Plymouth Cold War Testing (Version 1.0.1)

[Vagabond]

Everyone,

Hooman and I spent some time modernizing the project files and diagnosing the hang in Plymouth Cold War.

It ended up being very productive. The mission now uses the current version of the Outpost 2 SDK, compiles with VS2017, and we fixed the hang.

Briefly, setting the value of argument priority to 0 from the function RecordVehReinforceGroup(ScGroup& targetGroup, int priority) can cause an infinite loop condition inside Outpost2.exe. We updated the documentation to indicate that 1 is the lowest priority instead of 0. The hang would occur when the AI would attempt to reinforce certain defensive fight groups.

To download, goto: https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/PlymouthColdWar/releases/

It would be nice if a couple of people could play it and report details if they find any other bugs or if it looks solid now.

1. Wine test to make sure it works on Linux.
2. Playthoughs on different difficulties to see if any other crashes still exists.

If all goes well, we can include in the next release of Outpost 2 and I'll post a formal release of the mission.

Also, I didn't design the mission and am not planning to change the spirit of the mission or difficulty. As I recall it is very difficult on Hard unless you really know what you are doing.

Thanks,
Brett

[Hooman]

The update works fine under Wine.

Looks like there will be a V1.0.2 released soon, based on Brett's play testing.

During my test, I noticed that if I self destruct all my initial units, I don't actually lose the mission. Maybe we should add some more mission failure checks to the level.

[Vagabond]

Hooman,

Making defeat conditions for this mission is a bit tricky based on getting the reinforcements after starting the mining colony. I wasn't interested in going through the logic of making it work although it would be a nice touch.

If you'd like to take a stab at it, I'll wait to release version 1.0.2 with the smelter/mine repair activation for the AI.

-Brett

[Hooman]

Ahh, no, don't wait. I already feel like there's a ton of stuff on my to-do list.

[lordpalandus]

That is an interesting point Hooman raises. What happens in other scenarios, where you have to place a base, and you self-destruct all your units. Does it fail, or something else happens?

[Vagabond]

Really depends on the mission. Defeat conditions can be difficult in certain situations. In Plymouth Cold War, the goal is to destroy the advanced lab. If I make you lose if your Command Center is destroyed, you could have 85 Tiger Tanks sitting around to finish the job. Or you could have a CC in a ConVec somewhere or the CC could be in the Structure Factory, or the ConVec with the CC could be in a garage. Or you could capture an enemy convec with a CC using a spider/emp combo. Making a logic tree to cover all the possibilities doesn't seem worth it in these circumstances.

Sometimes defeat conditions are easy, like if you have to retrieve wreckage and the bad guy gets it first.

Sort of personal preference though on how the mission designer wants to setup defeat. It wouldn't be wrong to say you have to destroy the enemy Advanced lab and keep your original CC intact.

[lordpalandus]

Well it would be simpler if defeat (in any scenario involving a base) only occurred when your people all died off, rather than a loss of the command center. Since you need the CC to keep the agridomes active, people would starve to death pretty fast, so if you were fast enough, you could avoid this by rebuilding it or activating a backup command center that was idled off. And if you did this, you could say load up colonists into evac transports to keep them from starving, though having an evac transport blown up would mean an instant loss of life. Just a few ideas...

As for the start of the mission, if you fail at the loss of life, having no evac transports would mean all your people would be dead too.

[Vagabond]

I finally broke down and updated the difficulty of Plymouth Cold War. Normal and Hard are easier to play. Both difficulties have more starting colonists. Also on Hard, a couple of extra techs start out as being researched that the player only had on normal previously. Additionally, the AI player will now repair / rebuild their smelters and mines if they are destroyed by a natural disaster.

I would really appreciate someone playtesting the normal and hard difficulty and providing feedback. Normal should be beatable by applying some mild strategy. Hard should require significant micromanagement of combat vehicles and colonist usage in early game to be successful.

See the link in the first post to download and play.

Change log:

   -Rebalance difficulty to make normal and hard modes easier by adding colonists and starting technology
   -Allow AI to rebuild destroyed smelters and mines.