FreeSpace Port ReCharged Dev log 13: A Deadlier Eldritch Foe
- Iain 'Sessile_Nomad' Baker
- Jan 19
- 5 min read
Welcome back, friends. In the last post, I described how Deployable Rally Points and 'slow comms tactical pause' enabled the player to fight smarter.
And fighting smarter will be essential, because I was about to make FreeSpace Port ReCharged a whole lot harder.
No More Nerf Guns
In vanilla FreeSpace, the Shivans - the unknowable xenocidal eldritch horrors that are the series' primary antagonist, are hyped as being far in advance of both Terrans and our sometimes allies, sometimes enemies (frenemies?), the Vasudans.
In particular, their weapons were described as being far more powerful than ours. However, in-game, their weapons were significantly weaker than their Terran or Vasudan counterparts, as the meme below shows 😂
As such, they were actually a fairly trivial threat in-game on anything less than hard or insane difficulty. The setting's ‘Big Bad planet killer’ was mostly a threat due to possessing invulnerable plot armour until the last mission. Therefore, there was a disconnect between the narrative and the gameplay.
This needed to change. I wanted the threat posed by them in-game to match the threat the narrative suggested they were.
Pimp My Eldritch Horror
As it happens, there was one FS1 era campaign that had done this, the infamous and punishingly difficult Bem Cavalgar. In that mod, you truly did feel like the underdog fighting a losing battle against an unbeatable foe.
The Shivans were equipped with massively overclocked AI and weapons that were far deadlier than yours, while your weapons were barely effective against them. Perfect inspiration!
Bem Cavalgar mod for FreeSpace Open
First, I increased the effectiveness of the Shivan's weapons. All were buffed to become more potent than the equivalents that the player and their wingmates would be packing.
This increased the challenge significantly, but not enough for my liking, so I also did the following:
I set about overclocking the various Shivan fighters and bombers themselves by making them all faster and more agile than their Terran or Vasudan counterparts.
I gave some fighters and bombers unique weapons that are even more deadly than the already upgraded Shivan weaponry.
I did something to compensate for the Shivans' comparatively weak hulls.
(I shan’t spoil those last two nasty little surprises now 😈)
Overclocking the AI
Next, I wanted to increase the effectiveness of the in-game AI. Vanilla FS AI is fairly tame, but successive improvements have been made to it by the community over the last quarter-century.
One of these was the infamous ‘Fury AI’ (created by community member ‘Fury’), which drives challenging campaigns such as Blue Planet and Bem Cavalgar. This has been considered the 'gold standard' for at least a decade now, so I decided to use this as a base. But for what I wanted, it would need to be tweaked and upgraded further.
The first AI tweak needed was to make sure that the AI strikecraft - friendly and hostile alike - would take full advantage of the 6DoF GXYZ flight mechanics mentioned previously. This worked well, and soon the AI was flying backwards, circle strafing and gliding as much as the player.
Next up was seeing what other AI settings vanilla FS didn’t use. It turns out there are a lot of them due to the number of additions the community has made over the years.
What followed was my looking up what each did in the wiki, then turning it on/off or assigning it a value, then seeing what effect it had in-game. Rinse and repeat. This took a while, but it had to be done.
Why?
Because my aim was to create the smartest, most fiendishly punishing AI that FSO could create with its existing tools.
With a lot of trial and error, I’m confident I have created one of the smartest and most challenging AI setups of any campaign I have played to date. Only Bem Cavalgar truly rivals it.
I don't know if it is the smartest and most challenging AI setups of all FS campaigns created so far, since there are over 100 of them now, and I haven’t played them all yet.
I also don't know if it is the smartest and most challenging AI setup that can be made in FSO at present, but I hope it’s close. If anyone knows of a way to make it even smarter, please let me know.
But what to call this new AI standard? I was provisionally calling it ‘Fury on Cr*ck AI’, but I have settled on the rather more SFW ‘ReCharged AI.’
The Results are In
This, combined with the overclocked Shivans and rapid-fire weapons, made the game significantly harder than vanilla - just as intended. On the plus side, your AI wingmates are smarter now, too, which helps offset this a little.
Even so, the player will have to fight a whole lot smarter than they would in Vanilla, and FreeSpace veterans may have to unlearn some of their habits. Trying to 'Alpha One it'- i.e., charging in and taking everything on by themselves – will quickly lead to their pilot avatar sucking hard vacuum.
That’s all for now. In the next post, we will see how I 'ReCharged' the missions themselves. See you all there.
Previous dev log posts
Iain is a 40+ author and gamer from England, who started his gaming journey on the Atari 2600 36(ish) years ago. His specialities include obscure cult classics, retro games, mods and fan remakes. He hates all sports games and is allergic to online multiplayer. Since he is British, his body is about 60% tea. He can be reached via email at nomadsreviews@gmail.com
Nomad’s Reviews now has a YouTube Channel - Nomad's Reviews Plays.
Comments