Possible Mission Briefing blurbs

[Talon112]

Hey all, I've been thinking about something I read in another thread:

Mission Briefings before tactical combat.

Here's an example of one for a Supply Ship crash site.

Lieutenant,

Your team has been ordered to secure the crash site of a medium sized UFO that's been brought down by our interceptors. Be careful as some of the aliens may have survived the crash.
The local military has cordoned off the area, but there are still civilians in the immediate vicinity, so make sure to check your fire.

Mission will be concidered a success once all alien presence has been rendered incapable of combat. If you need to evacuate the mission zone, return all team members to the dropship.

Good Luck, Lieutenant.

[shevegen]

I think I like the briefing part, but I am not too fond of the Rank.
Who is the Lieutenant? Does he live on the phalanx station? Can he be killed?

I think it would be better if the briefings would be more neutral, in that they briefly describe
what should be done, and maybe even give tactical hints. (Ie. "sniper rifle are useful" and
more of this kind of bla, tailored to a few specific maps)

[Winter]

Mission briefings have been on the books since the original discussions BTAxis and I had back in version 2.0.

We'll write them when the functionality for them exists.

Regards,
Winter

[BTAxis]

Before discussing this, you should read the writeup for this feature. Also take a look at the talk page.

[Talon112]

Ok, Updated version of a mission briefing. This would be for a medium sized UFO; most likely a Harvester or Supply Ship in a Village setting.

>PHALANX Mission index<
>Sign in...<

>Loading briefing,

PHALANX interception craft have shot down a UFO in this area. The local military has cordoned off the area and have called for our team to clear the crash site. As the crash has incurred heavy collateral damage in the small village we should assume some of the crew survived. Seeing this as the most possible case, we advise extreme caution when approaching the crash.

Your primary objective is to secure the crash site for retrieval by PHALANX trailers who are holding position with the local military. Secondary objectives include capturing the crew alive for interrogation, and protecting the remaining villagers.

You will be dropping into a village area, so be ready for close combat with hostiles. Also, be advised that some of the locals have remained in the area, watch for friendly fire.

Intel reports few buildings, none of them being more than wood huts. The UFO impacted, then skidded to a stop in the northern part of the map. Close Combat and burst fire weaponry are advised for clearing buildings.

[Destructavator]

Perhaps the briefings should be modular, each paragraph at a time as opposed to writing an entire briefing once for every possible type of mission.  I'm not sure if my point here was already brought up, but I took a glance at the wiki page and didn't see much as far as how it would be programmed or set up (although looking at the discussion page I can see examples that are one paragraph at a time).

I'd imagine the text of each paragraph could depend on the mission of course, although for fun it would be interesting if a small random chance of bad information was given (so intel wouldn't always be right 100% of the time).

[BTAxis]

That is indeed the idea; I've edited the wiki page to better reflect this.

[Destructavator]

...almost forgot - you may want to include, somewhere in there, something about the time of day of the mission, (day or night?), and have the resulting tactics, etc., adjusted accordingly.

[BTAxis]

The example text does show a few variations based on that.

[Zorlen]

Good, the only issue is that mentioning of the interception crafts in briefings might be incorrect if an UFO is downed by a SAM site.

[Captain Bipto]

I get the impression from the wiki article that the briefing may include intel, would that include of UFO and which aliens are going to be encountered?