[TrashMan]

Having played trough half the campaign on Knossos, there a few things I noticed that trigger my tism - and that is the enemies you can fight.

While constantly fighting shivans can be boring and it's fine to want something else, that something else should be credible.
Mercenaries or a megacorp going to open war against the GTVA? That makes zero sense. How will the company or merc operate when their homes, logistic, families are all living under the GTVA?
If there were multiple power blocks and those mercs or companies operated from a different one, then it could work....maaaaybe. Even then the power could just demand the other power do something about it. A mercenary company from China declaring war on the US would not really survive.

In other words, no one would betray the GTVA and draw a big target on their back unless there's a VERY good reason for it or they believe they could REASONABLY get away with it.

[Nyctaeus]

Pirate Superdestroyers anybody?

The problem kinda lies in rather minimalistic worldbuilding of FS. It features fery few factions and this far, the secondary antagonist was always derived from the deuteragonist species. FSverse features only 4 canon species, of which one is extinct and another is the primary, eldeitch aliens enemy of the entire setting.

Oh, and there is Sol, so either Inferno or Blue Planet style.

The solution of simple: expanding the lore, crush the FS2 balance of power defined by Volition, introduce new things, go crazy.
I feel like the recurring theme of OP mercs/pirates with hundreds of fighters lies in people being rather shy at adding new things to FSverse. I'm reluctant to say that people lack creativity. I feel like they actually lack... Hmm... Courage? Adding new things is balancing the risk of FS being not so FS anymore. Adding new things that are actually good is... Even harder.

My own 2 cents added to the problem is portrayal of Shivans in fanmade campaigns. One may like or dislike what Blue Planet did with Shivan lore, but everybody should fairly admit: BP Team made risky choice, but they made it. They vastly expanded Shivan lorebuilding, even if the price was taking entire mystery away. Anyway it's much more then every bulk majority of other campaign did, which is pretty much: Shivans have returned, they destroy things, we're risking extinction again, they steal our bicycles, milk our goats, we beat them, same **** as always, the end. Meanwhile FS2 itself adds a lot to Shivan worldbuilding, even if V did so very carefully.

Kinda makes me regret that I didn't really expand Shivan worldbuilding myself in Exile and rather focused on post-apocalyptic survival theme instead. I wanted Shivans to be scary and do really scary things, but all the material that would add to the mystery was spared for Exile 2... That never happened and is unlikely to ever happen.

[SilverAngelX]

While the minimalist world building may be one thing, there's a another reason for the lack of diversity in enemies, a more practical one: the available assets. Since one of the campaigns mentioned is mine, I can attest that this is one factor in my decision making process. We have tons of Terran assets, a lot of Vasudan assets and a lot of Shivan assets. And besides that there's comparetively little for other species. You'd have to go to the full conversions for more of something different, and then you have to put in a lot of effort to make it work. I'm no 3D artist and I barely have time to write and fred my campaigns, so I cannot design a full set of new models for some new faction and have to make due with what is available. I guess the same is true for a lot of campaign authors. The result is a lot of campaigns with some form of Terran, Vasudan or Shivan adversaries (or adversaries using these ships) and several different attempts to make that work narratively. Is that the most creative or maybe even credible solution? No, but it's the most economical, if you don't want to use Shivans, which are an extremely simple, but somewhat overused and sometimes even boring adversary.

[0rph3u5]

Turn that issue on its head:

The enemies get ridiculous because they are proportional to the toybox the designer/writer wants to give to the player's side.
So in most cases that means the threat has to be start with warranting the deployment of a capital ship.

But what if you run scenarios at a more restricted scale?
"You have four fighters and a aupply tender, that's plenty. Now go solve this."
... you just dont get big spectacle out of that

[Nyctaeus]

New species are indeed difficult in this situation, but if the community asset pool is abundant [it is! I swear ], then there are plenty of options one can remix/recolor/retexture/kitbash to make something that looks fresh. Back in the days, in the tilemapping era, people were going crazy at recoloring, retiling, returreting and reworking existing assets to get something new and provide their custom factions with fresh identities. Sadly, most of those projects never got finished and released... I miss those times.

This opens at least an option to have GTVA fracturing scenatio or an original Sol-based faction.

Does this require effort? Yes. Does this require modpack-making skills? Hell, yes. But it's worth it. I built several medium to enormous modpacks in my life based on conviction, that even if reusing the same canon designs over and over again may provide entertainment if the writing and worldbuilding is good, it does not bring anything new for the eyes... And sight is dominant sense of bulk majority of humans.

But the pirate/mercs have another problem: They are pirates/merc, like Trashman said. They have no right to roll enormous warships and hordes of fighters into the battlefield, vastly limiting possible options. Experience from Shadow Genesis made this clear for me. An enemy should be at least NTF-sized, with access to economy, logistics, command structures and stuff. Both HoL and NTF feel small, but even HoL alone has access to multiple destroyers and more resources, then modern US. NTF on the other hand is actually a fully-fledged, interstellar superpower, controlling multiple fleets, several star systems and has capabilities to wage a war against a stronger neighbour. Therefore both generate political environment to FRED cool missions around.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with setting the scale small and focus on civilian side of things... But most of the campaigns like that, like Twisted Infinities, Friends and Foes and also New Path, decide to go for big things anyway, generating the issue described in the op. This style of campaigns creates very limited creative space for interesting gameplay. I personally see no need for limiting myself so much and prefer to put my creative juices into larger conflicts because plots of larger conflicts provide me with all the creative freedom I need, without risks of entering "unbelievable" territory.

[0rph3u5]

There is an untapped wealth of stuff you can do without going big - whoever it requires at lot of experimentation and iteration. Iain Baker and I both are doing parallel development on ways to make individual fighter combatants more meaningful. Iain's approach is to overhaul the flight model, while I am getting geared up to massage the AI for all that it can give me, my eliminating the hierarchical vanilla structure and hopefully winding up with a full realized Archetype-system.

If you can make a smaller elite force of pirate or merc fighters scary in an encounter, e.g. by having not x-times the same behavior but with complementary behaviors that would be make them seem less ridiculous. Some of the tools are in the vanilla toolbox, e.g. kinetic, emp, and drain effects are all part of FS2 retail but are really underused in enemy weapons.

[Kie99]

I don't mind it that much.  The GTVA's monopoly on force isn't so great that it prevented the NTF taking hold of three systems, in FS1 the Hammer of Light was a significant force, in Silent Threat an intelligence agency fancied its chances in open rebellion and somehow managed to make their own superdestroyer.  It's a bit of a wild west setting.

There are some absurdities that you have to forgive in the name of fun mission design.  I love Homesick, but they have a couple of pirate cruisers deploying dozens of fighters and bombers.  If you want realistic numbers you're going to have missions where you just jump in, escort your corvette, and nothing happens except chat between the characters until the mission ends.

[TrashMan]

Pirate Superdestroyers anybody?

The problem kinda lies in rather minimalistic worldbuilding of FS. It features fery few factions and this far, the secondary antagonist was always derived from the deuteragonist species. FSverse features only 4 canon species, of which one is extinct and another is the primary, eldeitch aliens enemy of the entire setting.

Oh, and there is Sol, so either Inferno or Blue Planet style.

The solution of simple: expanding the lore, crush the FS2 balance of power defined by Volition, introduce new things, go crazy.
I feel like the recurring theme of OP mercs/pirates with hundreds of fighters lies in people being rather shy at adding new things to FSverse. I'm reluctant to say that people lack creativity. I feel like they actually lack... Hmm... Courage? Adding new things is balancing the risk of FS being not so FS anymore. Adding new things that are actually good is... Even harder.

Simplest solution is fracturing the GTVA into multiple power blocks.

But no matter what you do there needs to be a credible explanation of how and why.


And I honestly prefer for shivans to remain a mistery. Less is often more.

[qweqwe321]

This is a problem I ran into with Chanticleer, tbh - the Federals in Blue Planet are on their last legs, so you really do have to get creative to give the player a challenge without making the world seem ridiculous.

The Blue Planet Gaian Effort campaign I'm slowly writing tries to address it by keeping the player's force small. When your entire force is an Athena, two Apollos and a light cruiser, a couple gunship wings are suddenly a huge threat.

[TrashMan]

A relatively small force CAN hold a system due to nodes. A well fortified node means that even in victory losses may be unacceptable.

Again, the way travel works in FS2 can be both good and very bad in terms of mission design and lore. When it takes a minute for any enemy ship from anywhere in the system to jump right on top of you, you have to get creative with how a small force can ever survive.