Starship Corporation

A first version of the Probe Drone Attack Mission - at the moment only with "peaceful resistance". Guns coming up soon. You have to keep the enemy drones from scouting the ship. If they discover the bridge, the mission failes. Drones have limited battery capacity and use up energy every time the change direction or breach through a hatch.

Nice to see that:

- Doors can be locked/unlocked by clicking on them.
- The alert status can be silenced. (I'd like to see this on the Asteroid Mission).

What determines the enemy entry point? Is a random hatch chosen, every time that the mission is played? If so, will that swizz the mission, such that a player can repeatedly restart it until the furthest, most out of the way, hatches are chosen?

nice! I wasn't expecting to see another mission so soon! XD

I didn't think about missions like this... damn, I usually put most of my exit hatches near/on my bridge... now I have to be more careful... ">.>

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Entry point is randomly chosen - and I am not sure about the amount of drone containers yet.
It is true, that you can play the mission repeatedly until the odds are in your favour - but this is the case for all the other missions as well, and for all players alike.

I feel that's a concerning aspect of the game, at this stage. The purpose of each crew management mission is to obtain a high score. This encourages players to repeatedly restart the mission, until a more favourable random outcome is given. This presents two problems:

1. Increasing unhappiness or boredom with the game, due to feeling the need to repeatedly restart a mission, until a more favourable random outcome is given. Hypothetical player feeling: "I feel obliged to repeatedly restart this mission, until I get a high score. It's repetitive and boring. But I feel compelled to succeed, despite the negative affect on my feelings.".

2. Did that player achieve a good overall crew management rating because he was skillful, or just lucky or restarted his way to success? It undermines the value of a player's achievements, (especially in multiplayer).

Possible solutions:

1. Make the mission easy enough, that even in a bad random outcome - the player can always achieve a good score if sufficiently skillful.

2. Make enemy boarding partially or fully deterministic. Determined by one or more of a range of factors. (E.g. Always send a drone to board at the nearest hatch to the bridge. Only send drones to all cargo bay hatches. Only send drones to all unarmoured hatches, (armoured hatch being an extra room type)).

Notes:
It is noted that this mission does not appear to have a sufficient volume of random events, (unlike the asteroid or storm missions), that would mitigate bad luck or cause the player to spend long enough in the mission, that the desire to repeatedly restart it is diminished.

Although success in this mission partially dependent on ship design, a ship design that is bad for the mission can still achieve a high score - due to the random enemy entry points, (e.g. exit hatch directly attached to the Bridge).

I agree with Watsong here.

Perhaps the point of the probe drones should be to map the whole ship? That way it doesn't really matter what hatch they use, your mission is to stop the drones from discovering everything.

Drones mapping high-value rooms still negatively impact your score (so hatchway to bridge can still be a liability, without being an instant mission fail).

This type of mission would play significantly differently if you restarted it, but those replays could offer more enjoyable variety when replaying because there are more factors at play...compared to someone just hitting "ESC" until the farthest bridgepoint is reached.