Also, in similar vein, I think the replacements you get in each episode shouldn't simply restore you up to a set level (ie. full) but rather you'd get an increase on your current numbers, meaning it would be possible to run out of some types of planes...
As it is Jean's reports don't really matter, and I thought otherwise when I started Standoff.
Well, it's easy to come up with suggestions like this... however, I can assure you, we gave all this a lot of thought, at there's generally a reasonable explanation as to why things work the way they do
.
In this case, originally we planned to make every fighter restoration an actual event - e.g., you'd have to bring in a transport full of planes, and failure would result in those planes not being available. About halfway through the development of Episode 2 (i.e., pretty much the moment we first encountered the issue of transition from episode to episode), we realised this would make things far too complicated. In particular, testing would become a nightmare. There are two situations in the game where ships are not rearmed at the end of an episode (when you lose Episode 2, and when you lose Episode 4). In both of those cases, we had to do a fair bit more testing than normal, because we had to check what happens if the player goes into the next episode with especially high losses in a given type of ship.
And then, there's the question of what the actual results are. Suppose you've run out of Rapiers, but your deck is still full of Sabres and Stilettos. It might make sense to just give the player a "game over" message, but if that's the case, most people will be unhappy - the figher counter will be just a blunt stick we use to force people to keep replaying previous missions until they get perfect results (in fact, that is more or less what it was
). A reasonable option would be to give the player an alternative mission (there is an example of this in Episode 5, on the losing path - if you have enough Rapiers, you fly the first mission in a Rapier, otherwise you fly a Stiletto... though IIRC, the current version of the mission is buggy, and you fly a Stiletto regardless - we've fixed this, but I don't think we've yet released the patch for it). But that means dozens of alternative missions! Remember, even if the player was presented with a choice of three ships for a given mission, simply presenting him with a choice of any combination of two out of three ships would require a separate mission. Imagine how your mission history would look, if you had six or seven entries for
one mission
.
All in all, the fighter numbers idea was great... but it was not great for Standoff. We ended up having to soften it up, because implementing it as originally intended posed too many problems in Standoff. In order to make full use of this concept, someone would really have to make a game where managing your wing as the wing commander is the key "selling" point. And it would be a really great and fun game... but it would not take place during the Battle of Terra
.
