Special Ship Goals

Does it have to be the player?

Hello,

I'm trying to create a cascading series of special ships for a set of missions that define quite a large battle. This is a flowchart of what it is that I'm doing:

1. Player enters system with battlegroup allied.
2. Antagonist fleet arrives (special ships); one of thier heavy cruisers or other capital ships set as an even more special ship.
3. Big war type thing.
4. When the special cruiser is destroyed, it activates another silent mission that brings in more special ships (the enemy reinforcements) including another similarly mission-bit-set'd cruiser or something; also, player's fleet reinforced.
5. Repeat- but then the special ships that are invoked are an enemy of the fleet that the player is opposing but not nececerraly allies of the player.

That is the basic line-out. My question is weather or not a special ship goal ship has to be destroyed by the player, or can it be another ship? Does the player here specifically have to seek out and destroy the cruiser that will activate the next fleet, or can any other ship destroying it havethe same effect?

Any insight is appreciated,
Rik

If the ship is destroyed, that's it. Doesn't matter whether the player alone does it or if it's someone else. (in fact, it can be sometimes an advantage if you are in a system with people who hate Pirates, and have something like the Bounty Hunter missions of the Pirate Hunt ones from Arpia)

Can you really call more ships into the system like that though? If it works, that'd be awesome.

And yes, that's exactly how I beat the last Fed mission. I ran like heck while other people blew the Raven up.

It does work. At least, my knowledge of this tells me it works (since missions can be started/aborted in space (that I have done)).

Really? How do you set it up? I couldn't figure out how to do that.

In the ncb section of the mission editor (whichever one you use), there's a field concerning "when the player completes the special ship objective", so you put "sxxx" in there ("xxx" representing the mďsn ID you want to be started).

Make the "xxx" mission be a mission that is offered by a përs resource ship (so that no one will get it on a planet, and you won't get it either unless it's offered by one përs, which shouldn't be the case (unless you screw up)), and it should be fine.
As long as you put "jump in after a delay" I suppose (don't want to think what would happen if you put "place randomly" )

I think that they would appear at random all about the map after a short delay, perhaps simulating ships arriving from multiple destinations.