Thanks THobson, this sort of beta report is music to a mission designer's ears. I'm particularly pleased that the likes section is bigger than the dislikes.
I am treating this not as a change the flag and get away mission, rather I am treating it as a kill all the enemy mission - oh and change the flag along the way. The design allows for this.
You are exactly right. I spent many, many hours thinking about how to make this more difficult without just adding loads more enemy. It is actually, as you say, a "clear the map" mission, but disguised as something else. It is very very hard just to go and do the objectives - Sneaker did manage it but he was fortunate, especially in capturing an Abrams at the old base itself. (Although of course it took great skill to effect the capture.) I can't make that impossible but it is now harder to do.
I enjoyed booby trapping the old base and mining every road when I found some mines, it remains to be seen if any of that will payoff, even if it doesn't it felt like a realistic thing to do.
Seems perfectly realistic to me. Certainly worth a try. If you catch anything it will probably be around the base.
The randomness of the reinforcements has a very realistic feel.
It's just guard waypoints. Nothing more than that, although obviously with many hours of playtesting to get the right groups in the in the right place. Shows how sophisticated they are.
The use of reinforcements is forcing me to use tactics that for me are unusual in OFP but that feel very realistic, hit and run away (and it doesn't need to be a big hit either).
This is one of the nicest aspects of the mission. Here we are, playing a game three years old, and experienced players are having to invent new tactics. How cool is that?
I really like having a mission where I can take the long view. I plan to wear them down over however long it takes.
The scale was a surprise. It was not my intent to build a vast mission, it just turned out that you need to to make a fun unimpossible mission. The problem - from the mission designer's perspective - is that human players have a memory. They can remember how they got killed, go back to a retry and deal with the threat. Once you know exactly where the enemy are its easy. After many experiments I discovered that the only way to make the mission I wanted to make was to have it enormously random. (You can make a genuinely impossible mission with a fixed position, but that is no fun.)
In-game weapon availability . This could be a challenge. There are a lot of ammo crates and a lot of AA soldiers. The former seem bog standard with no added weapons, so keeping my guys rearmed with HK mags will be a problem I will have to deal with at some point. The latter put me off using the Chinook, but also provide ammo to take down the enemy choppers when I get to where I want to do that.
It is not my intention to deprive you of ammo: I'll add HKs to the crates if needs be. There are three groups of blackops you can steal from: a small one at the execution barn; one patrolling the road on motorbikes; and one hidden in a wood somewhere who get switched into a guard waypoint on some event, I can't remember what. There are HKs and mags (and bizons and Uzis) in the ammo lorry at the civvies, and bizons at the spetz natz camp and execution barn on the hilltop.
The large number of AA loons is more to give you weapons to shoot down the enemy choppers rather than to prevent use of the Chinook. Do you think there are too many?
The size - it is like having a whole campaign in one mission, with no one tell you what to do next.
I know, it's great.
The unforgiving and random nature of the start.
I'm very pleased by your comments here. This is exactly what I was trying to achieve: sufficiently difficult that frankly some players would never get past it, but actually it's perfectly possible - although frustrating - to get out with everybody alive. Somebody complaining about it - having done it - is precisely what I was trying to do, so I'm happy even if you're not. ;D In fact you can often get out with two or three men down: I die about 1 time in 3 I think. Making the actual attacks fairly random, yet keeping the difficulty level about the same each time, proved very hard and I admit it's not as consistent as I'd like it to be. It's true you pretty much have to be sober, which I admit is not a strength of the mission.
The game assumes I am going up the hill a bit too soon for me. In my progress around the base of the hill checking forests and the like for hidden enemy I kept getting the hint message telling me I had another save available - and then the mist cleared!
Both the save and the mist clearing are triggered (with random delays) by a simple group leader present trigger around the hill. The exact area of the trigger has been changed many times. I'll look at it again with a view to making it slightly tighter around the hill. The intention is that the mist starts to clear once you start to go up, not just when you are skirmishing around the edge. The problem is that the trigger can't be too small otherwise the mist can't clear fast enough. It took hours of testing to get the mist clearing speed right - it actually happens in three phases. If you just use 0 setFog 200 or whatever it clears too fast at the start (you can actually see it receding) and too slow later on.
Many thanks for the comments, keep 'em coming. The next version (0-64) is ready apart from some new voices by me and the stuff in this post. Should get it up in a couple of days or so.
Topic: (Review Completed) [SP] Un-Impossible Mission (Read 69283 times)