# General Advice

| This section gives some general advice for using FRED2. The subsections are:

- Designing Missions
- Testing Missions

## Designing Missions

| Before opening FRED2 to build a new mission, spend some time with pencil and paper. Decide what the player's goals are, what ships will be involved, and what major events will occur in the course of the mission. The most exciting missions are those where the player (a) cares what happens and (b) just barely saves the day. As a mission designer, it is your job to make sure these things happen.

Your story is set up in the briefing. Make clear what each side has to gain or lose in this battle.

Radio messages are a powerful way to involve the player. The fate of a ship is much more interesting if its crewmembers call for help, brag about their successes, and worry about impending danger.

Balance is crucial, but you can also subtly arrange events so that it's almost always a close call. Have allies show up to reinforce the losing side. Don't go too far with this, though; if the ship that the player is protecting automatically repairs its jump drives as soon as its hull gets down to 5%, anyone playing the mission more than once will realize that their actions don't matter much.

There is a temptation to make a gigantic mission with dozens of capital ships and hundreds of fighters. Resist it. Not only will such missions bring even the most powerful computers to a crawl, but the player will rightly feel they have little effect on the outcome. Keep your missions on the same scale as those in the main FreeSpace 2 campaign.

Capital ships and fighters should be used differently. If you give a fighter or bomber wing a job, you can expect them to do it or die trying fairly quickly. Capital ships, especially the larger ones, are not as flexible. They cannot steer around obstacles (and may even try to fire through friendly ships), they move very slowly, and they take quite a while to destroy. Don't think about what your capital ships will do, but rather about where they will go; give them choreography rather than commands.

## Testing Missions