Maj.Striker said:
Quarto and Eder's explanation for the numbers concerning the battle of Terra makes sense...for the Battle of Terra. Since when do pirates get those kind of numbers though? Also your explanation for the greater numbers being ok since you have 5 or so wingman doesn't jive either. Standoff is a game that is trying to fit into the WC2 time era...in WC2, your standard wing was you and one other pilot (on rare occassions two other pilots). That was flying off of one of the best ships in the fleet...
Ever read End Run, or Fleet Action? Or the WC3 or WC4 novels, for that matter? We serve two masters here - the books and the game. So yes, on the one hand we try to imitate the game, and on the other hand we're not, because we're trying to imitate the books. You can argue that in your opinion it would have been better for us to stick to just the game - but you certainly can't suggest that what we see in the game is in any way representative of the era. It's not - the books, which do not suffer from memory and processor limitations, are. Hell, even the game lays in plenty of indications that it's not really representative of the era - you go out there and fight great big battles against four Kilrathi fighters defending a pair of carriers, while an unimportant pilot named Dallas gets killed on an unimportant patrol by
ten Drakhri. You go out there and take out K'tithrak Mang solo because you're the player, but meanwhile Admiral Tolwyn is assembling the
entire Concordia wing to take out the very same base, because he's not the player.
And the same goes for pirates - you may encounter three or four pirates at one navpoint in Priv, but then you read the story of the Scarab, which has to fight off dozens of Retros to get to safety. And of course, while you may encounter just three or four pirates at one navpoint, it's possible that you'll encounter three or four pirates at every navpoint from Troy to New Detroit... which adds up pretty quickly. Remember those Delta Prime missions? You often had to kill about ten-twenty pirates
solo, even though you were in supposedly unexplored space. If that's what you can find in unexplored space, why does that number seem excessive when you're going up against a pirate base?
Secondly, saying the reason there wasn't more ships in WC2 was an engine capability thing also doesn't jive. It'd have been no problem to add a couple of extra nav points with additional wings of Kilrathi...or to have multiple waves at the navs already established. The designers of WC2 polished their game. They knew the difficulty was just right as it was. They didn't need to have the player kill 20 ships every mission!
No, they couldn't have. When I tell you that WC2 has a limit of 16 ships per mission, I'm not speculating. Back in the days before WCP, HCl worked a fair amount on WC1 and 2. Amongst other things, he documented WC1 and 2's mission format and created pretty decent mission editing tools. That 16 ship limit is a fact. And it's not just a number that the designers decided would be sufficient for anyone - it's a very real consequence of the time when the game was made, when you had to fit everything in about 600kb of memory. Each ship's stats would take about half a kilobyte, and by the time you've allocated memory for everything else, it turns out that half a kilobyte isn't as little as it might seem.
Of course, WC2, with its extremely small ship limit, is a fantastic game. But WC2 isn't a great game because it had only 16 ships per mission - WC2 is a great game because its designers were fully aware of the engine's features and limitations, and used them to their advantage. And this is what we're trying to do, too - we're not trying to remake WC2 in the WCP engine, because that's not what the WCP engine was designed for. It just wouldn't work - WCP's physics (bouncy shields!) and AI are geared for large battles, and if we tried to recreate WC2 odds, it wouldn't be a challenge (as you can see in the Sparrow mission, which isn't anywhere near as difficult as the Jazz mission - and not for the lack of trying on our part, I can assure you).