OSX SkyFighters 1945 MB 2 - Victory Conditions

The victory conditions determine when a mission is won (or lost). While this might seem like the last thing you'd need to set, understanding what can (and can't) be set for victory conditions has a big impact on how you design your mission. For that reason, we're covering the victory conditions early.



The image shows the "Set Victory Conditions" tab of the Mission Builder window. You can set any combination of the following conditions:
 * You Must be alive to complete mission: Selecting "Yes" (the default) means the that if the player (or the host, for an online game) gets shot down or crashes, the player/host team immediately loses (and the opposing team immediately wins) regardless of the status of any other victory conditions.  If you want the player/host to have the ability to restart some number of times, select "No" for this setting.
 * Required Individual Kills: The number of enemy fighters the player/host must shoot down.
 * Required Team Kills:  The number of enemy fighters the player's/host's team must shoot down.
 * Required Points: Objects you add to the mission have a points value associated with them (each type of item has a default point value that you can adjust as desired), and the player's/host's team collects those points when destroying items belonging to the enemy team. You can set this to a minimum number of points the player's/host's team must collect before they can win. This is a useful alternative to the "Targets that should be destroyed" setting, as that's limited to 20 items.  If you want to require more than 20 items be destroyed, give them high points values and then set a Required Points value that's the sum of all the items to be destroyed.
 * Location #1, #2, and #3: These allow you to set locations the player (or host, for multi-player games) must get their aircraft to in order to win the game.  For instance, the "Easy Hangar Fly Through" mission uses this setting to specify a point inside of the hangar, and flying the aircraft through the hangar then fulfills this victory condition.  This is one of the lease-used victory condition settings.
 * Targets that should remain alive and Number of items in list that MUST be alive: These two settings are related.  The first setting is a list that lets you specify targets that the player/host's team need to protect, and the second is how many items out of that list must stay alive (see the "Add Buildings and Vehicles" tab to understand how target IDs are set).  For example, if you list 20 items and state 5 of them must remain alive, the player's team is OK so long as no more than 15 of the items on the list are destroyed.  The moment that the 16th item is destroyed, the player/host's team will lose.
 * Check victory conditions after (seconds): If you want the mission to last a minimum amount of time, put a value other than zero here.  Otherwise, the victory or failure will be reported the moment the conditions are met.
 * Targets that should be destroyed and Number of items in list that MUST be destroyed: Much like the list of items that must stay alive, these control the items that must be destroyed in order for the player/host's team to win the game.

Things to consider when setting victory conditions: Make sure to play-test your creation to confirm the victory conditions you set are achievable and that the mission is neither too easy nor too difficult.
 * Make sure the victory conditions are achievable: If you're not careful, you might set conditions that can never be met. For instance, if you require 10 team kills but have included only four enemy fighters and they do not have restarts enabled, it will be impossible to score more than four kills.
 * Are you intending for the mission to be used for online play by multiple players? You might set a condition that the player/host's aircraft carrier must survive, to complicate matters for the player(s). This works well for games where the opponents are controlled by the computer.  However, if you get a human player on the "enemy" side during online play, they can easily win the game by choosing a P-51 (the fastest plane in the game) and making a high-speed kamikaze attack that will be nearly impossible to defend against.
 * How long do you want the game to last? The more victory conditions you set the longer it will take to achieve them, especially if required targets are located far from the player's starting position and/or each other.
 * How hard do you want it to be to win? A required target sitting by itself is relatively easy to destroy, while one defended by numerous AAA guns and/or destroyers will be risky to attack. Try to balance the challenge with how much frustration you think players will be willing to endure.

[This page still under construction, check back later for more content.]