[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

Ignoring that possiblity, I think the point is that putting the enemy in close tends to have the effect of shortening the amount of time you have for decision making, and ultimately the amount of time from detection to shooting. I think in certain other cases, the scenario designer is trying to surprise the player. For those who want to play "ASW Doom" that's great. Although I think it's sort of a cheap trick, ultimately, because once you realize there's a submarine placed in close, you don't get fooled a second time so the scenario gets old fast.

Having to surprise the player by artificially putting an enemy in close is a sign of having insufficient randomness in the scenario. ... It's also important to choose an appropriate distance scale for the scenario to occur over. If you do all of those things, then there's enough uncertainty in the game for the enemy to surprise you without resorting to cheap tricks which wear off once you've discovered them. It makes for more replayable scenarios and it makes for much more fun ones in my mind, because it makes the player the decision-maker. ... Scenarios should be open ended enough that people can try different tactics, approaches and methodologies and still win. It should be up to the player what the best way to tackle a problem is.

I definitely agree in principle. If there's anything I hate, it's single-path, single method missions. I've been trying to make things a bit more open ended lately thanks to people like SuBB who have shown a willingness for MP sessions that last longer than the usual 2-3 hours. Still they're in the minority. Just as an example of my frustrations, in one session I played about two months ago, the scenario was set up with forces far enough apart that the location of intercept, if it occured at all, was highly variable, but that also meant that the time was highly variable as well--no sooner than 1 hr. in if everyone was aggressive. Well, the closest Blue side platform dropped, and the closest red side player and the next closest Blue side player played conservatively. It's perfectly legitimate to play conservatively of course, but that will delay the time contact occurs. As the 2 hr mark approached the complaints about "nothing happening" started to build, and shortly thereafter a Blue player voluntarily dropped--and he was probably only 10 minutes from being engaged, too. The AI failed to take over his platform and the whole match was screwed.

Even though the delayed contact was due to someone dropping and the choices the players made, I still found it necessary to make some changes in the scenario to accelerate the conflict. Fortunately, in this specific case, those changes probably improved dynamics rather than harmed them, but that of course is not the usual result.

I'm not going to stop trying to make longer missions just yet, but I can't shake the feeling that they won't see much use.