Ironduke said:
I like the idea, as long as I don't have to baby-sit my wingmen all the time. (Read: If the wingman AI is good enough to handle non-critical situations without requesting assistance every other second.)
Well, the AI is still the same as it was in WCP/SO, and like Q said, it's not very bright - but that goes for the enemies too. So, yes, I'd say your wingmen are good enough to handle non-critical situations on their own. They can even handle a little outnumbering, and depending on the difficulty level, they'll even rob you of a few kills. But it gets ugly when they're badly outnumbered, when there's capships full of flak turrets around, or when your wingmen are focusing on a objective (ie: bombing runs) and worrying less about their own hide than they normally would.
Quarto just made they seem stupider than they are because he always loses more wingmen than I do while playtesting.
Quarto said:
Seriously, though - I don't think Standoff is that much harder, I think it's mainly just different. UE's difficulty was that it tried to wear you down gradually and then kill you. Standoff skips the wearing-down part, and just goes straight for the kill...
Yup, that's pretty much how it feels, and that's what I was trying to say on my previous post. There will be no throwing 60 morays at you for five navpoints, only to then make you and your worn out ship go defend a Marine LC from a wing of Devil Rays like in UE.
Standoff's difficulty is different: it's harder to survive if you go head on with just about
any ship of comparable class to your own... but on the other hand, you usually won't be as outnumbered as in UE, so if you just take a different approach, not risking yourself so much, you might find the game easier. However, if you do what you did in UE, and ignore a couple morays attacking you from behind just for a few seconds, while you finish off that other moray which you already got to 80% damage... well, you'll probably end up dead.
Starkey said:
Out of curiosity, what does the patch do? Have you got all the patches from HCl already?
These periodic patches usually do nothing big, but this one is kinda special. This one adds the new Stiletto, "briefing" versions of some ships meshes, and a new hangar for auto-landings, as far as my work is concerned - that's the kind of thing we're used to getting in these patches. But this one includes a new launcher from Tango (UE-style launcher), and some campaign file tweaks from Quarto to accomodate the first chapter of the main campaign (whose missions have all been coded already, but haven't been tested by the team). Now we should be able to test those Chapter 2 missions and make sure that our Prologue release will be fully compatible with stuff we are going to add to it in the future. Basically we'll be testing two separate releases: Prologue, and Prologue+Chap 2, and we gotta make sure they're both 100% the same up to the last mission of the Prologue.
Starkey said:
The screenshot is quite dark, I can barely see the Lionheart.
EDIT: heh, my monitor´s brightness needed some adjustments. I can see it now.
No, no, don't touch your monitor.
It's just the angle the screenshot was taken from... you can see I'm facing the system's star, so almost all the light is coming from the other side. We did that so the Lionheart would look pretty on the autopilot sequences, but the downside is that it looks dark from below.
(My monitor *is* kinda dark, as this is a complaint I get pretty often on the screenshots I post, but in this case, I'm sure it's more the lighting on the mission than the difference between our monitors)
Starkey said:
Also, I know you can´t improve the AI, but were you able to do some tweaking with it?
Nope, we're not even sure where we'd look for AI tweaking. It's the most obscure part of WCP editing.
Starkey said:
Finally, can´t you move that curve-shaped cockpit strut a bit up? I never liked to play with struts in WCP/SO and I was hoping to do so in Standoff. The bottom part of the strut looks great, but that curved thing leaves little viewing space below it. The big space above the curve is not much useful in dogfighting, since you´ll lose sight of the enemy once it enter the curve´s blind spot. So could you increase the space between the VDU´s and the curved strut?
No.
I figure people who prefer playability would prefer playability enough to turn struts off altogether (the choice here is the same that was given in KS versions of WC2). People who play with the struts probably want more immersion than playability, so I didn't let the later interfere with the former. Some ships' cockpits don't have optimal visibility, and pilots have to live with it.
UE's second mission got me so frustrated, it almost made me deinstall the game. Now I really don't want to niggle, but shouldn't a prologue campaign be manageable to rookies and vets alike? (At least the first, say, 2-3 missions.) I think this would help to open up Standoff to a much broader public.
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