Howard Day said:
And coming from an artist's POV, those explosions are horrendous. They were in the original Origin release, and they've not aged well. Do you have the ability to change them? If so, I've got some real explosion footage I'd be willing to share (It's going into Pioneer anyway), if you want it. Also some of the explodie chunks that are left over after an explosion don't look as if they match the fighter that just bit it.
Yeah, some of those chunks look... Nephilim?
It's because ultimately, we're still modding an engine which wasn't designed to be modded. Every once in a while, we come across something that's hard-coded into the EXE for no apparent reason, almost as if Origin wanted to make like difficult for us. Those chunks are one such thing, IIRC. That is to say, we can change the meshes that get used as chunks, but we can't make each ship use different chunks, and indeed sometimes we have no idea what chunks a ship will use until we try it
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The tail gunners don't seem to fire very often. Do your gunners fire without your input? I haven't seen it, but then I wasn't really looking.
Yeah, they do, and yeah, they don't fire all that often. IIRC, they didn't fire all that often in WC2, either - which is not to say I'm happy with how little they fire here. Doesn't seem much we can do about it, anywa.
I really miss the bright drive flares from WC1/2. Is there any way to alter the art so that you get those awesome bright flares? And maybe some orange afterburning action?
Hmm.. The orange is impossible because of the way WCP works (the engine flames are 3d cones - when you turn on the afterburners, the cones are stretched out, but they still use the same texture and mesh). And as for making them brighter, about the only thing we could do is make them less transparent - which, I fear, would make them look worse rather than better.
The gun bolts don't seem to travel very fast. I'm probably worng but it seems like they moved faster in the original WC1/WC2. I'm probably wrong.
Numerically, they are exactly the same speed as in WC1/2. The difference seems to be that WCP generally feels a little slower - in WC2, flying on afterburners near a capship was dangerous. In WCP, not so much.
There's sometimes a loooong wait from where dialog finishes and when the Auto lights up. Please fix this - it's incredibly jarring and boring to have to wait 20-45 seconds for the autopilot to become available. This is worst when landing. At one point I got so tired of waiting I just friggin ejected. I had been waiting almost 2 minutes, just aimlessly flying around the Lionheart.
I think you're somewhat overblowing this problem, there definitely are no situations where you have to wait more than 5-10 seconds after a dialogue finishes - so if you did find such a situation, please let us know the details, because it must be a bug.
The game is incredibly unbalanced. I'm taking on 10-12 Gothri in a Stilleto and winning. Nuh-uh. Bad. And of course, I doing it alone because all my wingmen are dumbasses and get greased five minutes into the patrol. Less fighters, More deadly. I should be shitting myself going up against a single Gothri, much less 10. I am playing on the ACE difficulty level.
The game is definitely not unbalanced, it's just balanced differently. The WCP engine is designed for big battles. Everything, from the physics to the AI, is geared towards that. Remember, one of the reasons a Gothri was so scary in WC2 is because it was so slow - if you were chasing it in a light fighter, you risked instant death in a collision every time you hit the afterburners to avoid its fire. Here, you don't have such a risk - you crash, you bounce... and the Gothri will fly on afterburners all the time anyway to keep you from colliding.
We took the ship stats from WC2 - our stats are pretty darned accurate. In order to make the enemy tough enough for a single Gothri to pose a huge challenge, we would have had to blatantly cheat, making either the enemy ships way more powerful than they should be, or weakening the player's ship. The end result would be that our ships would no longer be even remotely accurate, about which we would hear all manner of complaining. This isn't worth it... and it isn't even desireable, as far as I'm concerned, because the whole point of using WCP is because it allows us to re-create the Battle of Terra with more than sixteen ships per mission. Later in the game, there will be more than a few big missions, where we don't actually want the player to have trouble dealing with a single Gothri. How much fun would it be to re-create the biggest battle of the Kilrathi war if you end up fighting five or six enemies in every mission? If we wanted that, we'd be making this mod for WC2, not for WCP.
The pilots taunt the pirates like they're Kilrathi. I couldn't stop laughing at this - it's just silly.
Yeah, we know. We could have fixed this, but the effect would have been that their scores from the killboard would not have transferred from the first episode to the second. And ultimately, we felt that this wasn't a big enough deal to bother with that.
Enough crits for you?
It's never enough
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