Ideas for further minor missions

[Xante]

There are now different minor missions in VS:

• Cargo
• Bounty
• Clean Sweep
• Escort
• Rescue
• Patrol
• Wingmen (not a mission for the player BTW)

I would suggest adding a mission called "Mercenary".

There you would have to join another fleet in order to participate at a battle.

At first you would have to:

• report (dock) at an insystem capship, when you launch again, you'll be in front of the battle (don't know if it is possible)
• or "scan" a jump point in order to make the two factions appear like it is actually done with clean sweep.

During battle, different tasks would appear, since you would be under the orders of the "mothership":

• Destroy the ennemy escort vessels and fighters.
• The leading ship of your faction would ask you to reform on his wing in order to gather all the troups remaining for a second assault.
• Destroy the ennemy escort vessels and fighters.
• Eventually reform again on the leading capships wings
• Destroy ennemy capship(s) before (t)he(y) can flee

The news would then title something like :

the andolian battlefleet was finally able, with help of some mercenarys, to totaly destroy the aera attack in the xxx system. Heavy losses on both sides.

The pay would turn at least around a 100.000 bucks

Integrating such missions would make battles occure more often and make the game more passionating.

[pyramid]

Excellent idea. I am strongly supporting the idea to provide more mission types. Other types of missions could be of the exploration, research, science type and be self-enclosed so as not to depend on the flow of the global universe events.

[()Alf]

Possibility to join a faction or work for faction in a way, that you get kind of ranking and wardevelopement related missions, news and the glory (i.e. medals)

Such war-effort-missions (WEMs) should be realtime-related and, related to ranking, in a more or less way important to the strategic success of the faction.
Although i don't know if VS is tracking in some way anything of none active systems or if this is stored into savegame, a WEM could be "Flightgroups x,y,z grouping in qq-system, preparing to attack (/travel through) kk-system." Depending on your rank, the faction is granting 1 or 2 wingmen, or maybe some flightgroups with real capships to search the travelpath between qq-system and kk-system (intersytempatrol/cleansweep). Getting a high rank might offer a possibility to hand over the control of a commandcapship with its fleet (size also depending on rank) to the player (only as long as he/she is working for that faction of course). While working the way up, help could be called by comm (which need some add-ons i think (intercom?)) or you could get called.

[edit]
oh, seems it's already mentioned
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 4&start=30

[ace123]

Flightgroups throughout the universe are stored and simulated.

dynamic_battle.py deals with battles of factions, and I think if you jump into a system during a war then you will see a big battle there.

I'm not sure how to tell if there is a war going on at that time.

[Xante]

I'm really not against the idea of research or exploration, but my fear is that these types of missions end up as waypoint-jumping pay-grabbing mission.

Like the probe exploration in a nebula. Just fly there, wait until the computer tells you the probe has been grabbed and fly back. Or scan a planet.

There would surely be a way of making this kind of missions be much more like a strain on someone, where one has to be more actively incorporated into the action that takes place during the mission, but I suppose this would require much more coding in exploration mission (like requiring someone to step out of his ship into open space to take manually a probe, or fly near a black hole without getting sucked up by it)

When you fight, you fight, you're active, and there a "things" that can make you fail your mission (like been destroyed ). That's also important in a mission.

I never fly cargo or simple patrol missions, because they are to less chances for someone getting into my way. This is what I call waypoint-jumping missions.
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However, I will think about a way to make these types of missions more interesting without changing the hole engine. I like the exploration idea, that's really not the point. I just suspect them of becoming boring way to fast.
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However, other interesting (fighting) missions could be infiltration and sabotage missions. Just thought about it this morning.

In the first case, one would be required to dock at an ennemy starbase / capship and grab some documents. When launching again (after having grabbed the docs) one would get hunted down until he passes friendly lines, or he lands on the planet where he got the mission from an intel guy, who will provide him a new ID in order to proceed to friendly lines.

In the second case, one would have to approach a starbase or a capship without dockíng, but close enough to virtually make some "modifications" or attaching a remote bomb, before fleeing again to home. One would get hunted down for a while too, but only after completion of the mission, in a matter of vegeance, since the job you have done had somehow as consequence that the ennemy of your contractor lost a battle, or a production unit or something.