I've just finished the BZ-CC campaign. I waited and played with the 2.0.140 patch hoping that there would be no mission breaking bugs remaining. Indeed no missions were broken, however I did encounter some annoying issues.

Throught the campaign the majority of enemy units are spawned and not created via factories. That is generally OK however it's so blatant in some missions that it just brings the entire experience down.

For instance:

On Thin Ice

There's a Guardian that keeps spawning near the Dropship dust-off area and then goes to the little hill above the biometal pool between your base and the enemy base.

In my playthough I had units there intercepting it along its route and as such it kept spawning and dying several times before the mission was over.

The AAN

The Assault Tanks that attack your base spawn just a little bit to the west, half-way between your base and the enemy base. They continue to do so even if you have units there or even if you've passed that region. At one point I had units stationed there so when the tanks spawned there was a big pile-up with units colliding and flying in all directions.

Braddock

Leading up to the enemy base there are two paths: a western one near the lava and an eastern one. On the eastern path Tanks, Scouts and Mortar Bikes spawn. Like in the mission before they keep spawning even if that area is under your control.

For these three missions I suggest moving the spawning points to less-obvious locations. Or, preferably, have them spawned at the Factory/Kiln as long as its available and then give them waypoints to navigate.

The campaign has many other issues, it's generally unbalanced in mission length and difficulty and it relies a bit too much on scripting but fixing these three missions shouldn't be that difficult or time consuming and would make a big difference in player experience.

I thought the campaign was very good - some missions very hard, but at least doable, unlike that big community project campaign - what a cluster F-ck that was, i could only do the first two missions i think and that was that, dead end no matter what i tried.... and i consider if i cannot complete a campaign mission 'in any game' without being forced to go and ask something outside, because the information provided in the game itself is lacking, then i classify that campaign as a dud.

Forgotten Enemies' campaign is indeed a challenge. It requires creative thinking and careful force management - it was after all designed for players who have not only beaten the campaign on the hardest difficulty but also gained significant experience in playing against other players.

Yes to all of the above for me, and i realized it required more creative thinking....

The difficulty level was not the problem that i had with it. It was either the second or third mission that i would complete and then ...... nothing!, stuck. At first i was into the challenge of trying to work out how to do it, but after repeating the mission a hundred times it was time to write it off as a failure.

Its the lack of sufficient information that irritates me, not just this game either, it seems to be a frequent issue with third party software in general. One example is many times i tried to install an Amiga emulator so i can play some of the old classic Amiga games... Hybris, speedball 2 etc.

I will be happilly following the step by step instructions, then suddenly a step is missing? And i am like "well what the F- do i do here? No answer.... forced to abort install, happened EVERY TIME ... F-ing sick and tired of missing information, sick of it, no patience for it.

I will tell you something else, i never seem to have this problem with official/commercial software, it is only the third party private coders who simply refuse to give coherent instructions.

Forgotten Enemies is 18 years old now, and most of its documentation was released online - link rot and similar afflictions have led to much of that disappearing. It's also gone through a lot of unofficial updates from a variety of other mod developers of varying quality and skill. The best version to use are still the original releases for 1.2 - which of course comes with the problem of being largely incompatible with modern systems.

A BZCC-compatible version is in the works and should hopefully not suffer the same issues you are encountering.

I hear there is a new patch incoming. While designed to fix pathfinding and multiplayer issues maybe they can also fix the issues mentioned here earlier.

If the AI cannot be left alone to do its business and scripts need to be used I'd rather they be a bit less obvious.

!8 years old? hmmm, at that age i dont think that it can be the same community project i was thinking of?

It's the only community project BZ2 has really had. First mission is an escort affair on mercury, second is a search-and-rescue against a new race on a desert planet, third one introduces teleportals. Sound familiar?

FE isn't 18 years old it's more like 15, we only started working on it in summer 2000 ....

The first part was released approximately 18 months later, and the full version was released maybe 18 months after that, so roughly 2003 or so, but development continued for quite some time culminating in the rev C patch... I can't remember exactly when that was released though - probably another year or so later at a guess.

That is interesting - the sources I could find listed it as *releasing* in summer 2000... time to go dig those up and get them fixed, I think!

It would have been impossible for FE to release in 2000 if you think about it, the game was only released in early 2000 in most parts of the world and December 1999 in the US.

Modding for BZ2 was slow at first because we didn't have access the the XSI files for quite some time so it was impossible to make any models for the game, and even when they were released we still had to figure out a lot of stuff for ourselves which took time.

We first had access to the XSI's at around the time the 1.2 patch dropped and this is when folks from the community first started talking seriously about a large scale mod project.

Another crucial event was the release of BSer's DLL scriptor, without this essential tool FE probably would never have happened.


After that momentum built up fairly rapidly and the rest as they say is history. :)