Is it possible to have squadron members die?

Glabro

Spaceman
I just had an idea that, although minor thing, might increase the enjoyment of Standoff a bit.

Is it possible to have your friendly pilots die instead of ejecting every time? They'd have a chance at ejecting, perhaps, but could die just like you otherwise. Of course, only those pilots that don't have scripted speech and / or rec room presence would be killable. Then in later missions you'd either have alternative pilots for them or would simply be down a fighter.

Of course, I understand if the WCP / SO engine doesn't allow for it, it was just an idea. It's fun to see the war taking its toll on your killboard "roster"...
 
Major characters are immune to non-plot death. But from Ep. 5 onwards, any of your other squadmates can die.
 
There are two reasons why the other pilots never die (...until Episode 5):
1. WCP has an automatic "assign a random living pilot from a given squadron" system, but we didn't really have it figured out when we started Standoff. IIRC, we know how it works now, but we just kinda stuck with the traditional method. Needless to say, unless you can assign a random living pilot to a given ship, you can't allow anyone to die - otherwise, you'd wind up with KIA'd pilots flying around.
2. WCP's random pilot assignment system had a huge, gaping flaw that somehow they managed to overlook - if you assigned a random pilot from a given squadron, and that squadron had no more living pilots available, the game would crash. This being the case, the random pilot system wouldn't work well for us unless we had at least twice as many pilots on the Firekka as there are ships. And that would be a lot of pilots for a CVE...

In Episode 5, though, just as soon as we know that a given pilot does not appear in any more missions, we allow them to die.
 
to get around the second bug there, you could just but non-killable pilots in every squadron so that bug wouldnt be able to occur.
 
Yep. I remember out of curiosity's sake seeing how many people on the Midway I could kill off as I progressed through the game. Ultimately I got to the point where I crashed to desktop with an error message that said something like "Squadron 2 (ie Black Widows) has run out of pilots!"
 
to get around the second bug there, you could just but non-killable pilots in every squadron so that bug wouldnt be able to occur.
That's what Quarto means - we'd need as many non-killable pilots as there are ships in the missions... and in some missions we launch just about the entirety of the Firekka's fighter wing. If we had 11 living pilots, and the mission used 12 ships, the game would crash. IIRC the Firekka never has more ships than pilots.
 
More like you "allowed" her to die.

Anyway, random pilot assignment is good, and alternatively have, say, 12 (or however many) unkillable pilots so you can always launch the full complement in a mission, or reduce the amount of planes like in earlier Wing Commanders.

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.
 
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 :p ). 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 :).
 
Back
Top