Don't be sad when the forum is so quiet...

But like i said, thats the Engine not you...

b) Next thing, you are the COmmander of all Wings onboard the Friekka, and you can't decide which
ship to use.

c) The AI, Wingmen and Enemys are, well stupid at best, which makes it hard to keep an eye of your
poor wingie who trashes all ships, I can't imagine playing the game on a high difficulty. You can
never really concentrate on the mission, and only 1 time i had the feeling that they help, and that
was in a simulator mission^^.

d) Which was a little mood killer are those green particles in Explosion, dosn't fit here.




Now a few good things.

The ships look EXCELLENT, and they look like big bad mean Fighters, and not Toy Fighters like in
WC3-5(regarding the size).

And the homecoming sceen where you see Shipdamage and the mechanic....is one of the best part of the game, it really gave me a "Welcome back to Wing Commander" feeling. I wished you would use more of those small scenes.

The music, well i know some music is made by your team, but well it never caught my attention, which
in this case, is a big compliment.

The speech, well first i thought i sounded cheap(Bradshaw and Spoons), but i changed my mind very
quick, because they aren't the perfect talker like a professionel Speaker (or whatever the profession
is called in englisch) makes them so more human.

Mission Design feels good, but i can't say what makes them good.

Simulator Mission: The Mission i tested seem as good as the main Missions. AND you can choose your ship :)

So that's whats on my mind (about the game) right now.

Bow,
Icefire
 
Icefire69 said:
b) Next thing, you are the COmmander of all Wings onboard the Friekka, and you can't decide which ship to use.
You will be able to choose which ship to use when it makes sense to - we'll not let you take a Gladius on patrol or a Rapier on a bombing run. :p

Icefire69 said:
c) The AI, Wingmen and Enemys are, well stupid at best
Yeah, I really wish we could do something about the AI.

Icefire69 said:
d) Which was a little mood killer are those green particles in Explosion, dosn't fit here.
Well, that we can fix. We'll look into it... thanks for pointing it out!
 
Icefire69 said:
But like i said, thats the Engine not you...
b) Next thing, you are the COmmander of all Wings onboard the Friekka, and you can't decide which
ship to use.

The Firekka doesn´t even have a full fighter compliment yet, they are picking up ships here and there and awaiting supplies, so Bradshaw really has only TWO types of ships available... he will get to pick his ship when he has real options.

Icefire69 said:
c) The AI, Wingmen and Enemys are, well stupid at best, which makes it hard to keep an eye of your poor wingie who trashes all ships, I can't imagine playing the game on a high difficulty. You can never really concentrate on the mission, and only 1 time i had the feeling that they help, and that
was in a simulator mission^^.

Well, you said it yourself... it is the Engine´s fault. But the Standoff staff have tweaked the AI a little bit, it is better than SOs.

Icefire69 said:
d) Which was a little mood killer are those green particles in Explosion, dosn't fit here.

Oh, that is just.... fuel... spilling :p

edit: And Eder beat me to it... :p
 
You will be able to choose which ship to use when it makes sense to - we'll not let you take a Gladius on patrol or a Rapier on a bombing run.

Sure but for Patrol you could use Stilleto, Rapier (even the Gladius to a certain degree More Firepower vs less Afterburner Fuel,ITTS or no ITTS). I would prefer the extra Punch, because wingmen surivival is important, which needs a low kill speed, not a super duper artist ship for fancy manovours, since in most games, 50kph, 100kph dosn't give much difference anyway.

And on bomb runs? Well Galdius,Sabre,Crossbow(if you have them).
But i admit, bomb runs are more limited (How many Trops do i need? I think Sabre or the Gladius has only 2 Torpedos) but maybe someone prefer the Extra Speed+ Afterburner over the Heavy Shilds of the Crossbow.

But hey, your the boss,
just my oppinion.

Icefire
 
The Firekka only has Stilettos, Rapiers (M2 onwards) and Gladii at this point. Given the limited number of ships, there´s no point in flying Gladii on patrols, risking losing them and not having them available in the next mission.
 
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.
The neutron cannons don't sound like neutron cannons for some reason. Something's just off there.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 pilots taunt the pirates like they're Kilrathi. I couldn't stop laughing at this - it's just silly.
Those flack cannons on bases and capships look really, really wierd. Like flamethrowers, really.
Enough crits for you? :p
 
I think i should open a new thread for ship usage for what mission :)

I only pointed that out, because it's feelt like stretching the mission with a inferior ship, which isn't so mission effective (for me).
 
I was wondering if you cap ship you're on for ep2 actually fire their own guns against the enemy. I dont recall in ep1 the cap ship helping out at all, or in ep2 either.
 
Icefire69 said:
Sure but for Patrol you could use Stilleto, Rapier (even the Gladius to a certain degree More Firepower vs less Afterburner Fuel,ITTS or no ITTS). I would prefer the extra Punch, because wingmen surivival is important, which needs a low kill speed, not a super duper artist ship for fancy manovours, since in most games, 50kph, 100kph dosn't give much difference anyway.
Right. Well, here's the thing - I hate it when people make games customisable purely for the sake of customisability. I definitely want people to be able to choose ships... but only when I want them to choose ships. In my opinion, the ship-choosing ability did not add anything at all to WC3 and 4. It made both games significantly worse (...in that particular aspect) than their predecessors. All the missions felt the same. What's the difference between a Ralari strike in McAuliffe and a Ralari strike in Venice? One requires you to shit your pants because you're flying a Scimitar, the other makes you feel like you could destroy a dozen of these Ralari. What's the difference between the Star Base mission in WC1, and the Star Base mission in SM1? Both bases have the same stats, why do the missions feel completely different? because in one, you fly a Rapier and are required to kill two dozen fighters before you destroy the base, and in the other you fly a Scimitar, and the mission is more challenging even though there are less enemies around.

Now, fast-forward to WC3. What's the difference between a destroyer strike at the start of the game, and a destroyer strike at the end of the game? Answer - none. You fly whatever you pick here, you fly whatever you pick there. And it removes a lot of the variety from the game. I flew with each of WC3's initial four fighters once. After that, I pretty much never flew the Hellcat again, and avoided the Longbow (or was it the Thunderbolt? I don't even remember) as much as I could. I can't even post at this forum about how I hate <insert WC3 mission here> because the Hellcat is such a horrible fighter to fly - because everybody will tell me that if I don't like the Hellcat, I can always fly with the Arrow instead. The ultimate consequence of this is that there is less than ten missions in WC3 that I find memorable enough to recall in any detail, and they are the ones where some big story event happened. The others could just as well have been randomly generated - would've made no difference.

And so, in a nutshell, this is why you won't always get to choose fighters. I don't care that you're the Wing Commander, it means nothing - heck, you're supposed to be in full control of Bradshaw, so why doesn't anybody complain about having no control over what Bradshaw says?

Rest assured, though, this definitely does not mean you won't get to choose fighters at all. There will be many missions where you get to choose fighters, and some of them will let you choose between not two, but three different fighters. It just won't happen all the time, that's all - only when we feel it helps the game.
 
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? :p 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 :p.

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? :p
It's never enough :).
 
I think the autopilot problem he's reporting is on the landings - you know, the ones we couldn't figure out. :p

If that's the case, you can just manually fly your ship into the Firekka's hangar after having been given clearance, and you'll land. No need to autopilot or eject.
 
Considering that we set up all the final navpoints as a home run, autopilot isn't necessary. You're already angled straight for the Firekka's landing bay. All you have to do is fly straight. Hell, for most missions it's timed perfectly so when Freyers has stopped talking, you're coming in to land.
 
Oh. In that case, I won't continue to be a dumbass. :p
And the whole Stilleto VS Gothri thing - I don't know of anywhere else in the wc universe where a light fighter is asked to go agains 12 heavies and survive. It just feel wrong to me. On the other hand, it's a helluva lot of fun.
So you didn't answer my question about the explosion sprites: I've got some high-quality footage and I want to share. If you want it, you can have it. :D
And again, what's up with those Flak cannons?
 
If you mean the graphics, well, they're something which was supposed to be temporary, but ended up not being improved upon. :p I'd need a patch to make a hardpoint fire random bullets (so that it would fire different explosions rather than always the same one) and something to make sure that they're always spawned at their starting frame (the way it is now, every bullet is always in sync with every other bullet of the same type... that's why you see "lines" of explosions) to make it look any better.

I wouldn't mind updating our explosions, so feel free to send me some of your effects. As long as it's not a huge file you can just email it to me... standoff (at) solsector.net
 
very impressed fellas

I've heard other people say that the game has a WC2 feel, and they were correct. And yes i think it was the best of the games. We havent really seen any capship battles yet, so I'm interested to see what the anti-matter cannon blasts look like...(i think i saw a ralalthra shoot some blue shit at me, maybe that was it) and what damage they dish out to other capships. I just finished sim mission five on level 3...and its made me realize how awesome the sabre is.. I think that with the torpedo loadout of 4 (the same as broadswords and crossbows) the sabres make all the bombers in the game tactically obselete, since bombers are probably more costly to produce than sabres and lack afterburners. But for the game to have a fleet action feel they are absolutely necessary...so what im trying to say is maybe the sabres shouldnt have 4 torpedos, 2-3 would be more realistic...I love the epee, it seems to be the "true artists ship" if there is such a thing. I always hated the Epee in WC2, but in standoff it make me truly appreciate the need and value of light fighters in general. I really hope the next episodes are ready soon, but Im prepared for the wait...
 
Actually, all our ships have more torpedoes than in WC2 for one simple reason which we really can't do much about: ships take multiple torpedoes to kill. All our ships have at least 2 components, and some even have 3, so I've basically doubled the amount of torpedoes on every bomber ship (this means enemy bombers as well :p).

So, while our Sabres have 4 torpedoes, they aren't really overpowered compared to our bombers, and neither to the WC2 Sabres... I tried to make it so you can still take out more or less the same number of capships with each bomber as you could with the WC2 versions.
 
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