Titan Gunship - Ork Encounter addon

Readme File:
Readme

Gunship 2.0
Made by Redeemed74 and TyoungLS
Using EZScar-2-020B.scar
With help from Maxxta
Map Tested by Iron_Father and Rah1

Compatible only with DOW Soulstorm (it depends heavily on special Soulstorm units)

Fluff:

Pride of the Imperial Navy, Flagship of the 9th Armada, the Titan Gunship is the only surviving maxa-warcraft of the great Age of Technology. Now fully restored and renovated, you have been given the incredible honor to take command of this revered vessel. The course is set for the Tallassar System to obliterate a recently spotted Tyranid Hivefleet. En route you detect a small asteroid, insignificant except for the indication of life forms – and the potential to see firsthand the immense firepower you now possess! Your long range “Omni Scanner” illuminates the rock, revealing a nest of Orks. Closing in on your prey, all 10 deadly Titan Cannons concentrate a devastating blast that nearly rends the asteroid in half! But above the cheers from your crew the first mate shouts out that something is going wrong. The Omni-scanner shuts off, thrusters die and your invulnerability shield fails as all your thermo generators go up in smoke. Perhaps the strain of all cannons firing at once was too much for the old ship?

You possess the technology and resources to rebuild the generators, and it should only take a matter of time. But might that nest of orks cause any trouble? Precariously close, you could be bothered by short range craft and should prepare in case of trouble. Little do any aboard know that this meager meteoroid has been exile for Warlord Gashgun and his Orkish army for nearly 4 years, trapped in interstellar orbit. They have done nothing but quarrel among themselves and prepare for the day a vessel might pass by close enough to commandeer. Desperate to get off, and craving battle, they see your ship as Gork's answer to their prayers. The volley of gunfire you just displayed frenzies their passion to take this ship for their own!

Crippled, but in no way intimidated, your mighty ship is well prepared for this kind of conflict. Armed with many powerful deck cannons, those Orks will be pulverized in their desperation to take the ship. But underestimating their innumerable horde, undauntable determination and craving for combat could be a deadly mistake. Victory over the Orks may prove your worth as captain, whereas defeat will give Gashgun the weapon of his dreams and your memory would be forever despised as havoc is wreaked across the Imperium. Fight well!

What's new in this update?

1. Lots of bugfixes including the installation problem, all known scar errors and multiplayer incompatibilities that were discovered with the first release.

2. Level of difficulty options – you now can make the game quite easy by choosing Easy, or truly insane by choosing Insane. The other levels of Standard, Hard and Harder work fairly well as well.

3. Audio speech – All the ingame printed messages are now audible. This is our first attempt at this sort of thing so we can't promise that it is of the greatest quality, but at least it is something.

4. A spectacular replay of a win on Insane difficulty for those who like action packed Dawn of War videos, or just want to see how to beat the game on the harder levels. Note, this replay can only be seen in Soulstorm with both patches, without any mods running, and shows up in the replay list as Titan Gunship Insane.

5. An extra high camera lua file. This high camera ability will remain possible even in other scenarios, although all you might see is fog. If you don't like it you can manually remove it by deleting the camera_high.lua from your Soulstorm-Engine-Data folder.

Installation:

To install this scenario, run the installation file and make sure that it is going into the correct place. A Titan_Gunship-Uninstall.exe file will be created inside the main Soulstorm folder, making it a lot easier to get rid of the scenario when you are tired of it. Along with this map is the documentation for EZScar and the latest version of the EZScar script. You are welcome to use and-or modify in part or in whole the Gunship.scar script for your own map or mod and do not need to ask for any specific permission. Please do mention, though, that you are using EZScar and keep its header intact.

Game Setup:

It is very important to use FIXED STARTING POSITIONS and PLAYERS SET TEAMS. You can leave any slots 3 to 5 closed if you like, and doing so will increase your squad and vehicle caps a little bit. Player2 must be set to be on team2 and should be ORKS, in order for the scar programming to work correctly. All other players should be set as your allies. It can be played as a single player, or as an online co-op.

The only objective this scenario is designed for is ANNIHILATE. Anything else will cause malfunctioning.

All the standard races should work. New Race Mods will not receive a forward base, but should still be able to play.

Starting Resources don't make any difference since everyone on the Gunship receives 50,000 Power and Requisition at the very start. Why not? You have been on the ship long enough.

Dealing with Lags:

This scenario involves large numbers of units, lots of Titan cannons and complex scar programming. It takes a top notch computer to run it in high resolution. If you experience lags, there are several things you can do:
1. DO NOT use “Heroes” as this takes lots of extra processing power
1. Lower the number of AI allies (leave one or more slots “closed”),
2. Lower the resolution settings on your computer,
3. If a mod affects the computer AI, use “Highspeed” if it is an option
4. Make sure your computer is not running other processes that slow it down
(virus scan, quick launch programs, etc.)

Known Issues:

The innovative nature of this scenario causes several unusual effects. These are the ones we know about, and there may be more. We are sorry about them, but at this time there isn't much we can do about them.

1. The flyers pass through the walls of the Gunship – we would love to have made them fly over the walls, but as it is they just go straight through.
2. Targeting enemies over the large Titan Cannons is very difficult – instead of firing at the fighta bombas, you can end up selecting the unit underneath. Moving your camera to view from different sides can help, allowing you to target the unit above or beside the cannon. The design of the battle keeps most of the action away from the big cannons, trying to minimize this problem.
3. There are blood splats around the ship and asteroid – this is what creates the artificial impass allowing the flyers to pass overhead and keep ground units from running through space. It would be nice to make them invisible, but to do so would require it's own mod and wouldn't let you use your own favorite one with the map!
4. Teleporting and deepstriked units can run around in “space” – We set up a system to automatically kill or re-teleport units that wind up in space, but it put a much heavier lag on the game. So right now everyone can run around if they really like to!
5. Cannons fireing at flyers in Space leave a crater decal – yes, and there isn't much we can do about this. By having a deep space setting we are going beyond the normal settings of the game. Perhaps we could fix it through a mod that kept the cannos from leaving craters, but at this point we are not worrying about it.
6. Some times clusters of Orks just stand around dumbly – Our programming for the Ork attack isn't perfect, and sometimes they just can't seem to figure out what to do. Blast'em anyway! They can suddenly get a sense of direction and pound you. Having the AI on Standard or Hard seems to cause this less than Harder or Insane.
7. It doesn't take any power to fire the cannons – yes, your amazing ship doesn't need power for the cannons, just the scanner and for the guns to be in auto-target mode. Fire away!

Tips and Tricks:

(Caution, contains spoilers! Adventurous players scan just get started, but if you become disgruntled with the map or are of the more cautions type this may be of help to you.)

This scenario is best played with several human players that can think – AI players will only help a little bit. Player1 is the only one who can power the large and small cannons and should concentrate on keeping the Fighter Bombas off the Gunship. Watch out! It can take time for your cannon to fire, and if the target moves over friendly troops or buildings you may destroy them too. When the Bombas do make it, some act as transports and will drop squads of fighters. At the start the orks are disorganized and will attack whatever is close to them. But then contingents will wisen up and develop strategies. Don't let them take control of all three critical locations at once, or in a few minutes they will gain ownership of the deck cannons and you will be blown away! Also, try to keep them from building Orky Forts on the deck, since a lot more units, even Squiggoths, could then come at you.

There are several ways to cripple the Ork's advance. It is up to you to figure most of them out, but you might want to know up front that successfully destroying key buildings on the Orky Asteroid will slow down and even stop their unit production. Your big cannons can still fire, if you can manage to reveal areas on it while holding back the orky onslaught...

The numbers of attacking Orks will not be affected by mods that allow higher squad caps, so settings for massive battles or no limits will make it much easier for you as defenders. If the game slows down because of lags it can actually help to use the deck cannons a lot more effectively. Have fun!

Disclaimer: While we have done our best to make this error free we can't guarantee that it will not mess up the mod you install it into. Keep your reinstallation files handy just in case you find that something isn't right and can't be fixed by uninstalling the Gunship add-on. By installing this you also agree that you will not hold it's creators responsible for other problems also that might happen such as your computer exploding during the volley of cannon fire or a Grot-Bomba targeting your house in revenge for killing so many orks!