Tiny Ships Encounters

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Sun May 11, 2008 11:41 am

Well, I've spent bloody forever making these (making the notepad documents was almost as hard as making the goddamn ships and encounters), but here they are, the previously unheard of Tiny Ships Encounters.

This is somewhat inspired by Perturabo's Miniships encounters. When I saw how many ships could fit on the screen without a significant drop in framerate, I decided that I would try to do something similar. Now Perturabo's fleet seems to have died, but I decided to continue with this idea anyway. Now I bring you, the Tiny Ships Encounters.

For the fleet, look here

There are Five encounters so far with more soon to come. I will go into detail with each encounter in using text documents that you will find inside the download. Hopefully, they will be to your satisfaction.

The gameplay is simple, you get one ship (occasionally you get one or two more, because of ai limitations) which is a command vessel of some sort or the other, and you complete the objectives (which, in the end, consist of killing the enemy). Sound simple? Great, get going.

With these encounters, I'm hoping to start a trend in which the encounter section of the forums gets comments, more then one page of threads, and threads with more then one page. I hope you will all follow this trend.

Anyway, here's the encounters plus a few pictures. Everything you need to know is included in easy to read, hard to understand (j/k) text documents.

First, the encounters and text documents. Next, a few pics from the encounter called showcase1 (which I've given to you for fun and for a taste before you start the real missions, note that it doesn't reflect the performance of the actual encounters) a few ships have to be reworked, but it's fine really. Oh yes, all of the encounters were tested and beaten by me, so if you have difficulty, don't complain that it's impossible.

Anyway, here are the pics:

Enjoy the encounters, comments and criticism are welcome.

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Mon May 12, 2008 8:25 pm

I suppose I didn't say this before, but can I have some comments please?

Strideo · Post by **Strideo** » Mon May 12, 2008 11:22 pm

Bad Boy wrote:I suppose I didn't say this before, but can I have some comments please?

Sure!

. . . but I'll have to get around to playing your encounter first.

I'll give it a shot later.

Normandy · Post by **Normandy** » Tue May 13, 2008 8:48 am

Tiny?

You call that TINY?

I'll show YOU tiny!

But seriously, too large to be novelty. And generally speaking, never reply to yourself to ask for feedback.

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Tue May 13, 2008 9:25 am

Fair enough, I should have named it the small ships encounters, but that name had already been used by Perturabo whose encounters I partially based this off of. I know that I shouldn't reply to myself asking for comments, but I left it for a few days and got nothing so I figured I should say that comments, etc. are welcome. On that note, have you played the encounters? If so, what did you think of them?

For the third or so time, comments and criticism is welcome. Please, someone comment on the ships or encounters.

Strideo · Post by **Strideo** » Wed May 14, 2008 4:19 am

Well in the first two missions it was really confusing because the enemy ships look just like the allied ships. All these ships swarm in and they all start fighting and I'm like: O_O. Then I pick the only ship left that isn't moving and sure enough it's mine to control. Since I couldn't tell friend from foe I just clicked on the other ships until my ship locked on and went from there. Pretty much though for the first two missions I didn't feel like my participation was all that important to the flow of the battle. It felt more like I was given a ship to give me something to do while I watched the battle unfold.

Now the third mission was better since it involved enemies that had different ships from my allies so I could easily determine what my targets were. I still felt like the AI was doing most of the work but my ship had a more significant impact on the balance of the battle. I didn't like the high speed, low acceleration properties of high my ship handled very much though. It felt a bit like controlling a well armed hockey puck as it slid around on ice.

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Wed May 14, 2008 7:20 am

Ya, the first two missions are confusing, unless you know which ship is yours. I didn't think about that when I made it, because I knew which ship was mine. Also, in the first mission, your team may win without you doing anything, because both teams have the same number of ships (give or take a few). The second mission is much the same, until the aliens come, then you should start doing stuff.

Anyway, which ship did you use in the third mission? If you used the agile one, that would explain your complaints, although I fixed the ship, I forgot to fix the encounters, so you do slide around crazily. The tough one handles well, so if you want to be able to control you ship better, use it instead.

Have you played the fourth and fifth missions?

Strideo · Post by **Strideo** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:00 pm

I haven't play all of them yet.

So if I choose mission A or mission B does that change which ship I pilot?

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:43 pm

Yes, A is regular command vessel, B is tough command vessel, and C is agile command vessel. This will stay the same for all of them (except the ones where you only get one type of ship, eg. mission one, mission five), A will always be the basic variant, B will always be the tough variant, and C will always be the agile variant. Also, thanks for actually playing and commenting on these (unlike everyone else).

Royace · Post by **Royace** » Fri May 30, 2008 11:40 pm

FLASHBACK:Tiny?

You call that TINY?

I'll show YOU tiny!

But seriously, too large to be novelty. And generally speaking, never reply to yourself to ask for feedback.

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Sat May 31, 2008 4:20 am

Thank you for your insightful comments on the quality of the encounters [/sarcasm].

I would have called them small, except that that name is already taken, so...
Anyway, the novelty isn't the ship size, it's the fact that you have to extensively micromanage one ship within a fleet war.

Slominator · Post by **Slominator** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:29 am

I agree with Strideo that the first two missions are confusing. I know you've put a lot of work into these, but it would have helped tremendously if you had taken the time to add a different color scheme to the enemy ships.

I really enjoyed the tough command vessel. I just seems to fit well with everything. The original command vessel seems far too weak for what it is and the agile command vessel seems to have way too much firepower compaired to the others. I'm also not really a fan of the low acceleration on the ships. It seems to take some of the fun away from the missions.

Other than those things I think you did an exellent job. Everything else seems well balanced, the ships are well made, and the difficulty for the last 3 missions is just about perfect.

Bad Boy · Post by **Bad Boy** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 10:06 am

Thank you for the complements, and, because they seem to be getting a lot of complaints, I might rework the first two missions. While the agile command vessel does a lot of damage, it's fragile as hell, and hard to control. If you accidentally fly into a firefight, you're going to end up horribly damaged, or possibly dead.

The tough command vessel is my favourite as well (excluding the advanced tough command vessel), simply because it works perfectly in that it's vulnerable to flanking attacks, but takes very little damage from frontal attacks, and it's not as utterly useless as the command vessel, which I must admit, is worse then I wanted it to be.

When you say low acceleration, do you mean the ship's minimum speed, or the acceleration value in shipmaker? (I assume it's minimum speed, because they have quite high maximum speeds) Assuming what I do, the reason for the low acceleration, is that I wanted them to be able to stop decently, instead of skating around for several seconds, because, in such close ranged fighting, those several seconds could easily make it fly over the ship it's attacking.

mtheminja · Post by **mtheminja** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 10:12 am

Minimum speed?

When someone says acceleration, they always mean the ship maker acceleration value, AFAIK.

Slominator · Post by **Slominator** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 10:35 am

I did mean the acceleration value. I think they slide around a bit too much. I don't have a problem with sliding around if this were a Space Simulation, but this is an RTS. It is very difficult to precisely manuever your ship around if it takes too long to stop or change direction. Some sliding around is to be expected, but there seems to be too much sliding (It could just be me). I look forward to more missions though.