Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Funny, seeing this discussion on the once-every-few-months occasions when I actually look in on the forums and read anything. But I since you ask what the guys behind the mod were thinking, I guess it's up to me to respond...
Twenty years down the track, it would be hard to explain all of our decisions. Some were rational, some were based on individual preferences, and some were just... hand-me-downs.
Reading your comments, I tried to remember why we chose the Scimitar as the main fighter. And I could come up with a few arguments that might have reflected our thinking of the time. But then I remembered - none of those arguments reflect the reality of the situation at the time!
When I joined up with Pedro to run Unknown Enemy, the project had already died, and Pedro was basically looking to resurrect it with new people, but not necessarily throwing everything out the window. There was an earlier version from the project which started a year earlier, and didn't get very far. I don't remember anything about it now - I guess if you looked through the CIC news archives for 1999, you might find something there. Anyway, the original UE told a different story, I think it might have even been set in a different timeframe, but 1) it was based around the Border Worlds, 2) the game's carrier was a Bengal-class, and 3) there were Scimitars involved. When we restarted UE, we basically said - ok, we've got a model of the Bengal, we've got a model of the Scimitar with Border Worlds markings, let's not waste such assets. New story, but same central stars. We'll find some way of justifying these choices - and the narrative does justify them, though whether these justifications are convincing is a matter of opinion (and to be fair, I think our detractors criticising the idea of old Scimitars still being used, would never have believed at that time that in 2024, the F-16 will remain the single most eminent fighter in the world...).
Ironically, as we developed the mod, gained the support of new people, including some excellent modellers, as we also learned to better handle WCP's ship types (especially capships), both the Bengal and the Scimitar models were eventually thrown out the window. So much for "ok, but let's stick with Bengals and Scimitars because we've already got those"
.As for the other ships... in general, we had a strong bias towards WC1-2 era ships, because even for the Kilrathi, there was this sense that if we just use the WCP-era Dralthi and Vaktoths, it just won't be very interesting. The Gratha were chosen because they seemed like a nice boost for the Kilrathi forces - a heavy fighter, but one which doesn't have a rear turret, and which isn't as vulnerable as the Jalthi. Mind you, this is me trying to recreate our thinking from 24 years ago, so, you know, not fully reliable.
The K'ha'haf was a spur-of-the-moment, I think. Just basically, "hey, what other interesting equipment might we bring in"? I think by the time we brought in the K'ha'haf, we'd already had the idea of capturing Kilrathi ships and flying them, so the K'ha'haf was there explicitly to be played, not to be fought against.
The Epee... well, at least two of the leading team members (including me) really liked the Epee - maybe not as a WC2 fighter, but as a really great-looking ship. At some point during development, I think we started thinking that it's kinda lame that our carrier seems to only have Scimitars. Somehow the idea of Epees came up, no idea how. I do remember I very much liked the idea that the Epees will be able to carry a torpedo, as the story in WC2 suggested, and that the player will actually have to choose the Epee for anti-capship missions. This ironically didn't turn out to be the case, because along the way, we learned how to modify gun parametres to allow capship-killing guns - and without thinking "why", we simply decided to "improve" the Scimitar's main gun into a crazy machine-gun-fast capship-killing monstrosity. Yeah, not a brilliant decision, and living it down meant a lot of grief, because all of a sudden a number of missions got broken by the player's new-found ability to wipe out capships.
I will say this, though. In spite of the evident randomness of some of these decisions, with the exception of the Scimitar's crazy guns, we did actually devote considerable thought to how these ships might have been upgraded (or degraded) over the years. I'm not going to say that all our decisions regarding their stats make sense: but I will say that we at least had lengthy discussions about them, and we at least thought they made sense, and we had some sort of explanations for what we were trying to do.
That said, if I were to remake UE today, I'd probably do a lot of things very differently.
...And it's probably a good thing I don't get to remake UE. I would very much love to make a new, more grown-up version of UE, armed with two decades of subsequent experience and so on. But I would also hate to replace the crazy, wonky UE of 2002, which so amply reflects our abilities and thinking of that time.
