New Feature: Ambush style missions...

So I was adding a new mission (as some people were unhappy with the number shipping with the game) and I decided to try out an ambush style deployment:


This will be mission 11 in the next update. The plus-side of doing this was it forced me to make some changes to scenario/challenge support. Now there is a flag in a scenario file that tells the game to flip AI/Player deployments every time that scenario is used as a challenge or a retaliation.
Soo…
You can fight this map as the defender (center), then post your fleet as a challenge. Players can then fight it as the attacker, and they can retaliate to it, and then you get to be the defender again.

I think it’s kinda cool :smiley:

Ideas for other mission tweaks to make things more varied are most welcome…

I like this idea, but I’m going to have to see how it plays out before giving feedback. That deployment in the screenshot looks like it would not go well for the ambushing forces. One thing that has not changed from GSB1 is that deploying in a giant blob will nearly always beat a spread-out, more balanced deployment, simply because of the ability to engage the enemy fleet piecemeal and defeat them in detail, since you concentrate fire from a larger number of ships on a smaller number of targets.

This looks like a fun idea. I’m all for making those backwards facing hard points usefull!

I actually disagree about the giant blob - whatever the logic is, GSB2 punishes you pretty hard for stacking ships. If they start in a huge blob, as soon as you deploy they spread out instead of going towards their first goal. The outcome is a garbled mess with ships in places you don’t want and at the very least it will slow down your fleet big time. They also impede each other’s progress quite a bit.

Typically a concave will crush a ship stack, but if you retaliate to the concave with an off center ship stack you may have an advantage. I think this is more balanced than GSB1 where I would just always mash everything together into a blob before hitting fight.

GSB2 doesn’t punish you for blob fleets badly enough to make them non-viable. In GSB1, if you take your entire fleet and arrange it into an echelon left formation at the bottom of your deployment area, as tightly packed as you can make them, they will invariably roll up the entire enemy fleet from the flank, unless that fleet just happens to consist of the one ship configuration that lives to eat your cruisers for breakfast. The exact same deployment method will work just as consistently in GSB2.

Dreadnaughts also explode for a good 800+ damage AoE, which means at least the all-important destroyers need to be placed to the side or behind a blob. Here you can get behind them - the forces in the center may very well have to fight without destroyers or try to deploy in an awkward ring.