Take One

Maybe limit AE access to level 5+ so people at least have to punch a few Hellions on the way to the AE building.

I never suggested removing the AE building or anything. If anything I would want to make Contacts easier to find. There is a contact finder but it doesn't really work too great - it keeps finding contacts that make no sense, like at level 20 you get 10 or so contacts showing up in First Ward, but if you pick any other than the first one (Doorman, I think?) you'll mess it up. It should only show "introductory" contacts in cases like that.

That doesn't help if a player doesn't know how to open their Contact tab or why they would want to open their Contact tab.

I was reminded of this post I made in a different thread and thought I'd make it its own suggestion. The randomizer needs to be weighted properly so that each option "weighs" as much as the number of child options it has. Basically each and every option should have the same chance to appear on a random "roll". That means that some of the "top" head options must have a higher chance to get rolled than others, and so on, all the way down to the lowest level option for each category. Example below. Currently there are 18 head options. 8 of them are the "normal" heads, including helmets. 10 of them are various weird special heads, like think tank, floating head, monstrous, piranha, etc. That means there's currently a greater than 50% chance of getting a weird head, and only a 2/18 to get a standard or full mask head, which is probably what most people would like to see. If each option was weighed by how many sub-options they have, the standard head would weigh a whopping 103, while the think tank would weigh 1, the monstrous heads would weigh 6, the Animal Big Cats - Medium Size would weigh 2, etc. That would mean that the standard head would have a 100 times greater chance of showing up than the think tank, which would be more in line with how I expect a random costume to work.

I guess I'm one of the few who like the early arcs. Some of the best ones are the issue 0-1 arcs, in my opinion. Almost all the arcs that have to do with Crey. The Freakshow arcs. The Portal Corp arcs, before they were messed up by Who Will Die and Praetoria. The Malta and Carnival of Shadows arcs. I really like them all and usually play them on all my alts, eventually. Later arcs might have more interesting gaming elements or fancy mechanics, but I'm used to imagine all kinds of stuff my characters are 'really' doing so I don't mind the simplicity of the gameplay while the story is unrolled. Then again I also love all the tip missions (well the ones that work properly) which are full of weird mechanics. So it's not like I can't appreciate the new stuff. The story writing peaked in Issue 10 I think, when they released the RWZ update (or if it was issue 13). The LGTF and the arcs leading up to it were all awesome. Even if I cursed the stupid npcs who would run suicide missions into piles of Nemesis soldiers when I tried to rescue them.

Sadly no. Would be nice to have, a few different ones. Closest you can get is one of the graveyard maps.

I'll add these to my list. Thanks!

The valiant Marcus Valerius ought to have a unique description.

Yes, if I removed the defeat-all objective I got all the boss objectives, as expected. The defeat-all seemed to occupy one of the objective slots. I don't know if it always did that or if it's new for these maps but it seems counterintuitive. The other problem with hostage objectives over-writing the boss objectives remained, however.

The Sybil Temple map has the same problem - it says 3 back objectives but you can only place 2. I can also place 10 captive objectives which overwrite the boss objectives. ACTUALLY: I had a "defeat all" objective set too, and it seems to have counted as one of the back objectives somehow. Seems like it shouldn't count as an objective but that might just be me. So maybe that's the real bug. @Faultline

Interesting, because I had never noticed it before... But okay, thanks.

The Vespillos Pass map is supposed to have 17 Front objectives, 11 Middle objectives and 10 Back objectives, but as you can see in the screenshot below, when I put in 10 boss objectives at the Back, I get an error. If I put in 9 boss objectives it works. In addition to these boss objectives I was also able to add 38 'free a captive' objectives. When I do this, the 'free a captive' objectives seem to "overwrite" the boss objectives.

I'm testing an AE mission set on the Castellum Quarter map. There are no objective markers on the map, which there usually is.

I have a map populated by Cimerorans. I set a 'free a captive' objective with Angry Citizens as the captive group. The angry citizens' level range of 1-5 prevents me from publishing because their level range doesn't overlap with the Cimerorans' level range. 'Free a captive' shouldn't check for this so you can use any kind of critter in a captive group. I now see that there is a similar problem with other groups that don't overlap the Cimerorans, such as the Banished Pantheon (20-29) and Bat'zul (15-21). This would be a big problem if it went live.

Yeah the AE is a crude tool that doesn't allow for even the most obvious and simple setups that we see in the rest of the game all the time. Your best bet here is to find a map with a small "end room" with space for one hostage and one boss, so that if you place both of them in that room you can have the boss threaten the hostage without looking like he's doing it over an intercom. Otherwise you'll just have to let him delegate the job to his underlings, who are guarding the hostage. They do, but they are low-level mobs. As are the Vahzilok. Granted, they are probably some of the toughest ones at that level. I can only recommend a liberal use of inspirations when facing them. Thanks for playing anyway, and I hope you will try again when you've grabbed a few more levels perhaps.

SFMA means "Story Focused Mission Architect" - i.e. "not a farm". I think any of the low level ones could work for a level 12 Defender, so maybe "A Taste For Evil" or "A Clockwork Romance" or "The Tangled Weave". Some of them are intended for villains, specifically for villain epic archetypes, but if you just pretend to be villainous they should work fine. As far as I can remember, the 'real' Bonebreaker IS a generic Skull boss with that name, so your version should be fine. I can't really tell what might be wrong with your mission from the screenshot, unfortunately. I would have to look at the map in the editor and see how many objectives it's got but an office map sounds like it should work fine, so I don't know, maybe that map is broken. Have you tried another map just to see what happens? If it doesn't work on any map there's something weird going on. Edit: I just noticed that your hostage is set to spawn when Bonebreaker is defeated - did you make sure to defeat him and all his minions (if the boss is set to that - there's a dropdown for it) - before you went looking for the hostage?

Each map only allows a certain number of the different objectives. If your hostage doesn't "fit" when the map spawns are populated, it might just simply not show up. This is not supposed to happen but the AE will do whatever it wants sometimes. What map are you using? Another possibility is if you set the hostage to not be guarded by anything (if you set the enemy group to "empty"), it might instantly be "rescued" and no longer show up in the navbar. Sometimes.

I did look at the map from all kinds of angles, even flying up high to check things from above, but yeah, it's possible that it might have ended up there - I didn't spend as much time looking at rooftops as everywhere else.

What the title says. Many times I want to make several objectives of the same kind with slight differences. Being able to easily duplicate existing objectives would greatly improve the mission architect UI. We can already do this by editing the mission file but it's a bit of a bother because you have to close the whole game down to do so, as far as I can tell. And of course editing a file directly comes with the added risk of destroying something important.

Please add a function to the 'Fight a Boss' objective which causes the mission to fail if the boss defeats one or all player(s) on the team. Would be great for scenarios where you have to take down the boss or they will escape with whatever mcguffin you are fighting over.

I think this arc needs a lot of polish to be really great. As it is now, it has a good premise and the promise of an interesting story about one of my favorite characters. Sadly, it doesn't quite hold up. My main problems are with how the missions are laid out and structured - the first two or three seem like they could have been condensed into one or two, and conveyed the same information. Then there's the strange behavior of the judge in Mission 4, and Mission 5 is a bit of a let-down after all we've built up towards. I am curious about how you managed to create a custom group with underlings in it, when I try to add underlings to a custom group they don't show up. So that's something I'm interested to find out. If you want to have a discussion about what you could do to 'fix' the story, we can have that but I will end this review here for now. This arc had very nice formatting - love the colors for the text. It's something I often forget about myself and kick myself over every time. It should probably have been lower level, since it's about Galaxy City. Seeing Psi-cops and police drones slumming in the sewers doing dirty deals with Skulls and other low level mobs feels odd. Especially since Kershner's bio says that he "took some of his old precinct with him" - and Galaxy City would not have had psi-cops. You even had to make some custom Skulls to put in one of the missions. As far as I could tell there was no reason for this particular level range. I noticed some typos and such but we can sort them out privately. The story was supposedly made by cobbling together several other arcs or shorter "tip missions", and it shows - there's a story about corrupt cops, and a story about the return of an ancient magical threat, and they connect in an unexpected way. Personally I would have liked to see more of a focus on one or the other. Not a bad attempt by any means, just not my favorite this time around. The contact had the default AE description! Oh no! Disqualified! No, I'm just kidding, but I thought I'd point it out so you can fix it, unless it's caused by some bug. The story was pretty straightforward without any big surprises, but I had come to expect some mechanical trickery from the author and I wasn't disappointed. I wonder if perhaps the choice to have three different endings was a little too complicated but the author pulled it off so who am I to complain? The only problem I saw with it was that each ending was perhaps cut short when there was just a third of the space to write each ending in, so to speak. But again, I don't know what could have been added to it, unless you had put in a 5th mission just to deal with the aftermath of your moral choice. But that might have stretched the patience of everyone involved a bit too far. This arc has a few problems, the biggest of which is that the first mission uses a very big map to deliver a single objective - find a single glowie and click on it. There is some sight-seeing too, but no combat. Not a problem, usually, but the size of the map means that you can end up wandering around quite a bit to look for this clue. A few red herring glowies with triggered events attached to them could have livened up things - perhaps you find a discarded piece of clothing worn by Myl E Vanilla and you are mobbed by crazy fans when you pick it up, or similar. There's also a risk that you miss out on the most important character, Dairy Devil, who is standing somewhere feeling sick. You should really try to make it so we have to meet him, and the police woman who will be our real contact for most of the story. The other problem I had was that I don't speak Spanish. Fortunately I know enough to understand most of what one of the NPCs said, but I would suggest a clue with a translation for those who are even less linguistically talented than I am. So those were the problems I had. Now the good stuff. I loved this story. At first it started out kind of silly, with weird names for the NPCs and the whole premise about ice cream trucks being attacked. Then it took a darker turn, and I was wondering if it was really appropriate for the tone of the story, but as it turned out my worries were unwarranted because it all tied up nicely in the end, with a lot of foreshadowing that makes it even more fun on a second playthrough. The only thing I could wish for was even more of the funny and cool custom enemies that show up near the end. People who know me and my stories probably think I must have lost my mind in the heat, but this was really a very cool story with unexpected layers, and some genuine surprises. And now here is what you all have been waiting for: the awards! I am happy to give the first place to @Soup or Man for his "We All Scream for Ice Cream". 500 million influence will be coming to your in-game inbox shortly. Our runner-ups are @NyxiaSnow and @cranebump - 100 million influence each are coming your way. What, Cranebump gets the runner-up award? Yes. Darmian's story is already more or less perfected, and to make it appeal more to me he would have to take it all apart and make two new stories. But Cranebump's story could become something very interesting, in my opinion. So to encourage that, I give him the prize. Not that I need to explain myself but I thought maybe my reviews up above gave the wrong impression. Thank you all for entering the competition!

The competition is almost over. I will play all the entries again over the next few days and then make a final decision. The winners will be announced shortly, along with the theme for the next competition.

Hm... looks like you wrote "Defeat all Skulls, Check the safe, Arrest Bonebreaker" in the "Compass Active Task Text" field in your mission editor. That place is more suitable for a general reminder what your mission is about, or perhaps a general description of the location, like "Investigate the office" or such. Each objective you add to the mission will have its own text that shows up in the navbar. If you don't enter this yourself, the AE will put something like what you see in your screenshot. I will use a Boss objective as an example, similar to your Bonebreaker. Here is how my objective's Boss Text section is set up. Navigation Text (Plural) and (Singular) are the fields you need to look for. If you have just one boss, just add text in the singular field. "Defeat Bonebreaker" for example. If you had two bosses you could write like I did, and the AE would automatically prepend a number in front of that line. I have three bosses so in my mission it shows up like "3 fire-stealin' horses to catch", and as you defeat each boss, the number goes down. When there is just one boss left, the Singular text is shown instead. Your other objectives work the same way, but may have different text boxes depending on what kind of objective they are. But all of them should have a pair of Navigation Text fields. As for what happened to your hostage, I think you may have been editing your autosave-file, and gone to test another one. Make sure that you are editing the correct file. The filename is visible at the bottom of the editor, right above where you see your file size: In the screenshot my filename is PWNY07. If it had been my autosave file, it would have said AUTOSAVE. So make sure you are opening and editing the correct file, and just leave the autosave file alone unless something breaks in the file you're working on. Personally I save copies of my arcs all the time, in case I decide that I liked an older version better or if I delete a lot and decide that I needed those things after all. Good luck, and feel free to ask more questions. There is also a great guide pinned to the top of this section of the forums which has lots of information:

I was sure I had played Talos Vice on HC.

I just make suggestions and let the devs sort it out. No point trying to figure out what they will or won't do beforehand.