to "Ramayana spawn point".

Mission 7:
- I find it a bit irritating that Cyrus beam cannons are invulnerable in first part of the mission.
- when Cyrus is back with two cruisers, one cruiser behind Reyes love to crash into Reyes engine - that is one a hell dedicated cruiser captain.

Mission 8:
- that EA transport at the beginning of the mission that try to save EA corvette seems to be too easy prey. Maybe delay it's arrival, so that it could try to sneak during the chaos of battle?
- also that inactive EA corvette - maybe it should have engine disabled? It doesn't look too dammaged/stranded.

Mission 9:
- no complains

Mission 10:
- no complains, actually this is one of my favorite missions - really feels similar to R1 Battle for Earth.

Mission 11:
- Another solid mission, the only thing I don't like is that SOC double-agent reveal herself to EA Admiral. This feels kinda forced and uneccesary.

[Korwin]

I noticed one strange issue - some subsystems of enemy ships are healed when attacked, this can go well over 100%. It looks like you were trying to protect them from being destroyed too early. This looks stupid and can be annoying - one time I had to destroy some beam cannons, and they were sitting at 200%+  because my wingmen attacked them earlier, when the bug was active.
I think it was the Cyrus in mission 7 but I might be wrong. This also happened on some destroyer's engines which I tried to destroy for fun.

[FrikgFeek]

The "correct" freighter in mission 2 IS random, you just got the same one multiple times.

Code: [Select]

   ( random-of
      "Celeste"
      "Cayman"
      "Pyrobolos"
      "Tylis"
      "Advocate"
   )
   ( true )
   ( modify-variable
      "@karpinskyShip[Blank]"
      "<argument>"
   )

Mission 6 went through some iteration in testing, one of the versions was making the cruisers grouped with escort, but it was too easy to blow them away and then all fighter wings would absolutely **** on the cruisers with hurricanes. If the fighter cover or the cruisers own AAA is increased too much then trying to interact with them leads to losing too many wingmen that you'll need for killing those Gaganas later, so it was better to just sit and wait for friendly cruisers to scare them off.

The 'main' point of it is killing off all the fighters and bombers attacking your destroyer anyway, the cruisers are supposed to be a secondary threat there.

[mr.WHO]

Strange, I ran this mission several times and aways get the big freighter in the middle as main target.

[JSRNerdo]

I noticed one strange issue - some subsystems of enemy ships are healed when attacked, this can go well over 100%

This is both fixed in a recent nightly (June at the very latest) and is why we recommend you use a nightly!

- I haven't tried it, but what happend when I try to ambush and destroy the traitor shuttle?

You get summarily executed for destroying a civilian shuttlecraft and killing everyone on board. Don't do warcrimes, kids!

[mr.WHO]

Misson 12:
- no complains

Mission 13:
- The scanning part is a bit long and bit boring, maybe you could put scan targets closer together to shorten this part?
- it seems odd that shivans dedicated so much resource to kill a few fighters - Fighters, Crusier, Corvette an Destroyer - seems a bit like overkill on their part.

[Nightmare]

Having to fly around creates some tension.

I don't think that the Shivans returned there only to kill a few fighters. But it's natural that it is the first thing they do.

[mr.WHO]

General note:
I feel that most of mission are a bit too chaotic due to the simple sensory overload - ships jump in, jump out, fighters and bombers blow up left and right, everything have full rainbow of weapons and command messages pop-up and dissapear too fast - most of the missions are very intense, which is good, but I think everything is a bit too much over the limit - I say it after my third  playthrough, when I know what events will happen ahead.

I think that it would be good to have some voice community made acting, so at least we won't have to read the comm message in all that chaos.

[Nightmare]

I'm afraid VA is highly unlikely to happen, simply due to the large amounts of time (and money) it took the BP team to get their campaign VA'ed; which they ultimatly abandoned in favor of making more playable content. Also, it has never been on the 2-do list of INF AFAIK. Robo-speech was therefore considered the best solution, but it apparently hasn't been implented...

[Rampage]

Yeah; voice acting for INF is nigh unlikely to happen at all.

R

[General Battuta]

I'm afraid VA is highly unlikely to happen, simply due to the large amounts of time (and money) it took the BP team to get their campaign VA'ed; which they ultimatly abandoned in favor of making more playable content. Also, it has never been on the 2-do list of INF AFAIK. Robo-speech was therefore considered the best solution, but it apparently hasn't been implented...

I mean, we finished everything we set out to VA, and it is a much bigger script than Inferno's...but it is still an obnoxious and difficult process.

Also locking in the script for VA would mean we can't revise it and having the freedom to rewrite whatever could be valuable for future Inferno releases.

[Nightmare]

Just out of curiosity, what happened to the idea of using robo-speech a.k.a. text-to-speech? The thing with the many messages that come in quick intervals was noted, but obviously not changed.

[Stardust]

Just finished my first playthrough, and am thoroughly impressed! Loved it! Worth the wait. Didn't expect the shivans to show up as late as they did, but that's okay too.

I agree that with everything happening so fast, it'd be good to have voice-overs, but on the other hand, if I missed a few messages, I'd just pause the game and go back & look/read through the message log. If a poll were released asking the community whether they'd prefer voice acting or more/better content, I'd go with more/better content. Great job guys! Hopefully Act 2 doesn't take fifteen years to be released LOL.

[CT27]

I think every return-to-Sol campaign has its own node location. Canon had it near Earth, BP had it in outer Sol IIRC, I don't know where INFs is, so it would not necessary to be visible from the node. But the thing is, building a 20km warship could barely be concealed from the public. The construction of the Colossus was announced publicly, and I think from complexity, it's about as difficult for EA to build the Icanus as for GTVA to create their supercap. The details are probably secret, but not the whole thing.

Another plot question:

Presumably the Nemesis took part in the initial EA blitz into Delta Serpentis.  What do you think it did after that; would the EA send it against the capital world of Janus in Beta Aquilae?

[Nightmare]

I don't know whether the Nemesis participated in the initial action against the gateway - there was an unfinished intro cutscene that implied that, but it was incomplete and finally dropped, so I'm not sure. IIRC the Nemesis was in Sol for most of the time doing not that much; what was actually quite disappointing to me, as I hoped for some cool Nemesis action. There was a really old fan fiction that was basically "OMG the Nemesis is in this system - we're so ****ed", but I was informed that the story was changed loooong ago.

[Rampage]

The established story is that the Nemesis lead the initial assault on the Sol Gate and didn't venture outside of Sol and DS.  If you remember the mission where you're scrambled to save the station in the asteroid belt, Admiral Falon was communicating with the defenders of the station during the first several minutes of the mission.  Despite this, the forward fleet let by the Argus nominally led the invasion and Falon only stepped in to interfere after the Argus was pushed out of Beta Aquilae.

R

[mr.WHO]

The lack of Nemesis in Act 1 is disturbing, hope you will compensate in Act 2 and Act 3