Testing Challenges before Posting

Is there an easy way to test your own challenges before posting them for others to have a go at?

I decided to try something a little different and created a challenge to kill a ‘space station’.

The space station is merely a static cruiser, and I disabled cruiser engines on the map (so the biggest ships moving would be frigates) and created a relief force in the corner of the map to add a time constraint. Of course, the relief force is heavily twinked, which would be no fun as a straight fight, but I figured the challenge of taking down the space station before they closed would make it fun and by avoiding the cost of the ‘space station’ the attacking force should have no problems winning overall - I gave the cruiser no weapons, and it cost me 10% of the overall budget.

So I posted the challenge, went to grab a coffee, and by the time I got back to give it a go myself four people had tried and failed to win it. Ok, I figured that’s a great outcome. But then I checked my messages… one of them kindly mailed me saying, “Well, I killed the station straight off”.

So my challenge has failed. Sure, there’s still a nasty twinked fleet that hasn’t yet been defeated, but morally anybody taking out the station has won anyway.

It may be that by giving less time before the relief fleet arrives (by positioning it nearer, or giving it better engines - it’s sloooow) I can keep the station alive, but that requires extensive playtesting. So simple query: How do I test?

This is my first set of ships created with that race too, so I don’t even have the benefit of playtesting the individual ship designs, let alone the challenge…

Only way right now is to send a challenge to yourself instead of selecting all.

Berny

And if you send it to yourself, it’s a good idea to save the deployment so you can repost it as a general challenge when you’re satisfied.

Oh wow I remember doing that challenge. I destroyed the space station with fighters and the relief force never moved at all so then I destroyed them fairly easily. I am sure I destroyed the space station well before frigates could have gotten to me if they were mobile. Space station was only worth like 25% of the points so you have to change it to 91% of the total points in order for the space station to die = a victory.

Yeah, I forgot to do that - and I spent ages putting on all the baby fighter squadrons and giving them unique escort duties :frowning:

It’s tough to find a balance where the attackers wont destroy the relief force with ease and get forever to attack the station, having the station strong enough to survive a minute or so while the relief arrives, and making it possible to kill the station.

Something like the shield repair guns on a cruiser would have been ideal, because I could have had a 50% budget cruiser that can’t defend itself but that would give serious support to a frigate force around it, balancing the fact they were only 50% of the size of the attackers. Or better yet, some heavy weaponry that needs proximity to the relief force to enable it - hmm, maybe that’s something for GSB2.

I guess the challenge as I envisioned it is an impossible balancing effort (especially against some of the fleets that have defeated me - took me 8 attempts to beat one retaliation with 100% of the budget available to me!) and I’m still learning how to build balanced fleets myself so finding something that’s sufficient challenge to everyone is always going to be tricky.

I just wanted to try something more interesting than “Here are 8 cruisers and a dozen frigates sat in a tight formation” as a fight (which was my first challenge, albeit for the benefit of a friend), and only after I posted it realised I hadn’t even managed to make the basic premise a reasonable fight.

Still, for a “second day owning the game” effort I’m happy with the experiment and I’ve had some very generous feedback in-game from people, so thanks everyone for that and I’ll come back with something better :slight_smile: