Commander only short missions

A suggestion that I think will increase the single-player galactic war campaign:


short, small systems where the commander deems it inefficient to build a base or units, and clears the hostiles on his own.

I recall a few sections like that in TA and Supcom 1 and 2, and always found them very enjoyable and a nice change of pace. A breather from the big battles, if you will. Also, it's a good excuse to actually take out your commander for a spin, as you technically have no choice.
It would be intended as brief respite from the massive combat and should be relatively easy to clear, to remind the player they're in a massive, powerful war machine, and not just a construction vehicle that hides in a base most of the time.


Purpose: In single player, after clearing 5 systems with 15 planets each, each system taking a lot of effort, sweat and time, a quick short easy asskickin' will be a nice change of pace and keep the player interested in the singleplayer experience longer.
"Glad that battle is over. I better stop now as I can't be arsed to put in another hour... oh wait, that system there will only take me 10 minutes and I get to blow **** up with my commander!" <hooked again>


Technically, this should be fairly easy to implement. On system load, a commander would start with a small amount of resources, enough to provide means for repair or small escort. No means to acquire more metal is provided however. This should be easy to implement in system generation- small system, one small planet, (moon? asteroid?) no metal collectors allowed, and enemy presence must be small enough (and in small enough groups) to be easily bested by the solo commander.

Thoughts? Comments?

Sounds cool.

Certainly sounds cool, but how creative can these kinds of mission be? At the moment I can only envision a sort of super-micro-clickfest thing going on at the most "intense" moments of such mini missions. Of course, having a customizable escort might do it...

An idea just wormed in, thanks in no small part to my past playing of Warcraft III. But I think it's really dumb, haha. I'll just keep it to myself, unless somebody's curious for it.

Anyways, it would be nice to have bite-sized missions, I suppose.

Comm missions are an excellent way to get players familiar with all the abilities and features of the Comm. Obviously, there's only so much a single unit can do against the enemy. But the mission helps to push his limits.

This takes me back to the Red Alert series - as well as doing the big 'build a base and kill everyone' missions, you had missions where you started off with Tanya, or Volkov and Chitzkoi (in fact, I think even in C&C Tiberian Dawn (the original for those of you who don't recognise its full name) there was even one where you played as a commando...).

Please do it. By all means put meta-objectives in (like "rescue these extra units if you can be bothered, they'll form an honour-guard type arrangement around your commander") and so on to allow for longer or less-repetitive missions (after the third "womble around and kill anything that moves" commander only mission, it'll get boring, so stick the extra meta-objectives in and you're on for a winner)...

cool idea. those maps could have some random events which would make it still interesting to play

I thought of beating to pieces a car in Street Fighter. That kind of a breather from serious combat might be a fun bonus between levels.

Exactly my thought! It'll break the serious large-scale combat up as punching a car to bits did in street fighter. Plus, I also recall several missions in the previous iterations of TA andsupcom where you do in fact start off solo and have to fight your way to the base in some way or other.


The main reason I thought I'd mention the idea is, it seems fairly easy to implement in a simple fashion. when randomly generating a single-player galaxy, say every 15th system or so is one of these one-map commander romps. Obviously it'd also be available in custom skirmish generation. All the work that needs be done (minimally) is tweak the very low-scale side of the population and army size sliders, and get a no-metal-allowed tag added somewhere.

After that, of course, the quality of these little diversions can be drastically improved by adding a few random events as someone mentioned earlier, but then of course we're back on single player campaign territory.

I'd say, definitely spend some time looking into the possibility.