Folk ARPS

Comrades,

Sometimes, when I read the interview transcripts from under-performing mission makers, I see passages like this one:

Oh God ... No ... NO! .... NOOOO!!!! ... Please .... please .... oh please .... AAAIIIIEEEEE!!!!!

Oh! Sorry, that's not the one I meant to share. I meant to share this one:

... no, I start with energy and enthusiasm, but then get bogged down trying to place enemies in buildings or build intricate road blocks. I get stuck and don't finish the mission.

According to the Party's best 'research', there may be many different reasons why comrades don't try to make missions, or begin and then fail to finish. Party scientists wish to collect a list of these reasons. And then crush them through superior design, engineering and revolutionary spirit.

If you have encountered one of these reasons - or perhaps you have a 'friend' who has - please post in this thread. No arrests will be made.

I also suffer from placement frustrations, placing units sensibly in buildings or fortification placements can kill my enthusiasm. The other thing that gets me is the editing of platoon structure and gear.

For the first one, we could possibly make a mission that is just a collection of pre-made compositions and then people can just c&p the ones they want to use.

I've finished about 3 missions for V+, but they all need to be balanced.

Balancing a mission while on a computer on your own is meh so that's what puts me off.

I suffer from this too.

Pr3sario wrote:Balancing a mission while on a computer on your own is meh so that's what puts me off.

Sometimes you just have to accept that the only way to really improve a mission is to see it played in a session. Attempting to perfect it on your own may well be impossible. A good half-way house is to get your mission to a finished state, load a copy on the mission making server, and then walk through it with a few experienced mission makers or players that are comfortable taking CO/SL roles. Often, just reading the briefing, scouting the AO and having a discussion can be a great way to iterate your design.

Bodge wrote:I also suffer from placement frustrations, placing units sensibly in buildings or fortification placements can kill my enthusiasm.

Comrade Wolfenswan's functions are now built into the FA template (available here); the garrison function is excellent for pre-populating buildings and structures with AI enemies.

Bodge wrote:The other thing that gets me is the editing of platoon structure and gear.

My advice to anyone new to mission making is to try and stick with the default ORBAT and loadouts. Unless there is a really compelling reason to change these things, it's often better to focus on enemy placement, writing a tight briefing etc.

I'm a lazy bastard.

Spend lots of time making a mission, gets play twice and never again while we keep playing the same missions (like inter) over and over again with people asking why we don't have more missions...

zitron wrote:Spend lots of time making a mission, gets play twice and never again while we keep playing the same missions (like inter) over and over again with people asking why we don't have more missions...

Some missions, like Inter IV and Crateresistance, feature randomised locations - they're effectively lots of missions in one file, which is why they tend to be rotated more heavily than story-driven missions with a single location.

Another reason missions fall out of the rotation is that they aren't updated to a modern(ish) build of F3. When we were developing v3-1-0 of F3 we changed many, many aspects of the framework - that required lots of release candidate builds (RC1 through RC6). I understand that for many MMs, keeping up with that update schedule was near-impossible. We won't be using RCs for v3-1-1, and in future I hope that upgrading to a new version of F3 will be much, much easier (and required far less often). Thanks for bearing with us during the last few months of updates.

I don't mean to say they are bad missions, I enjoyed inter but sometimes it's played multiple times per session while missions from a while ago (like Ferrard's "Burn") sort of get left behind. I understand and appreciate the time and effort put into each F3 release, obviously it is not possible to always keep backward compatibility. I don't know what the solution will be, maybe all the MMs should upload the mission files somewhere so old missions can be more easily updated by others in case they get abandoned?

With Inter IV in particular, it was one of the few v3-1-0 adversarials we had for a few weeks, so it was over-rotated. Hopefully, as our inventory of v3-1-0+ missions becomes larger we'll see much greater variation. As for Burn, I think comrade Carson has had some issues with that of late, but I'm sure you'll see it return soon.

The upgrade issues for F3 should become less of a big deal now that we have the revised folder structure. The changes in v3-1-1 are going to be fairly minor, so with luck upgrading will be easy or not even required.