Higher paying missions, just a discussion

[ugliestmoose]

I'd really love to be able to do missions which pay much more.

But what I'd like to see is missions saying what the biggest ships are which might appear, so you can judge by yourself whether you can do it or not.

There should be "smaller paying missions" which only spawn fighters of all kind (NPC fighters can be adjusted to the mission level regarding armor, equip etc I think - I guess that's a lot of work to be done though). Then there should be missions which also spawn bombers - maybe even like 2 bombers and 2 fighters? - And missions which spawn ships up to gunboats ... cruisers ... battleships. The important thing is, missions should inform you about what you probably have to shoot when doing the mission.

Just some wishlist of mine, I know this is a lot of work...or at least I guess so. *shrugs* Something to consider for when 4.86 is released and unbugged.:D

The way the mission system is coded, it's practically impossible to predict whether caps will spawn or not. The way it works is each wave of spawned ships is assigned a number value based on the level and number of ships. If I remember right, Disco treats mission capships as level 18, which is the same as the highest level fighters. When you select a mission, the mission level dictates the maximum value that all spawned ships can sum to, and then FL runs a mysterious voodoo function to calculate which ships to spawn. Unfortunately there's a random aspect to it, so even if you make capships a higher level there's a chance that you will instead get like 5 waves of low-level fighters instead of one wave of caps. The only surefire way to make it work is to redo the mission system from scratch, which only an insane person would even attempt to do.



tl;dr It would be a TON of work to specify which ships spawn during missions