Vega 1

So I do not forget it I'll write some short notices here and in the other Vega system threads to let you know what you should keep an eye on aside from general testing.

In this fifth mission of the campaign I'd like you to give us some feedback on how hard it is to protect the Sabres and how hard the last battle in this mission is.

It wasn't very hard to protect the Sabres, but the encounter with the Kilrathi ace was difficult at the beginning due to the fact that I focused on the Fireclaw and not on his wingmates, which were in fact closer to me and were able to put a missile up my butt and finish the mission prematurely for me. At the second attempt did the same mistake, so at the third I took out the closer enemies first and then focused on the Kilrathi ace. That did the trick an I was able to return to base unharmed. Maybe there should be dialog added hinting that the Fireclaw is only self-confident with his friends around to make clear to the player to take down the others first. What do you guys think? Did anyone had similar experience?

Hehe guys.. you are aware that it is not intended for you to master every mission at the first try. A little learning curve is still ok. And if you win an Ace battle on the first try it's not a good ace battle 😉

Hey Keldor, is it even possible to kill the Fireclaw in this mission, or does he always escapes when his fighter gets damaged?

Fireclaw has to survive. Continuity reasons.

damson wrote:Hey Keldor, is it even possible to kill the Fireclaw in this mission, or does he always escapes when his fighter gets damaged?

Usually there is the rule "if you don't get any recommendations in the Debriefing when pushing that button, then you didn't do anything wrong and you didn't miss anything."

What am I supposed to do at the navpoint with the two corvettes? My wingman and the Sabres just fly around them but do not seem to attack and I don't stand a chance alone.

TParis wrote:What am I supposed to do at the navpoint with the two corvettes? My wingman and the Sabres just fly around them but do not seem to attack and I don't stand a chance alone.

You cannot kill two corvettes?? Train my little padawan, train your skills 😉

But honestly, the others should help you just fine, it just takes a while. But their capship attacking AI, especially that of the bombers will be improved in Beta 4.

KeldorKatarn wrote:But honestly, the others should help you just fine, it just takes a while. But their capship attacking AI, especially that of the bombers will be improved in Beta 4.

Confirmed!

After killing the fighters the two sabres start taking down the corvettes with torpedos.

One question: If the two sabres survive there is a short dialogue between greywolf and charlie leader (if my memories are right), but if they don't survive there doesn't to be any mention of their loss. Is this how it was intended to be ?

Whenever you lose them you should have a short communication with the hermes about that.

I also confirm that the Sabres attack the Kamranis.

One Corvette taken out by Sabres, the second one by me (maybe the one remaining Sabre was out of torps by that time, the second one was sadly lost in the fight earlier). Still an improvement.

Sabres took down the corvettes very effectively in my playthrough, although one was lost. This is the first mission I died on. Had burned through all my missiles defending the Sabres and had none left for the Fireclaw dogfight, got missiled to death (I notice missiles are a lot more effective and damaging in WC Saga). Managed it on the second go, medium difficulty.

Other than that I noticed a missing space in the debriefing. A line reads "anymore.A flight..."

Anjelus wrote:Other than that I noticed a missing space in the debriefing. A line reads "anymore.A flight..."

I already mentioned it here.

Fixed.

This mission was giving me fits. I can confirm that the Sabers do launch torpedo at the corvettes but when playing on medium skill level I was having a hard time keeping them alive and surviving the mission.

It feels like though bombers are more dangerous than they were the corvettes all also more difficult to attack. I ended up dropping the skill level for this on mission just to get past it.

Corvettes are unchanged. Only the Darkets concentrate more on the Sabres now. That's the only difference.

Light wrote:I ended up dropping the skill level for this on mission just to get past it.

You can get past the mission one way or another. The only way to fail it is to end up dead.

I think the difficulty on that one is quite ok, if it was easier it wouldn't be thrilling enough 😉

I've noticed that in Vega 1 and 2, there is no voiced debriefing, even though the voiced debriefings have been already recorded. Mantis Ticket is open: http://mantis.wcsaga.com/view.php?id=434

Beta8 playthrough:

Seems like everything works fine. I don't have anything to complain about 😉

I had no problems with balacing on this mission, on both playthroughs one of the sabers got quite dead in the corvette fight.

However there were several problems with the voice overs and the debriefing:

Greywolf's first line telling "Dorothy" to punch it when flying away from the Hermes shows up at the top of the screen but no voice is heard.

Charlie 1, Wedge if I'm not mistaken doesn't have a his name on his helmet during comms. While he has a North American accent when speaking his lines he has an English accent when complimenting me on a kill.

On the debrief there's no voice over.

There might be a (deliberate) mistake in the debrief too. Fireclaw gets called a coward in the debrief but his psych profile states he's a "courageous pilot". It also states that he will stop fighting or retreat once things aren't fun anymore. e.g. Ganging up on him or denying him a dogfight by acting like at turret.

I'll defer to the programming Gods for the technical stuff, I'll touch a bit on the debrief.

Please put yourself in the shoes of the commanding officer for the debrief, in this Kettle, who just came off an instructor tour.

Two of your junior pilots just tackled with an Ace, notorious for killing many Confed pilots. Both survived. Are you going to make them feel better, and highen their morale by telling them they did a great job, and also take the opportunity to take a dig at Fireclaw? Come on, the guy actually prefers to fly a Darket, he's gotta have some sort of self-preservation if he survived all these years 😛

Or are you going to act like a sourpuss and belittle their accomplishments by portraying Fireclaw as some invincible god?

nickh46 wrote:Or are you going to act like a sourpuss and belittle their accomplishments by portraying Fireclaw as some invincible god?

Yes 😁

Hehe, j/k.

Well, naturally surviving a tangle with an ace, especially as a rookie pilot, is highly commendable. However saying he's a coward might make some rookies overzealous when facing this guy next and severely underestimate him. I'm just sayin' though. :p

I've played Vega 1 and I've got to nothing new to report report except of following: -While Blackslash said "He's right behind ya", I could've sworn that I've seen the word "Kettle" on his helmet. But before I open a Mantis ticket, I'd like to have it confirmed first.

Please do not open any tickets on generic messages of redshirt pilots. Those do not have final persona assignments yet. We'll inform you when this needs to be tested.

Beta9: Nothing new to report. Finished the mission without problems.

When I first played this mission, it took me several tries, but I liked the mission just fine. When I played the rest of the Vega missions, however, I felt like this one was significantly harder than the others. In particular, keeping the Sabers alive (on Medium difficulty) was something I never managed to do in the 4 times I tried the mission (as you can see in the playthrough video). I'm still not sure I'd say this mission was "too hard," but I do think it's harder than the other missions in this part of the campaign. Unless the goal is for the player to have to take out at least one corvette by themselves, in which case it is working as designed. Maybe it's just me, though; other testers don't seem to be having difficulty with it.

I tried it several times now and I find it really hard to lose both Sabres. One always survives for me and I usually even manage to save them both at least until we meet Fireclaw. You don't happen to fly by keyboard do you?

Nope, I use a joystick (Saitek Cyborg Evo). You can go watch the playthrough video; maybe I'm just doing something wrong. I'll admit that I'm rather rusty on my flying skills; it's been many years since I spent large amounts of time playing flight sims, but I didn't think I was *that* bad. It's also possible that if I went back and re-played the mission now I'd do better; maybe I just got unlucky.

To me it seems like sometimes it doesn't have to do with your flying skills or how you perform in the mission. During one playthrough your wingmen behave smart and do everything right. You could lean back and wait for them destroy all the enemys on their own. But sometimes they fly like they just came from a party at 3 am when they climbed into their cockpits. Do you know what I mean ? The AI does stupid things, ramming each other, flying straight ahead while beeing shot from behind etc. As it doesn't happen all the time the friendly losses seem rather random to me, especially in this mission as I played it several times to test the bomber AI and even though I played it the same way and made the same kills in the same time sometimes 1 or even 2 of the sabres got destroyed.

Having just played the mission a couple more times, I too am finding that the difficulty varies a lot. Firstly, sometimes the sabers seem to do a really bad job of dodging turret fire, meaning one often dies even if you keep the fighters away. Second, I've found the difficulty of the ace dogfight is all over the map. Sometimes I spend all my time dodging missiles, such that I never even have time to attack. I didn't count, but we're talking several dozen missiles, sometimes two or three at once. Other times, I don't get targeted by more than one or two missiles during the whole fight, and the entire thing was a cake walk. Maybe everyone decided to pick on my wingman those times; I don't know. All I know is that sometimes it is a "normal" dogfight, with me taking out enemies one after another, occasionally having to evade someone who's gotten behind me. Other times I spend all my time taking evasive action, and hardly have a chance to fire a shot; this seems to go on for several minutes, until eventually someone gets lucky with a missile, or I get rammed to death. I really don't think I'm playing all that differently. I understand that in a "real" combat situation, who survives is often as much luck as it is skill, but this is a game (and this mission is relatively early in the campaign).

I was flying a mission in Vega 1 and discovered you can auto pilot from a landing bay. I wasin the Fort Crockett landing bay and auto piloted out from there....should we be able to do that?

yes

We simply cannot check every single position of a player (like behind a large asteroid, inside a carrier, stuff like that and check for all those contigencies. Well we could, but that would be a bug-nest. Considering the cost and the little-to-nothing this would offer to gameplay (I would actually consider such a "feature" to be incredibly annoying") this is not even worth considering.

But thanks for pointing that out.

KeldorKatarn wrote:Whenever you lose them you should have a short communication with the hermes about that.

Two messages are sent:

1. Sandman reports that Sabres were destroyed 2. Hermes tells to proceed without them.

This should only be the case if Sabres were destroyed prior to arriving at the Fireclaw nav point.

Question about the debriefing. The paths description in green lanten thread states that you can lose two Sabres, one Sabre, or you can save them both. Does every path should have separate debriefing?

The debriefing is always the same for all of those outcomes.

Tolwyn wrote:Two messages are sent:

1. Sandman reports that Sabres were destroyed 2. Hermes tells to proceed without them.

This should only be the case if Sabres were destroyed prior to arriving at the Fireclaw nav point.

OK, those messages worked fine. I thought you mean a different communication after returning to the Hermes. Wouldn't it be possible to let Sweeney say a word or two about the loss of the Sabre(s) at the end of the mission, right before landing? It's a bit strange that the death of the pilot(s) isn't mentioned besides the "proceed without them" thingy.

Vega 1 will NOT have the Sabres in the escort list. That is final! Fighters are not in the escort list, that's what the wingman HUD is for. if you want them on the list, add them manually. Greenlighting means you are checking our specifications, it does NOT mean you get to say what the mission should be like.

So everyone greenlight this issue. This is NOT a bug. It is your personal opinion and we overruled as designers.

In the future if you have such opinions this forum is the place to bring them up, the greenlight checklist is NOT!

Copy that! Greenlighted the Escort List entry.

Edit: I certainly will add them to the escort list as they seem to be more fragile than shuttles and it's easier to monitor their hull status as well as target the target's attacker (BTW "target target's target" is most hilarious of Freespace target keys 😉 ) quickly by using E and G key IIRC. Even in original Freespace 2 in one mission in nebula the lead fighter from your wing was addaed to escort list so you could easily target him (you had to follow him) rather than going through all the friendly ships on target list.

I gave a "green" to the escort list, but is a comment like this out of line? For my reference, what types of "issues" should we be looking for with the escort list? Given that we, as players, don't really know what is "supposed" to be on the list, I feel like all I can do is report whether what I see on the escort list is what I would like to keep track of the health of, and my expectations are (obviously) not always correct.

Please don't take this personally. Keldor and myself are the only two developers working actively on the game. We do this in our free time and are simply exhausted, so emotions might be running high.

Either way, escort list is reserved for shuttles / capital ships only. Fighters/bombers should never be listed in the escort list.

Okay, I'll keep that in mind for the future. Might this be a useful addition to the general greenlighting "testing criteria" thread?

On my current play-through I've noticed that Greywolf does not afterburner on the corvettes on hard difficulty. Is that on purpose?

No fighter ever approaches capital ships on afterburner.

KeldorKatarn wrote:No fighter ever approaches capital ships on afterburner.