Quarto
Unknown Enemy
I seriously, really wish I could deliver on both - or at least on the upgrade. I just don't know how that can happen, though. I'm constantly overstretched between numerous different tasks, projects and endeavours. Worst of all, I must be frank and admit that if I had the sort of drive and interest in completing UE as I had for Standoff a decade ago - I'd probably take no more than a few weeks to create a code-complete upgrade of UE, which would then only require someone to go in and swap all those ships for better models. As things stand, I don't even have Secret Ops installed on this machine, let alone a working copy of UE.
I wish I had underlings, darn it. You! Install Secret Ops and get the modding environment set up. And you! Go through UE and identify all the fixes to be made.
I wish I had underlings, darn it. You! Install Secret Ops and get the modding environment set up. And you! Go through UE and identify all the fixes to be made.
. It's true, we didn't go completely overboard, and the strike carrier was, if not actually justified, at least reasonably handwaved in. The only crazy thing was the viper cannon, and its capship-killing capacity was so out of place, that we actually had to make enemy capships invulnerable in most missions to prevent you from using that capacity - with the implication that it could be removed now, and this removal would improve rather than detriment from the game.
. But setting that aside, and, setting aside the viper cannons that it carries, I really like how it was never a super-fighter, and actually in most ways it was inferior to most Confed fighters. The other ship - Dagger, was it? - was a similar story: a generally barely-capable design that was made actually pretty good by the incorporation of a new engine system. It's exactly the kind of aircraft a second-rate power determined to develop its internal aircraft industry would use. At the time, I was reading a lot about the pre-1939 Polish Air Force, which went very much through a similar cycle of being first an amalgamation of equipment abandoned, surrendered, or donated by other powers, to importing second-rate aircraft from allied nations, to developing its own aircraft industry, only to find, when push came to shove, that they just did not have the capacity to keep up with all the technological developments bigger powers like Germany and Britain were going through. Our fighters had infinitely superior manoeuvrability, at a time when nobody cared any more. Our medium bombers were genuinely brilliant and actually superior in many to their German and British equivalents in 1939, but nobody cared since there was like a couple of dozen of them on the front lines, and in any case, lacked proper escort fighters. Like the Border Worlds (well... like the Border Worlds that UE presents!), Poland, ironically, was more evenly matched against her neighbours in terms of technological innovations in 1918, when it was using hand-me-down equipment, than twenty years later when it was fielding her own aircraft and even exporting them to other countries. Perhaps in another twenty years, Poland would have achieved a level of technological almost-parity that Sweden would accomplish many, many decades later, but not at that time. This was very much the feeling I was trying to convey with the Border Worlds - of a nation consciously choosing inferior aircraft of its own internal production over superior imports, with the hope that in the long-term, this will pay off. A nation building its forces to match its situation, where any conflict in the predictable future would not be against Confed, but against pirates, retros, and Kilrathi clans using war-era technology (here, of course, the analogy breaks: Poland knew they wouldn't be facing German militias flying old Albatrosses and Fokker DR.Is - we knew we'd be facing the equivalent of Confed, and simply ran out of time to prepare).
. I think precisely the huge advantage of working with a game engine is that you can, with relative ease, produce scenes with reasonably animated 3d people.