Battle of Endor Syndrome

What do we mean by a Battle of Endor mission?

The Battle of Endor (BoE) is a very important battle in the Star Wars universe. This battle involved several dozen warships and hundreds of fighters on each side. If you ever hear somebody from the FreeSpace community mention a Battle of Endor-type mission, s/he is thinking about a mission which involves several warships (often big ones, corvettes and larger) battling each other across a space teeming with fighters. An old Volition Watch article advised FREDers not to create "BoE" missions. However, almost every major campaign released in the last three years features enjoyable Battle of Endor missions; the VWatch article condemned the type rather than the makers wrongly. It raised specific examples of errors common to BoE missions, but the errors are ones that bespeak poor design and attention to detail, not proper indictments of the type.

However this brings us to the key point regarding this type of mission. It is extremely unforgiving of designer inexperience, lack of attention to detail, and error. In a mission that features only a couple of cruisers and their fighter wings fighting it out, one can afford to make a few mistakes or to simply "gloss over" details; likely it won't be noticed.

In a Battle of Endor-type mission, any mistake or overlooked detail will show up glaringly.

What are the problems with such missions?

• The FreeSpace engine: The Retail engine (not FreeSpace Open) has difficulty if there are too many objects in the mission, typically resulting in collision-detection failure and rendering primary weapons mostly useless. FreeSpace Open is much more permissive in this regard, but can still experience a noticible slowdown in some cases. Generally, however, you should be reasonably safe as long as there are no asteroids involved.

• Mission designer's nightmare: BoE missions are very hard to build well. If you are a precise and circumspecting mission designer, you will find making such missions terribly painful and nerve-wracking. Testing these missions is not the easiest thing to do, either. With lots of targets, a player can react lots of ways and prioritize them in odd fashions, or attempt to take on enemies that are not their problem. Building a BoE and getting it to behave consistantly is not easy. Building one that looks good, with ships manuvering and reacting to changing situations, and getting it to behave consistantly is even more daunting. If it does work, the designer may be fighting the AI or ceding control of large parts of the action. And this is before you involve Alpha 1 and attendant issues of difficulty and player skill.

Why should I make such missions?

Volition had to "dodge" making such missions several times over the course of FreeSpace and Freespace 2.

The player participates in the epic Battle of Deneb depicted in the Freespace 2 intro through the missions Evangelist and Doomsday, holding off the SD Lucifer and SD Eva from Vasuda. In Freespace 2, High Noon and Bearbaiting come to mind. (Karajorma's "Grizzly Bearbaiting" gives a reasonable impression of what Bearbaiting perhaps should have been.) Similarly the events between Bearbaiting and High Noon, and there is in fact a time gap of at least several hours, encompass what would have qualified as a BoE. The original GTVA plan for taking down the Sathanas would probably have also counted as one, as would the version of Their Finest Hour that seems to have been originally intended.

Volition had to avoid this, have the poor Aquitaine totally unescorted by friendly capital ships, or have no more than two ships corvette-sized or up in the mission area, because they had to contend with the limits of contemporary computers. Computers have since advanced, and these missions could now have been built, or the Aquitaine could have yelled for backup from its fleet in Proving Grounds rather than run away.

Capital craft moving and attacking in groups can be helpful to establishing suspension of disbelief. And put simply, major fleet actions are important and often climatic events. In the classic admonishment to authors: "Show. Don't tell."

Conclusion

Put simply this is not something for a novice to attempt. It takes a lot of skill and attention to detail to build a large combat that will work. More difficult yet is attempting to build one where the player will actually have a noticible impact on the outcome, if that is your intent.

Some workarounds for these missions exist, such as Derelict's solution of having the player fight in a seperate yet nearby action. In addition, the presence of certain weapons replacing standard beams and a limited use of spacecraft could make a BoE-ish mission possible: it is known, in fact, that most problems are related to the massive presence of beam cannons firing at the same time and overkilling ships.