Muldrf writes on March 8, 2008:
A little more information on the new Vs Battle system in the UUTools. It currently has two modes.
It was written as an answer to the "I want to fight specific Enemy AI ships". As many know that was the original nature of the 1on1 maps. You would pick the map that had that 1 enemy ship you wanted to fight and then pick your ship you wanted to fight it with. This was rather limiting and required a different map to be made for each individual ship. The 1on1 Missons will be removed from Stage 2 and replaced with the Vs Battle Missions, you will still be able to play 1on1s with the new Vs Battle system by picking just 1 enemy ship to fight against.
With the Vs Battle's first flavor you get to choose from 1 to 8 Enemy AI Ships and an Enemy Station if you like. These Enemy fleets can be made of any combination of ships from various races. So you can have 1 Fed, 1 Klingon, 1 Romulan, 1 Vulcan, 1 Borg, 1 Section 31.. With the standard Skirmish you are limited to 4 randomly choosen ships from a single race to fight against.
I also have set it up that you can have 0 to 8 Allied AI controlled ships on your side and an Allied Station if you like. These are optional choices. The reason I put them in was so you can have more flexablity in what you setup say you setup 8 First Contact Borg Cubes you will likely need more than your puny 4 ship fleet.
As for your own fleet. It is selected ingame in the regular Fleet Selection screens. So your fleet will be made up of all 1 race just like in the past, but your Allied fleet can be made up of any mixture of races. Also if you use the Vs Battle in combination with the Single Player Race Selection function already in the UUTools you will be able to fly as any of the races with your 4 man initial fleet.
Also the "Allied" Fleet ships support & follow your Main 4 Ship Fleet. They will follow you to the battle and then engage and go about their own business killing the enemy. This gives you more control of where they go than was previously availiable. They used to just follow you and target the ship you had targetted until you selected an individual one of your ships with the 1-4 keys. This lead to near instant death of any enemy ship you had targeted as long as you didn't change your ship selection.
Also when your Main 4 Ship Fleet dies you get direct control of up to 4 still living Allied ships. I mean they can be selected by the 1,2,3,and 4 keys. Previously what happened when your 4 ships died you would get control of the "next" ship in the fleet and not be able to select a different one and limited what you could do after that happened. This gives a bit more control to you during the fight rather than gettting stuck with control of 1 ship while everyone else is flying around doing what they want.
The other Vs Battle mode is still getting hammered out. It's similar to the first mode, but on a much larger scale. It's to early in it's development to give you any concrete details on it.
The Vs Modes will have various maps to play in such as Modified Stock Deathmatch, Modified UU 1.0 Maps, and Some Brand New maps, as Chris mentioned in his post below.
The Vs Modes are single player only. That's what they were designed to be and that's likely what they will continue to be due to limitations of the Legacy engine.
