Make a Static Map for Praetor White's second mission "Rescue PPD in Tunnels"

[Major_Decoy]

This mission is so wildly variable. I've had it where it was two rooms and I've had it where it was four rooms, two bridges, two under passes, stairs up, stairs down, and a boat room. It can get tedious. And it's your first experience escorting NPCs gold side, and the NPCs are really awful with gold side stairs.

 

It is just not a good foot forward. Take the randomness out of it.

[The Chairman]

You've had it just two rooms?!?!

 

I've always had the same map. Don't remember the details at the moment, but it always involves lots of stairs and a boat room.

 

WHY ARE STAIRS SO HARD!!!???!!! YOU ARE BLOODY POLICE OFFICERS!!!!

[A Cat]

47 minutes ago, The Chairman said:

WHY ARE STAIRS SO HARD!!!???!!! YOU ARE BLOODY POLICE OFFICERS!!!!

I know your pain so well.

[Greycat]

5 hours ago, The Chairman said:

WHY ARE STAIRS SO HARD!!!???!!! YOU ARE BLOODY POLICE OFFICERS!!!!

 

You think *that's* bad, try to grab nukes in Warburg.

 

"You're a scientist and a *ramp* baffles you... Not even stairs, just an inclined surface...."

[Darmian]

As a dedicated Goldsider you learn to lead NPCS with Sprint etc off/Stealth etc off, and moving in a sort of a zig zag down stairs.  Seems to work mostly for me.

[huang3721]

Taking out randomness will not solve your problem. The escorts are not very good at walking on stairs, yet these things are prevalent in Praetorian maps. Sooner or later, you will have to deal with it.

A few tips for navigating stairs:

• It is easier to control your escorts when they are close to you.
• Lead them so that they won't touch the handrails.
• Try hopping when your escorts get stuck. Escorts sometimes will mimic your jump, setting themselves free while doing so.

General escorting tips:

• Avoid sprinting whenever possible.
• Disable stealth.
• Also, last but not least, beware of ambushes. Praetorian ambushes can be brutal. If your escort dies, you may fail the mission. 

[Darmian]

3 minutes ago, huang3721 said:

Taking out randomness will not solve your problem. The escorts are not very good at walking on stairs, yet these things are prevalent in Praetorian maps. Sooner or later, you will have to deal with it.

A few tips for navigating stairs:

• It is easier to control your escorts when they are close to you.
• Lead them so that they won't touch the handrails.
• Try hopping when your escorts get stuck. Escorts sometimes will mimic your jump, setting themselves free while doing so.

General escorting tips:

• Avoid sprinting whenever possible.
• Disable stealth.
• Also, last but not least, beware of ambushes. Praetorian ambushes can be brutal. If your escort dies, you may fail the mission. 

All good advice there!

[Nerva]

5 minutes ago, huang3721 said:

General escorting tips:

• Avoid sprinting whenever possible.
• Disable stealth.
• Also, last but not least, beware of ambushes. Praetorian ambushes can be brutal. If your escort dies, you may fail the mission. 

To this I'd add:

• Mind positioning.  Especially in Praetoria, a lot of mobs have AoE attacks.  You might be able to survive them with minimal harm; your escortee probably won't.

Can't begin to tell you how annoying it is for your escortee to get shot up by Resistance members because they were aiming at you with their energy-based cone-burst.  Same with PPD with their energy-based cone attacks.

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by Nerva
Fixed a typo

[Major_Decoy]

6 hours ago, huang3721 said:

Taking out randomness will not solve your problem. The escorts are not very good at walking on stairs, yet these things are prevalent in Praetorian maps. Sooner or later, you will have to deal with it.

Well, no, if the developers decided "Okay, we'll make this static map a flight of stairs 57 stories deep into the sewers." then yes, it wouldn't help because there would be so many stairs. It'd be even worse if the developers then decided "Oh, well, if this stairway goes that deep into the sewers, it would intersect the Underground Trial map, so we better throw in lichen infected war walker and an aspect of Hamidon.

 

But if the developers picked a map without stairs then it would solve the problem.

 

Yes, I understand that it's technically a skippable mission, but you get out of the tutorial at level 2 and you don't get "radio" missions until level 4. This is Praetor White's second mission, and sometimes, because of the randomness of it, it  is intolerably long. And because you have to escort an NPC from the end of it back to the beginning, I am absolutely certain I have had runs of it take longer to do than Death From Below.

 

If the developers gave it a smaller map, then it would solve that problem.

 

No, giving this a static map does not solve the problem with NPC AI, but there are maps that are friendlier to  the NPC AI.

[huang3721]

Praetorian architects love stairs with handrails. Those things are almost everywhere. Really. Office (dry & flooded), power/bio/tech lab and underground maps of all sizes have them. If you run a Praetorian mission, you will most likely meet them. Sorry, but I see no solution for your problem aside from getting used to it.

 

 

15 hours ago, Major_Decoy said:

If the developers gave it a smaller map, then it would solve that problem.

 

Also, modifications take time to implement. Updating the game takes much, much longer than playing Death From Below. So, based on your patience, I don't think any update will help you either. 

[Major_Decoy]

27 minutes ago, huang3721 said:

Also, modifications take time to implement. Updating the game takes much, much longer than playing Death From Below. So, based on your patience, I don't think any update will help you either. 

If I didn't have patience, do you think I'd be posting in the forums?

 

Yes, modifications take time to implement, more than one run of Death From Below. And depending on how many people play the mission, it could take a very long time for the amount of time saved by the players to be more than the programming time required for the developers to make the change. There are of course decisions the developers must make about the best investment of programming time. I am merely making a suggestion for a quality of life change. I think I'm in the right place for that. Yes, I realize that Praetoria is not terribly popular, and I can't honestly say that I know that changing one mission would make Praetoria more popular. It's just one frustrating mission at level 3.

 

But I have a forum for voice my frustrations.

 

 

[TheZag]

I wonder if its possible for a npc to use the player version of follow.  Talking to an escorted npc could switch them from AI pathing mode to the run towards the follow target and ignore everything else mode that players have.  Then it could be possible to 'force' them down or up the stairs.  Even if it reverted to AI pathing after 10 or 20 seconds it would save loads of frustration on more than just this mission.