Tweak some love for planetary missions.

[UFO Reality]

This part of the game needs more sentry skimmers to spawn and made randomly tougher OR harder to hit.

They seem a bit too weak and their very poor A.I. doesn't cause any threat at all to a raiding SRV.

It would also add more realism if it were made so, that when, SRV vehicle lights are on, then the skimmer accuracy to hit the SRV increases two-fold.

A time-delayed spawned enemy ship to chase you down once skimmers are eliminated would be also great to add more action and immersion to this mission.

 

[UFO Reality]

I find the base attack missions to be still somewhat of an alpha state game.

Not enough hints on what to do and when it comes to trying to evade an enemy ship while in the SRV, the game play is lacking any balancing where the SRV has a chance of evading destruction or a counter measure to escape target lock.

I would like to have at least have some hints from the mission giver about how to do the base mission or some some way to get in and keeping in stealth using lowered SRV temperatures, similar to being a smuggler to a star-port.

It seems like plans to enhance this part has been missed or neglected and it is obvious because there are no wing missions that are planet landings based.

 

[Sylow]

My only complains are outdated mission descriptions that state a SRV would be required. So far I couldn't find a single one where that is actually true. Quite the contrary, ships are usually doing the job much easier and faster. Some other mission descriptions sound as if you would need to destroy objects while in reality it turns out to be a scan job - also the other way around which can be unnecessarily confusing. Meanwhile I start to suspect that the internal tester (if such a person exists at all) doesn't like surface missions. Which is a pity, I'm a great fan of these kind of missions. Some of them are even pretty dangerous and fun, at least until you figured what and how to do there.

I can agree on all of that. The difficulty can be found there. The information provided is bad.

My other gripes are:

• Variety seems limited. I did them a few times during a beta and there wasn't all that much of a difference between them.
• I didn't check any more since a long time, but at some time all of them were criminal act. As my commander since a while sticks to the law, i don't look at them any more. So perhaps some legal "take down a pirate base" mission would help there.

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

Definitely like the idea of more 'legal' surface base missions, raiding the hives of scum and villainy, repairing/defending a base under attack, etc.

 

[UFO Reality]

It would also be good if there was a base defense mission added.

Possible scenario could be a faction has heard a news that eg: horde of skimmers/thargoid/ship/etc sent to attack and destroy an object at an installation and you must intercept or defend the object/base by destroying all attackers before they destroy their objective.

It would help improve the single player parts of this game.

 

[AdmiralXanos]

A handful of the missions state you're there to inspect damaged/malfunctioning equipment and as soon as you "inspect" you get a fine, DRIVES ME NUTS. Also you cant multi crew and deploy the SRV which I'd love to do to get some air support, ie distract the air patrol while the SRV gets the scan.

 

[Faded Glory]

As mentioned above

I can agree on all of that. The difficulty can be found there. The information provided is bad.

My other gripes are:

• Variety seems limited. I did them a few times during a beta and there wasn't all that much of a difference between them.
• I didn't check any more since a long time, but at some time all of them were criminal act. As my commander since a while sticks to the law, i don't look at them any more. So perhaps some legal "take down a pirate base" mission would help there.

Yes, mission descriptions as a whole are a bit wanting, but some of the higher ranking planetary missions can be a challenge.

Like you, the roleplay for my CMDR is a typically law abiding one. I would never massacre civilians or assassinate a politician. Since the C&P changes, destroying skimmers and turrets and the like is just classified as assault, so I'll do that and just pay off the bounties (just let my RP lapse for the sake of gameplay), but I agree that 'legal' base assaults would be good. The problem right now is that the higher ranked ones have a Federal (in my area) ship defending the base, and since I'm allied to the Feds (not to mention supposedly an honorary Admiral!), I'm simply not going to shoot at a Federal ship.

A bit of a shame really, as having to use tactics to take out defenses from your ship, then perhaps use the SRV to fight off skimmers to get a scan would probably be great fun gameplay, especially if FD were to come up with a few different base layouts.