Topic: Convoy Raid mission

[C-Los]

Have played this serveral times in single player with CL, CA, BCH, and DN...he he

Must say had fun every time, definitly not an easy mission to totally complete even against AI...

Takes a while and I would not be killing or capturing everything if there was a Player in mission, thats for sure.. 

I love the Warp start, one of the things I did like about SFC3 was the ability to do that...WAY COOL !!

Over all Tracey did a "GREAT JOB"   

[Capt Jeff]

What does changing the Impedence of a hex do?

[FireSoul]

It is of no consequence to me if you wait, there's no rush. If I can get it done, then it will be easy enough to use a bat file to overwrite all the planet mods for whenever this needs to be used on a dyna. Size isnt an issue, as all the planets are 1.1MB's zipped. I have pioneered your work before, so hopefully I can leave you with a finished product when SG4 concludes. I still dunno how it fits into your shiplist tho. this is more like a general patch fix than any shiplist issue.

Do the planets use the standard textures? Can the same .mod be applied all over the place, and thus be of different sizes?
Tell you what, let's move this discussion to the corrections thread?

[Hexx]

Thanks for the feedback everyone who has played the mission and posted comments. Something pointed out to me by DieHard was to consider mission times between races, he suggests that droners would fly this mission faster than plasma races. Another thing to consider is the difficulty of the mission, it is sounding like it might be too easy, should I add in another freighter?

With a BCHp it takes me about 2 minutes to cap the freighters, adding in another would add maybe 30 seconds onto that. Once I have my nice little freighter flotilla, all with about 2-4 marines on baord capping the escorts is easy.
The freighters really need to SD upon capture (imho)
Also as I mentioned earlier (I think -too lazy to look now) You can start the mission really close (about 40, maybe rng 30ish) away from the convoy.
This I think would be a bda thing if you're a plasma chucker in a PVP.


Of course you're probably better off dead if you're a plasma chucker anyway, so maybe it's a good thing.

[762_XC]

Thanks for the feedback everyone who has played the mission and posted comments. Something pointed out to me by DieHard was to consider mission times between races, he suggests that droners would fly this mission faster than plasma races. Another thing to consider is the difficulty of the mission, it is sounding like it might be too easy, should I add in another freighter?

Isn't that the case with every mission? I would think Convoy Raid would actually work well for plasma races time-wise, as transporters recycle as fast as drone racks do.

[Corbomite]

Thanks for the feedback everyone who has played the mission and posted comments. Something pointed out to me by DieHard was to consider mission times between races, he suggests that droners would fly this mission faster than plasma races. Another thing to consider is the difficulty of the mission, it is sounding like it might be too easy, should I add in another freighter?

Isn't that the case with every mission? I would think Convoy Raid would actually work well for plasma races time-wise, as transporters recycle as fast as drone racks do.

Yeah and we all know how rife with transporters a R-WB is.

[FPF-DieHard]

The Freightors should SD when capped.

[el-Karnak]

If I was to do the warp-in sound effect in EEK missions then I would not have the ship kicking off at speed 31. That put the plasma races at a disadvantage close-in cuz they need to dramatically slow down in order to get the plasma torps charged. Instead I would do a rapid burn from speed 31 at the warp-in wav's files start that ends at speed zero at the wav's file ending.

DH and I debated starting speeds around a while back in GW3 and came up with speed 7 as a universally acceptable starting speed. He said something about Feds and O/L photon charge-up optimal startup speeds. Although, I over-ruled that in the EEK mission so  I am still having the ships start at speed zero in order to alleviate any multi-player scenarios where one player may connect a lot sooner than the other.

[762_XC]

Thanks for the feedback everyone who has played the mission and posted comments. Something pointed out to me by DieHard was to consider mission times between races, he suggests that droners would fly this mission faster than plasma races. Another thing to consider is the difficulty of the mission, it is sounding like it might be too easy, should I add in another freighter?

Isn't that the case with every mission? I would think Convoy Raid would actually work well for plasma races time-wise, as transporters recycle as fast as drone racks do.

Yeah and we all know how rife with transporters a R-WB is.

So take a Kestrel p00phead.

[Dizzy]

Warp in to an emergency stop. That way all late comers can load w/o sync issues. What's the difference between starting at 0 and starting at speed 7 if when you start at speed 0 you are closer to the target? The travel time to get there should be the same. This is a sync issue. I have always wanted all missions to start at speed 0. It is my experience on GSA and on the dyna that slow loaders take even longer to load and are sometimes OoS when the mission starts cuz ships are already up to speed...

[762_XC]

Warp in to an emergency stop. That way all late comers can load w/o sync issues. What's the difference between starting at 0 and starting at speed 7 if when you start at speed 0 you are closer to the target? The travel time to get there should be the same. This is a sync issue. I have always wanted all missions to start at speed 0. It is my experience on GSA and on the dyna that slow loaders take even longer to load and are sometimes OoS when the mission starts cuz ships are already up to speed...

ACCCK Dizzy is making sense 

[Hexx]

Alternatively , would it be possible to code the mission so all weapons are
loaded at the start of the mission?

Of course i have a nasty feeling this will backfire on me in PVP but..

[el-Karnak]

Alternatively , would it be possible to code the mission so all weapons are
loaded at the start of the mission?

Of course i have a nasty feeling this will backfire on me in PVP but..

Not too worry Mr. X.  EEK missions already send you to auto-Red Alert upon mission start. That's about as close to SFB WS-III as the missions can get.

[Hexx]

Uhmm we found out Mr X was Homer ,
did you not understand that episode?

[FPF-SCM_TraceyG_XC]

A long time ago, there was a well known bug, sometimes called the speed bug. This would occur sometimes when player ship speeds were not being calculated the same by each client computer in a multiplayer, the effect was that ships would appear to be out of sync, jumping around all over the place. To correct this, it was necessary to have all ships begin at speed zero, or, if already in mission, have all ships come to a complete stop for several seconds.

This bug was fixed with one of the last patches for OP and no longer exists, it is no longer an issue and we have not seen this bug again. One of Dave's patrols (the one with the pirate) starts you at speed 15, I think, and never had any issues.

The only real issue now about starting a mission at speed is the power it takes to load up weapons. Ships that require more power to charge up weapons have to slow down more than ships that don't need as much. Ships that use lots of drones, for instance, will be able to maintain their speed thus getting to the enemy quicker, thus reducing their mission time. The question then, is by how much time do they save, and what impact will it have on the game. The players are set far enough apart that even plasma races will have all weapons charged, but its just the mission time that might cause a problem. So this needs testing, just how much of an advantage do droners have over plasma in this case. Perhaps some of the regular plasma and drone players can test this out?

With regard to capturing the freighters making it too easy, I can add more marines to each freighter from within the script, remember the default AI marine levels are set by the shiplist, players always carry maximum marines. While destroying the freighters on capture solves the problem, its unrealistic I never did like that aspect of the old convoy raid myself, it seemed silly. But if everyone wants the freighters to blow up, I'm happy to make this happen. Adding a few extra marines would slow down the capturing process, and make a player use up more marines, but still not completely rule it out as a ppossibility. Irrespective of what we do here, a player who plays the mission enough times will eventually find the best tactic for completing the mission as fast and as efficiently as possible. Some races are better at capturing than others (eg. Klingons), others are better at using weapons that don't require much power (eg. Kzinti) etc etc. and I have been reluctant to disadvantage any racial flavour that each race has. The idea I'm trying to do here is not make the mission a cakewalk, but reasonably challenging enough that it doesnt get boring each time you play it, but must still be winnable at least most of the time.

Thanks again for all the feedback, and thankyou to everyone who has played it so far, please keep the feedback coming, both good and bad its much appreciated. 

[FireSoul]

Have you considered to drop to speed 0 after dropping out of warp?

Edit: Oh. looka that. other people said the same.

Edit2: AAACK. Dizzy's making sense!

[Hexx]

While I must admit I never liked the exploding freighters that much either, not having them explode
causes issues.
1)- (As mentioned) the marines used to cap the freighters are usually more than enough, when added to my own marines
   to cap the escorts as soon as I crack a shield. If you could increase the marines on the escorts to max without changing the freighters it might work better

2) The escorts shoot at the closest ship, while it's nice to have  Fed BCH unload on a freighter, once all the freighters are captured its pretty easy to keep the escorts firing on the freighters while I kill the escorts.

I like the warp in thing btw, I like starting the mission at speed 30 (although even a BCHP has to slow down to start charging stuff up)

[FPF-SCM_TraceyG_XC]

Have you considered to drop to speed 0 after dropping out of warp?

I'm trying to keep it as realistic as possible. If you were a starship captain warping into a sector to conduct a raid on shipping, would you be ordering your ship to full stop once you were in sensor range? No, you'd be heading in at full impulse. Realistically you would also have all yourt weapons charged, and this is the real problem. If I can figure out a way to make this happen, this solves the problem. If I cannot, and mission times put some races at a disadvantage, then the starting speed will just have to be slowed down when the ship drops out of warp to make it fair. It depends by how much disparity there is in mission times really.

[Strafer]

I'm thinking as a drop down speed out of warp, 4 would be ideal for anyone...

1) it's not 0
2) max speed of the R-WB and up.
3) most energy-based weapons would fully charge at this rate.
4) would not set off a mine should one be in the way.
5) WW would fire out as-is if ever able to have one ready at mission start (SFC1?).
6) depending on timing, the (R)ed Alert preset with the SHIFT-ScrLk could prevent a total deceleration to 4.

[Hexx]

Again not sure why speed's a problem. If you want to do speed 4 or speed 0 at warp out then just slow down.