Star Blazers Mod

[Campeador]

"Star Blazers Mod: The Quest for Iscandar, Campaign 2" is up for download!
As I mentioned before it is twice as long as the first one, still is relatively short (4 to 6 hours?). If you like story telling, you are in for a treat, since you get to find out how the story ends.
I made a few changes on the mechanics on how the game play as compared to the first campaign. There were a few ideas and sugestions that I let pass before because I did not had the desire to go back and change things after it was done, but in this second campaign I did implement some.
Armor is more important than shields now. The shields are 1/2 as powerful per tonage, and the armor is double.
Items will not get experience, this is a very heavy combat mod and the "Yamato" was getting too powerful. Anyway I spent almost a month playing with it to see how things turned out, and I am pleased.
You do not need to play the first campaign to play the second part! If you lost your previous saved game, do not worry. Even thought the game continues in the same sector as part one ended, I gave the player the option to pick up the "Yamato" from the hangar at "Minerva". The only thing is that you will not have the experience. Anyway I am sure that the player will have to use the port to adjust the armor/shield relation and to pick up more fighters. I replayed the game at least a dozen times picking a new "Yamato" again and the previous experience is not necesary to beat the game. I also did it with all the stock items that came with the ship, and adding a few items to fill up the tonage.
In some sectors this game has more "celestial objects" than the previous one so the game will tend to slow down a bit, specialy with alot of asteroids, but it was not too bad. Remember that the game will pause for a second or two when the bad guys show up, so do not freak out. Another persistem problem is when a battleship blows up, the game may freeze. So, save the game before you face one of those. Reload if it happens. It is still a random thing, I still think that it is a video card/ram thing.
Have fun.

[Baron Munchausen]

Clarification -- does this replace the first campaign or supplement it? In other words, is there another file to download than 403431-StarBlazers-Campaign2.rar or is this the whole thing and you have removed the previous version?

[Campeador]

Clarification:
The "Star Blazers: The Quest for Iscandar" story was divided in two parts, Campaign 1 and Campaign 2.

The first part: StarBlazers-Campaign1_v1.1 (6.3MB) (updated 9/29/05)
and the music file: StarBlazers-Music1.rar (24MB)

The second part: StarBlazers-Campaign2.rar (16MB)
The "Campaign 2" file looks much bigger than the previous one, and it is, since there are a lot of new pics (used for story telling) and one music file. It also uses the same ships from the first part in addition of the new ships.

So, to answer the question, they are not combined, and it does not replace the first campaign. The second campaign is the continuation and conclusion of the story. If this is the first time you try the Mod then download the 2 campaigns and the music, that will be 3 files to download combined.
If you already have the "Campaign 1" and the music from before, then just download the "Campaign 2".

I hope that this explanation helps.

note: I went back and edited the post on the campaign download page to make it more clear also.

[Baron Munchausen]

Ok, I've played both campaigns now. I agree that firing the Wave Motion Gun at a Gamilon Battleship causes the game to lockup. It would be a good idea to reduce the firing points permanently if this is indeed the cause of the problem.

Over all, it was a reasonably interesting game. But it the Galactic News events are full of mispellings and clumsy English that makes me expect to see 'All your base are belong to us!" at any moment. I take it that you are not a native English speaker? Or are you just copying the narration text from somewhere else? It really needs a bit of editing. Even mportant words like Carrier are mispelled.

[Captain Kwok]

Baron Munchausen said:...Even mportant words like Carrier are mispelled...

It looks contagious...

[Campeador]

Thanks for the comments. Please, DO continue to bring problems up! My beta tester (my little brother) played the game only once, and obviously forgot to correct me. He was the only person I know who wanted to play this game.
Like on the first campaign, I will wait until more players try the game so that most off the bugs and mistakes come to the surface before issuing an update on the second campaign.

I did a spell check only on the "DisplayText" page, but totally forgot to do it on the "Job" text page. "Carier" was on the "Job" text, as well as a few other words (by the way if the Gamilons like to call their carriers "carier" instead of carriers, who am I to argue?)... I will start making a list of corrections, happy?

About my clumsy way of putting words together, you were right English is not my native language, and I also confess that I am also equally clumsy in another 3 languages as well. (And so are the Gamilons, and English is not the native language of the crew of the "Star Force" either). In short, I did everything by myself, and this is the best I can do, without asking some one else to help me, that is.

About the crash, it is still a mystery to me. Thinking a little bit just now, I come to the realization that it is not the firing points, a ship that is about to be destroyed usually is not firing. A lot of ships destroyed (all other but the battleship) by the WMG are long destroyed and still the WMG beam is blasting away, and no crash.
The problematic ship here is the "Conqueror" battleship. It has 22 weapons, more than any other ship (the "Yamato" has 20), the problem is when it dies, if the game creates a graphic explosion for every weapon, and maybe also every engine, and then that may be the cause for the crash. I do not know if this happens with the newer battleship, the "Audacious", 19 weapons. I could reduce the amount of weapons to see if this helps. It does not always happens...maybe I should add more weapons instead, like 50 to see if it crash every time, if it does then I will be close to the problem.

I really do not have any documentation on the limits of components/weapons/size or hardly anything on this game. In part that is a good thing because first I dream freely and then I try to adjust things as I face reality. Maybe 22 weapons is too much.



Desslok talking to General Crypt:
"I know Lysis is rash, even dangerous. But he is the only one of my generals who DOES something... unlike those who sit in judgment on him."

[Q]

IMHO the language should not be the main focus of critics. As long as I understand what you want to say I am very tolerant to imperfections and English is not my native language either. The alternative would be a campaign in Spanisch, French, German or whatever language the author speaks as native language. Not very reasonable IMO.
I was not able to play the second campaign much and I would like to wait with my critic till I finished it. But for me Campeador has earned a big "thank you" for the lot of work he did!

[Q]

Now I finished the second campaign and I found it quite challenging! Some very impressing combats you put up here Campeador. And the minefield is something new and original.
Thank you very much for your excellent work.
Some comments and suggestions:
- In the minefield I found it very difficult to localize all control satellites.
- On the other hand spacedocks/supply sites outside Minerva make it quite easy for you to repair and resupply. IMO no spacedocks should be available until you reach Iscandar.
- During the last battle before Gamilon I had big problems destroying the Audacious battleship Telema. The game froze 3x in a row although I did not use the wave motion gun. Just the last hit when only about 40 hit points were left caused the game to crash. Only when I used fighters to make the final kill I could continue the game. I had no problems to destroy other battleships however.
- After visiting Iscandor, I felt a little bit lost. There was no more job in the list and in the description of the last job there was no further instruction where to go, so I even thought the campaign was finished. Of course in the strategy room you are told to return to earth, but some instruction in the job list would be clearer.
- The combats on the return trip are too easy, which makes this part of the campaign a little bit boring. One or two surprises would be great. Or otherwise make a shortcut available to earth.

[Campeador]

Thanks Q!
Sooner rather than later I will issue an update. That will be tomorrow (02/06/06).
On the update I fixed the spelling mistakes, decreased the amount of weapons on the battleship "Conqueror", from 22 to 19, to see if that helps.

The update will include a few of the issues that "Q" raised:
About the "control Mines", the instructions were to "Find and destroy the "Control Mines" until free." That means that you did not have to destroy all of them, just the ones on your path to get out. (Well, all of them but one).
Yet I added a little line on the text to stress that out.

The spacedocks, no change. There are no upgrades on the items; therefore the spacedocks are only really useful for repairs, and to get more fighters. If you want a real challenge just ignore them and let me know if you can reach Iscandar! I would have really liked for the game to give me the option to fix or re-supply only once at the spacedock, but Starfury does not give me the option.

Some players find it difficult while others find it easy, therefore I did not want to make the game too difficult. If the player want a challenge, play on the most difficult setting, or do not use the WMC, or do not use the spacedocks, or fighters, or go and destroy the "Strange Gas", etc.

Another challenge: On "Campaign 2", the "Earth sector", I left on the spacedock most of the Gamilon and Terran ships in case that you want a joy ride, or you can use any of those ships to redo "Campaign 2". Big ships on "Earth", fighters on "Mercury".

On Iscandar, you said it. on the strategy room they told you to return to Earth, actually more specific: "Captain Name", we will head back through the same rout as we came from, so to the planet "Iris I" on the "Rainbow" sector." So an instruction on the job page was not necessary.
I totally agree about the return home. It is boring; I originally had a short cut to Earth, but took it off. So in the update I restored, and added instructions for the player to use it.
I wanted to be very close to the original story, I did not wanted to create "one or two surprises" because the original story did provide a few surprises. I do have a bunch of things that I could add but they would have been too distracting for this story. For example, I was planning to use the "Octopus" sector with all those warp points to land on different time periods/time zones, like the Negative Zone (?) on "Star Trek" and fight the evil "Yamato", or have an encounter with the "Comet Empire" (Another Star Blazers story), and many other things, but that would require new ships, maps etc. Time consuming. It is easier to do it in another campaign.

Game crash, I have no solution for the moment. A new weird thing, I tried today to fly the "Battleship Audacious", I attack an Earth torpedo destroyer, and as the destroyer blew up the game froze...only two medium beams from the Audacius were firing at the destroyer...my expression was like "what the ...." I still do not know. Maybe I am dooing something wrong someware, or maybe this game was not meant to have so many weapons on a ship...but they look so darn good, especially when you see 8 enemy missiles coming simultaneously towards you from a single ship!

[heemdream]

Great story and great job Campeador. I had'nt played star fury for a few months and found the new mod. It is original and challenging.

I too noticed the freezups at times when the ships exploded. I worked around this by saving the game more frequently.

There was a slight problem with one of the shield layouts as well. It appears that the bitmap file for ShieldLayout_G_Carrier_Revenge was mispelled in one of the image files and the game would crash when this turned out to be a spelling error. The shield graphic had one "r" missing in Carrier. This was easily corrected by renaming the file, not a biggie.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, I just wish I had the right tools for making ships, because I am familiar with the files and I have modified a few of the other mods already and it is great fun.

GREAT JOB!!!