#337333: Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today!

(This is a repost to fix the number in the title)

A long arc with an appropriately long title!

MARVEL at the world of tomorrow through the eyes of yesterday!
JOIN the elite ranks of the universe's greatest adventureres, the Tomorrownauts!
GASP at the horror of their arch-nemesis, the vile Baron Doomsday!
LEAVE GOOD FEEDBACK when you finish running it so I can fix any mistakes I made!

All this, AND MORE, await you in:

A *Bump* because I've still only had one person play this arc. SOMEONE must be interested!

Interested, but I still owe four reviews in my queue (which has cobwebs now), and I was already naughty and put the Guest Author arcs ahead of them....

Once my queue empties I'm only going to review arcs I choose, and this will probably be one of them.

This is on my list of arcs I want to play "for fun", too [after I work through my current "owed" queue]. I like the pulp adventure sound of it.

I played this arc this morning (took me nearly 2 hours it did) and commented in a PM. I said something about how this was silly, corny and stretched the joke out for too long but I still had to give it 5 stars for being well made and I had a good time playing it (or I wouldn't have stayed up to bloody 4 AM). I recommend it. It's just not my cup of dr pepper.

Some changes made based on feedback so far:

-Reworded some objectives in a few maps to make it more clear what you're looking for and where you're supposed to go.
-Changed the maps in missions 2 and 3 from "Large" to "Medium" maps - the number of objectives didn't quite justify the use of such huge maps.
-Changed around some required objectives, and made some previously required objectives optional, to reduce backtracking - now the most that you should have to do is front to back -> back to front to clear every mission (Which was my original intention, I didn't mean for people to have to run back and forth several times in a single mission - I was just going for a "Double dip" approach to map usage). Note that a couple of the maps are still non-linear, so you may miss an objective if you don't explore one of the paths.
-Removed a pointless objective chain from mission 3 - it was optional in the first place and the joke wasn't even funny.

Hopefully this should help to alleviate "It took me 2 hours!" somewhat - it will probably still take a while to finish, but my aim was like, an hour tops.

Doh, my 30s blaster is between missions 2 and 3 right now ... am I better off restarting?

You might as well finish if you're just insterested in the story - it's basically unchanged. I'm still testing the changes to make sure all of the objectives still spawn in the right places, as well, so the changes may not be totally functional yet.

*Edit* then again, mission 4 is one of the worst offenders for backtracking, which is the biggest fix I made this time around, so if you haven't hit that one yet you might want not want to run it in its previous incarnation.

*Double edit* Oh wait you haven't done mission 3 yet? Yeah, you definitely want to restart then - that one even gave ME trouble finding all the objectives.

Stillll working on finding a good map for mission 3. It'll be a bit I think.

*Edit* Okay! It should be much better now. I was using an arachnoid tech map before but they seem to be all kinds of buggy. It's just a standard tech map now.

Oh one more thing.

I really, really, liked the extra information you added to the contact when you click on him a second time during a mission. That's a really good use of that feature.

Swap ya a play through?
Really looking for feedback on Crown of Iron, Heart of Steel Part 1 (see sig)

This has my interest piqued, now.
Time to dust off my tanker, methinks, for some old school Hammer Time!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Arrow Girl (my archery/dev blaster) restarted the arc and got through mission 1. Haven't been able to do the whole thing in one sitting; last night was especially bad for distractions because I went out IRL for fajitas and margaritas, then did a lot of tweaking on my new story arc (struggling with level range choice).

I also spent some time trying to pose Arrow Girl near Captain Skylark in a "swooning" pose to get a screenshot in the style of an old Flash Gordon serial, but none of the animations I could find really seemed to work for this. Alas.

After restarting the arc, I tried shortcutting through mission 1 by purposely getting my allies killed, hoping to exploit the "timed mission fails if ally dies" bug, but it didn't work (mission didn't auto-fail). Possibly because the allies aren't required. Unheroic, I know, but I was trying to fast forward back to where I was before.

I love the retro science fiction "feel" so far. Took me awhile to realize the Tomorrownauts were recolored Longbow - they look great. Reminds me of Bubbawheat's comment about how versatile Longbow were, with the recoloring capability.

Only nitpick I have so far is that "Acadamy" should be "Academy" in mission 1's briefing.

@GlaziusF

Done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

Alright. If this arc is really squishy friendly, let's see how it holds up to my slightly sub-30 mind/kin controller, Bosses on but otherwise the old diff 1.

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Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Limits of the Contact Name field!

Actually I forget how much you can fit in there.

Anyway!

I'm gettin' a Roger Ramjet vibe from this guy. Or, y'know, any given Anderson/Ward co-production.

Huh. I was expecting more of a tech lab, but I guess this is an alright moon base.

Good lord these guys look goofy. I think it's the blue masks low-contrast with their skin. You might be able to do a better job with white-on-blue (and white-on-red)...

Assuming you want to do a better job. These guys look less like Longbow recolors and more like Longbow dipped in paint or something.

Very amusing retrofuturism going on here, all told. Vacuum tubes! Punch-cards! And I'd bet there's even one of those new-fangled dot-matrix printers lying around too!

Of course, we seem to be short one doomsday device.

Also I think I picked probably the worst possible hero to go through this, since these guys have like 75% psionic resist.

...having my leadership toggles both flip on when I got back into reality made for a hilariously appropriate fanfare. For a moment I wondered what you'd done.

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Giant eyeball status: still watching.

So me and the cap'n go take down the bad guy from last episode again, and...

OH BOY IT'S VOID HUNTERS! They actually have minds I can tear apart! Damage time for pinky!

...also I seem to be in the middle of a cautionary sci-fi tale about the dangers of the vacuum tube. I am legally obligated to share this CAVEMAN SCIENCE FICTION.

Strangely enough these guys appear to be actual Nictus and actual Void Hunters with standard descriptions. What are they doing in the middle of this retro campathon?

---

Huh. You can get Arachnoids pretty not-pale. Shame about the back appendages.

Aw gad. I jump down to get a better angle on some spiders and it turns out there's a boss and two patrols caught under the overhang.

Hmm. Okay, clicking the glowie, the new objective in my navbar is hella messed up. I imagine that's deliberate, but if I don't realize what PUT it there it seems off.

Anyway, he's got an ambush of robots, but they're all soon much too busy smacking each other around to worry me.

---

You know, I won't lie here. I was waiting for the worm to turn.

But uh... okay. It seems like the noble Captain has been corrupted by the Nictus. Does this mean Baron Doomsday has won? Could this be the END of our valiant TOMORROWNAUTS?

Huh. I was expecting more of a Johnny Sonata's Personal Hell thing here, but I guess there's not enough space to stretch out.

I confuse the first boss into annihilating his own summons, which is fun.

Hmm. Looks like the hostage here has her default description, unless that's deliberate too.

Gaw. Adamastor. At least I have some actual muscle.

...up until 25% health, anyway. Fortunately she flipped just as she was closing to melee and got footstomped into oblivion.

I was wondering where the Watchers were in all this. And... Doomsday has come back? Unheralded?

Man. Looks like Big W spawned in one of those dinky little side-chambers just out of view of the doorway. Not a pleasant experience for a squishy.

Anyway, Doomsday is back at the entrance -- really seems like that should be reversed, so you can just slip past him on your way to the truth. He may have made to run away there? Hard to tell with a controller. But he went down and said the same thing as always.

Big W drops as well. And I finally understand what the giant meatpile was saying - he wasn't cursing the Watchers because they brought me, he was cursing at me because I brought the Watchers. I kinda interpreted it the other way.

Why is the Watcher so eager to wax me, anyway? You'd think his eyes back at base would have picked up on the captain going cuckoo for Soul Puffs, the sugar cereal with bits of real innocent soul!

---

So, final boss. Wonder what the arena is here... oh, the Center's command center? So this is what it looks like. Ritzy.

Unfortunately Doomsday is some kind of DBlast/DA shadowtank, and he completely shreds the converted robots I shepherded into the fight.

Fortunately, I have a spare green jello alien to drop on him.

Hmm. Okay, I think I finally get what you're using the Void Hunters for -- Nictus taking human form -- but given the standard description and name it falls a bit short. You couldn't bring the Galaxys in? They're certainly dressed for the part.

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Storyline - ****. You know, when I think "flesh palace" in the context of a hokey 50's serial, I think green-skinned DB/MC temple girls. Not skindancers and meatpuppets. Bit of a tone shift there. Not that it in itself is a bad thing, as "50's serial gone wrong" is pretty much Fallout. But I was expecting a bleaker final mission, where the Nictus were too much for humanity and I was trying to shut down the UNIVAC over the vigorous objections of a mad Captain, maybe with Baron Doomsday as backup, because he can't conquer the galaxy if it's consumed by darkness. Nope, back to the serial for the final battle. Tone whiplash! I can buy going dark if you stay dark through to the end, but just dipping into it makes the whole thing seem out of place, and not in a good way.

Design - *****. Pretty great work with the recolors, aside from the Tomorrownaut Longbow which could use another look. The Captain is the part right down to his product-assisted haircut, and regardless of what I think of the appropriateness of some of the customs, they're all very evocative. maps are used pretty consistently and well, too.

Gameplay - ***. Council robots? Squishy friendly. EB/DA custom boss? Squishy friendly. Voids and Nictus? As long as you're not bringing a Kheldian, squishy friendly. Super Arachnoid? Too much regen to be squishy friendly. Necro/claws boss? Dude was popping eviscerate, probably not squishy friendly. Adamastor? Not squishy friendly, even if I only have to whittle down 25% of his HP on my own. DBlast/DA final boss? Takes out all the help I'm supposed to have along with his opening salvos, to pretty much no net HP change thanks to Dark Regeneration. This is probably an artificially low rating -- if I were playing with a stouter character I'd probably have fared better and been less frustrated.

Detail - ****. The Void Hunters (and the dark nova in mission 2) retain their original descriptions, which don't make much sense in the context of the serial. If they're supposed to be Nictus-controlled humans, the standard description doesn't parse that way. The Big Boss Watcher also had a more conventional Rularuu escort, rather than the tweaked eyeballs I was accustomed to seeing.

Overall - ****. Generally enjoyable schlocky sci-fi, but mission 4 strikes a bit of a wrong note, the Void Hunters need to be either replaced or re-explained, and the arc isn't quite as squishy friendly as advertised, at least not if you have bosses turned on.

Thanks for the review! A few comments:

-The Nictus are actually meant to be the same Nictus as in CoH - think of it as like "Same universe, different earth". Hence why they have all the same abilities as CoHverse Nictus (Though I suppose the way I wrote them, they're a bit more feral). I would have liked to give them custom descriptions, but I actually don't have the space for another custom group, even a custom group composed of standard mobs with custom descriptions (The arc is sitting at 99%). Of all the customs I would have had to sacrifice, the Nictus were the easiest since they're the same anyway, and the descriptions would only reflect how the "Tomorrownauts" world would interpret them. If I managed to find a way to free up some room, I'd probably throw the Nictus in their own custom group with galaxies as well to mix up the mobs a bit - that said, I really wish the "Nictus" group would spawn the fluffies that normally come out of Cysts.

-As I mentioned, I was able to run it without trouble on my fire blaster. I've never done it on a controller so that would probably be a bit of a rougher ride - the arc DOES have "Challenging" in the tags, though (Also, I believe the claws/necro boss is the one that's set to "Extreme" that the warnings mention - though that could be pre-mission 5 Baron Doomsday. I can't remember. It's only one of the two, though - I'm pretty sparing with extreme settings usually).

-The Flesh Palace has a bit of a story behind it. Originally that was the last mission and the ending was completely different, but I didn't like the original ending I had because I felt like I threw out a perfectly good story, so I changed how that mission ended and added on the final moonbase raid - but I still liked how the Flesh Palace mission was designed so I left it in there (With some of the clues changed to get rid of a lot of 4th wall breaking that was part of the original ending). It might not be pulp sci-fi but it's very much pulpy horror, so I think it still fits. I was also tempted to throw "This is NOT what you were expecting by 'flesh palace'" in the opening popup but I don't think I had enough characters left to fit it. It does strike as a bit of tone whiplash, I'll agree there, but I still kind of like the mission and it is important to the plot (Revealing the watchers). Doomsday also shows up in mission 4 as an optional objective, just because I felt like he should be in every mission - it's played off as a joke by the time he shows up in mission 4 since you've defeated him so many times (And yes, he is meant to run away at 75% health, hence why he spawns next to the door). This mission probably COULD use some re-writes, but I like the customs I used in it so I'll probably stick with the basic concept.

-The Big Boss watcher is actually meant to spawn solo, but he seemed to REFUSE to do so when I set his surrounding group to "Empty" (Instead always spawning with a Nictus escort). I gave him a Rularuu group instead just so his helpers would fit thematically until I could get it to work properly.

-The messed up objective in mission 3 is just a quick joke related to the system text it gives when you use the bio-neural interface (And the captain comments on it when you get back) - the needle goes directly into your brain and downloads the information, and doing so tends to mess up your speech centre for a few hours (That's also why the clue has the weird "Level up!" text).

*Edit*

Also whoops, she's not supposed to have the longbow description in the 4th mission - I guess I forgot to change it to the "Tomorrownaut" version when I added her.

Some changes made:

-Replaced canon Nictus with a custom "Nictus" faction with my own descriptions - had to replace "Mr. Boggs" with a standard NPC to make room, but his costume didn't really turn out how I imagined it anyway, so no big loss (It was the "Meat" I really wanted to keep in).

-Rewrote the intro and outro to mission 4 - Captain Skylark isn't possessed anymore, instead he comments on Kelly's possession (It wasn't really adding anything to the plot for him to be possessed for all of one mission).

-Added Captain Skylark as an ally in mission 5, along with the reprogrammable robots - hopefully he should be able to survive a little bit longer than they do against Baron Doomsday.

A lot of praise for this arc. The customs and the redone longbows look superb. A good touch was the clever use of the returning to the contact for detailed mission info.

I played this on Trolly, my leveling brute 0n +0/x2 and got clobbered a few times. Those Arachnoids are plain nasty and those void seekers pack a mean punch when you encounter two groups of them.

In mission 4 I was starting to loose interest. The map to big and horrible to scout for objectives. Once I got the mission objective. I left as fast as I could. Not bothering with the baron or the possessed ally. Seemed that I missed a big clue however as she was mentioned in the debriefing.

I failed the last mission. The baron kept healing faster then I could damage him so in the end I abandoned this arc.

Made a few changes, mostly typo corrections, but I've also removed or reworded a few objectives to try to make the story a bit more straightforward. I also modified the ending dialogue in mission 4 so that it (Hopefully) still makes sense if you skipped the optional ally.

Full review posted, complete with pictures!

Apparently there's a bug with the latest patch that prevents AVs with a minimum level above the arc level from scaling down to the correct level. This makes Adamastor spawn as level 40 in the 4th mission when the cap is 34, rendering the arc extremely difficult to complete solo, if not impossible.

As a temporary fix to the AV scaling thing, I've set the minimum level of the 4th mission to 40. It might mess up a few of the mobs in the mission, but 90% of the ones there should scale appropriately, and it will force the player to bump up to the same level as Adamastor.

Since the AV scaling thing has been changed back, I've reset the levels to their original values.

Also, I recently reinstalled CoH and apparently when you republish live arcs with custom NPC groups, it uses the data from your local drive rather than the data from the server. The upshot of this is that when I republished to change the levels, it ended up replacing the main villain and hero groups with groups composed entirely of the two fully customized characters I used instead of the dozen or so customized standard mobs. Luckily, I made a backup of my mission arc related folders before reinstalling so fixing the issue was as simple as a copy and paste job, but for anyone who might have played the arc recently, the Tomorrownauts group is NOT supposed to be composed entirely of Captain Skylark Shadowfancy clones, and Baron Doomsday is not meant to appear in normal spawns. These issues are now fixed, as well as every mob in the arc except for the Rularuu spawns used in one spot now has their proper, custom description, rather than the default CoH descriptions. I suppose now that there's more space to work with I could replace the Rularuu group with a proper custom "Watchers" group, it's just that they only appear in one spot in the entire arc so I haven't been in a huge hurry.

An important note: This arc is currently BROKEN and unplayable because of the issue they're having with the overzealous profanity filter in the AE. I think it's picking up "Doomsday" as a copyrighted term. Given that about half the main enemies of the arc have that in their name, I think it'll be easier to just wait for them to fix it than to try to rewrite the entire thing with other words.

-Also since apparently my last update was quite a while ago, I suppose I should add that now every single group in the arc has custom descriptions - even the one-off Rularuu spawns. The only ones that don't are the warwolf transformations of the LT+ galaxies, since there's no way for me to customize that (the power is hard-coded to spawn the Council wolves so even if I made a custom version it wouldn't use them)... but the transformation itself is explained in the custom galaxy description. Not that anyone can actually play the arc to SEE these changes. The arc itself is pretty much "done" at this point; I can't think of anything I would want to change. It's probably my own personal favorite of all the arcs I've written since it's so rare that I'll actually feel satisfied with something I've written.