psych0fred wrote:We will not be eliminating any of the current types of gameplay, that's for sure.
Good news.
Galactic Conquest is incredibly ambitious and I too would like to see it be everything that it can. Not sure how that's going to turn out as we do have a fixed production timeline and we could literally work on Galactic Conquest for years blurring the line where strategy games and and fps's begin. I may try to do that as a full conversion either way.
The actual swb1 galactic conquest in my opinion has a good basic idea, the use of a turn system, but atm it's too simplyfied.
Bonuses are not really effective in battle (if you except kashyyk, that with wookiees bots it's quite unbeatable... go wookiees!! lol).
A nice idea could be that any planet influence the presence of certain vehicle, weapon and units on the maps instead of others.
Or, for example, that if you beat an enemy on a certain map with more of xxx tickets he is penalized for the rest of the campaign, because for example each faction can start with a certain ammount of tickets, that the commanders are free to use in any quantity on each planet.
Or better that the commander has to assign to each planet, at start a certain ammount of tickets, that rappresent troops, and an ammount of them on transport ships, that can use for attacks on planets or for support a attacked planet.
If these ships are much far from the objective, in their movement they use 2 turns, or that arrive after a certain ammount of time in the battle (for example 20 minutes) for supporting as reinforcement the currently attacked troops. Obviously these ships could transport vehicles too.
If the enemy send an attack to a planet with some allied ships orbiting around these ships could intercept the attackers and engage them in a space battle (that in swb2 will be possible).
And this costrict the attacker to use a part of his resources for escort his transport ships.
In simply words, a sort of dinamic campaign, like for example in the DiD F22 simulators.
And for some idea like this i suggest you to take a look to Star Wars Rebellion, a very good strategic game (in my opinion the best SW oriented), that probably for its difficulty never saw the success.
The fly height you meantioned becomes a problem with performance. The higher you fly the easier it is to see the edge of the maps unless you design the sky domee as a complete sphere and do memory intensive blending tricks. Otherwise it just looks like crap. The alternative is no terrain (Bespin 1) or space battles. The flyers can be modded to perform however you like, and balancing flyers and units on a map is hard because you end up having to map the flyers weak or units super strong. Technically all the flyers should be able to hover and just fire, but that would not make for good gameplay for the units flailing on the field. A lot of attention is being paid to balance, and I trust the developers but in the end it's the publisher's call so we'll see how it turns out. The PC was different than the other platforms but if you ask me the PC version should have been made much more difficult. We fixed this at least partially with the patches, but I know how good our AI really is and there is more that could have been done to improve the PC experience by adjusting the maps themselves for the PC.
Wait!
Atm the soldiers AI is not better.
Is better the AI soldier's aim.
They can kill you with 3 pistol headshots from 100 metres, but probably after doing this they simply stop themselves and crouch down like when people go to bathroom... lol
And i have noticed that higher is the difficulty level, more stupid are your allies and more intelligent are your enemy.
However about the balance i have to admit that you developers made a very good work (if we except jettroopers and droidekas... but with the 1.2 patch this problem has been solved too).
I hope to see a good balancement like this in swb2
That's a good idea about the distiguishable flyer classes. I'm not sure how useful it would be in the maps we have but I'll see if it's something we can add for modders.
Are you not hoping too much in modders?
And if you want to hope in them, remember that you (you=developers) have to support the community, and not only with mod tools, but with the things that a console user never will see usefull, like command console in game, linux server files and things like this.
I agree with a lot of what you said about first person. In the end I'd like to address the PC design separately from the console design because they really diverge when it comes to this topic. Consolers play 3rd person, and their controls are limited so on the PC it ends up not being very useful in 1st person when it could easily be just like Xwing vs Tie Fighter. Consolers don't have akeyboard to balance their shield and select targets of varying type. Starfighter did it pretty well, but then on the PC it had the same lame controls for targeting that were on the console. I wanted better controls for that game too.
About controls i have read of a control that allow you to rotate around the Z axis.
I hope it will not be full automatic (predefined xxx degree), but a better idea will be to do similar to XvT old one:
when you pushed the button the control for X axis switched to Z axis, until you release the button.
However this is system was fully surpassed from XWA, with its completely separate third axis control.
Remeber this before choosing how to control this axis.
The better thing will be to allow, for PC users, both the system.
And for console users only one of them.
This comes back to that target the dumb consumer who can only mash buttons problem. Consolers wants Crimson Skies, PC Gamers want Tie Fighter, and there's a big difference. We are revisiting the HUD so we'll see how it turns out. At least some of your issues have been addressed already. I want XWvTF myself, but that I doubt we will ever see again unless it's a mod.
About the cockpit, take a look to XWA, with a 3d designed cockpit but with real controls directly in 2d on the screen.
The server browser in 1.2 did have a few features missing such as favorites which were addressed long ago. Patches have deadlines too, and we constantly develop so if something isn't finished and tested it may be in and disabled until it can be activated after enough testing. Better to not have a feature than one that's buggy and causes more complaints, expecially if it forces you to keep releasing patches.
Another reason for doing a good use of this multiplayer test.
And for opening this to more people (and more countries), for example for focusing each testing team on one aspect of the test.
When it comes to priorities don't forget the Xbox and PS2 take longer and are more demanding because of the Technical Requirements Checklist and process they make you go through. We could spend a month putting in voicemail because it's an Xbox requirement and with a fixed timeline that's going to bump things from the bottom of the list. The reject resubmit process takes forever, assuming they even get back to you in a reasonable amount of time. Wonder why there's no Xbox Jabba's Palace? Not because they devs didn't finish it, that's for sure.
More money? More troubles...
will continue... too long for making only one post... ^^'
but I STILL think, that WE should try to mod some levels, before SWBF2 comes out 
