The Ingredients of Challenging Scenarios

[Keldane]

A fairly simple question, here: In your opinion, what makes a scenario challenging, yet fun?

Once you've answered that question, to make it more complicated, assume your ships are significantly more fragile than traditional Nexus ships and that you can request one reinforcement at a time (the stronger the reinforcing ship, the longer it takes to arrive). What changes would you make to your initial answer in light of these alterations?

If at all possible, please answer both questions. ^_^

[Mularac]

Lot's of things.
1) Having your ship disabled in some way, so you're not working 100%. The enemies may be weaker, but so will you, thus re-balancing the fight and forcing the player to start thinking his/her strategy in a completely different way.
2) Plain good'ol 1-1 confrontation. In nexus, some of the most fun yet challenging missions was when you have to face a few of the most strong enemy ships single-handed (take Nexus' first missions, where the stilleto comes in the aid of the hawkings. There were a couple of ways to win that mission, and in the lowest dif levels it was a bit too easy, but in harder levels it was quite fun, as you had only two ships to focus on)
3) Keep in mind that having a lot of ships to keep an eye on in battle is never a good idea. Something any higher than 2 is never good, as if the mission is a bit tough you'll get quite frustrated when one of your ships get blown up, and that'll happen quite often.
4) Defensive missions. Remember the one mission where you had to defend the Colossus? that mission was quite fun, because you have to both defeat an enemy but you had to do it in a way so that that ship would survive.
5) Side objectives. They can make a mission much more enjoyable and tough but yet winnable if you feel you're not up to.


And countless more things. I can't lay out a mission for you in a more complete manner, as I both don't know the balancing of your ships, the gameplay of your mod and some other things, but I hope this helps

[Keldane]

Thanks for the reply, Mularac!

In regards to the damage capacity of ships in my mod, suffice to say that it will be generally unreasonable to expect to finish a mission with all your ships intact - especially against the default skirmisher AI, which focuses all its firepower on a single target. There are exceptions, of course - if your only ship is a Fleet Carrier, the strongest in the mod thanks to its Level 2 Screens (reduce incoming damage by 66%), 980 HP, two medium range beam batteries, and six wings of fighters, and your opponents are all Courier class vessels, with no anti-fighter defenses, 20HP, and only a single short range weapon of their own, then odds are you'd have to play really poorly to see your Fleet Carrier be taken down. Most scenarios, however, will see you fighting against an equal or greater number of opposing ships with around the same degree of fire power as your own.

As an example, the scenario I just finished creating pits you against seven enemy vessels (in order of increasing potency, two destroyers, two light cruisers, two escort cruisers, and one heavy cruiser) while granting you five expendable combat vessels (three heavy cruisers and two needle cruisers - specialized ships using the heavy cruiser chassis, equipped with level 2 screens and armed solely with anti-device weaponry) and one unarmed but highly agile drone that you must escort to a nav point on the far side of the map. Selecting the drone allows you to summon reinforcement ships - needle cruisers or heavy cruisers, both of which take 30 seconds to arrive. Though it is possible to complete the scenario while losing only a single ship, I've played the mission at least two dozen times over yesterday and today and found that it's more likely that two or three casualties will occur, despite the technically superior armament the player is given.