STANTON

[icycalm]

A new mission has been added to Ghost Hollow in 3.19 that I've been waiting for for a long time, and that I would like us to approach as we do Dynamic Events, meaning there must be at least one officer present and everyone should take orders from him, everyone should be fully geared up as per their spec, and at least one person should be streaming (preferably on the ground, because that's where most of the action happens, I believe). The stream(s) should be titled according to the format "X-player Assault on Ghost Hollow #X with username and The Cult", and once the video has been exported to YouTube, the Commanding Officer should post it in this thread along with a debrief.

Normally, all the officers should be streaming, but recoil's still having issues with this, so if he's the only officer present, shubn should also be present and streaming, because he's the only Inquisitor with a strong enough rig to stream. Basically we need either one of Chev, ysignal or shubn to be present, otherwise mission is a no-go. Make sure to run a sound check before mission start!

Note that Inquisitors can go alone if they want, with whatever gear, not streaming, it doesn't matter. I am only talking about officers now. Officers are REQUIRED to do all the above every single time they go to Ghost Hollow, and make sure that all Inquisitors present also follow these rules. If you find this bothersome, no worries, you can switch to playing an Inquisitor and maybe someone else will want to take your rank.

Once you decide you want to play Ghost Hollow, ping the Star Citizens role on Discord as much time in advance as you can, and hopefully you'll get people to join you. If you don't get enough, you can cancel the attempt (you're the judge of what's enough, though I've heard 3 players is the minimum to have a decent chance of holding the place, as one of the players needs to be in the air, one I think has to hold the terminal, and the other one... I dunno, need to look more into it).

The setup is almost like a mini-Jumptown, or it can be seen as a mini battle royale running 24/7. You activate a terminal which pays you money as long as you hold it against waves of Nine Tails and/or players in the vicinity challenging you. Since it's a wooded area, inside and around a derelict wreck of an Aegis Reclaimer no less, the variety of approaches and tactics must be great, and I can't wait to explore them in the game and discuss them here with everyone.



Regarding the payout, it's been hard for CIG to balance this mission because it must be made to work both for 1 player who got lucky and has the place to himself in a quiet server, and for full-on org versus org battles. It's an incredibly difficult balancing act, and I don't envy the designers tasked with it. But for us, none of this matters. We want to play this mission above all for fun, and then also for training purposes, to learn to fight as a unit. The money, whatever it ends up being, will be a bonus.

Feel free to wildly experiment with vehicles and approaches. Take the Carrack if you want. Go full ground or full air or whatever. It gonna be wild!


P.S. If you are an Inquisitor, and join in this event with an officer present, I expect you to follow orders. If I see in the streams that you're ignoring them, you won't be able to play in official missions with us again. Conversely, as an officer you are expected to take charge of the situation. If you're just shooting your gun and not bothering to implement any kind of tactics, I'll switch your rank to Inquisitor. No hard feelings for either of these scenarios, I am just trying to make the official missions more fun for us by implementing tactics. Everyone's free to join us for these missions as long as they don't stand in the way of my vision for them. If you don't want to bother with any of this, just play the normal everyday missions with us where you can do pretty much what you like. Lord knows there's hundreds of those and more are added every update, so we'll never run out.

P.P.S. Ghost Hollow is an umarked location. Instructions on how to find it are here: https://starcitizen.tools/Ghost_Hollow

Ghost Hollow is a small unmarked settlement established within the derelict wreck of an Aegis Reclaimer on microTech. Certain missions may lead the player to this location, and members of the Nine Tails are known to occasionally occupy it.

Fun fact: This location was only added in Alpha 3.17.2, the update with which we joined the game last summer.



It's so cool that in Star Citizen there are unmarked locations in a level the size of a solar system, while in midwit "open-world" games the size of a village, everything is marked. Wild.

P.P.P.S. One set of spec gear per life! No exceptions! Don't run back there with random gear after a death! I don't want to see random loadouts on the streams!

[icycalm]

So here's what I have in mind for our first crack at Ghost Hollow.

We load all our gear into a Carrack, and I mean ALL of it, all 5 gear sets per person, so that if the Carrack gets blown up, it's mission over. This will make the mission feel far more real, plus of course all our respawns will be happening very close to the front. Another nice bonus is that, instead of simply logging off when we've had enough, we'll have to fly the Carrack back home and land it and store it properly, because it'll be carrying so much valuable gear. So we'll have to plan our exit from just as much as the entry into the mission. This can get tricky because people tend to log off one by one, so that after a couple people have left, the remaining will have to start thinking about wrapping things up. Not sure if this will be impacted by precisely who owns the Carrack. I think we should be able to fly it back and store it regardless of who owns it? But we can also just call it a night whenever the Carrack owner has to go (so he would have to let us know at least half an hour before his departure).

So we fly there, and we establish a BASE. This is another approach we've never taken before. In Jumptowns we try to land as close to JT as possible, so that we can quickly drive there after every death. So we typically land 50-60km away. My new approach here is to land much further away, possibly out to 100-150km, in order to ensure the Carrack/base will be safe, and then we use a DROPSHIP to ferry troops and possibly vehicles to the front after every death. With a ship doing the trip, it makes little difference if the distance is 100km or even 200km.

Since I have operational command, it would be ideal if I just stayed on the Carrack the whole time, and that's not as boring for me as you might imagine, especially if many people are streaming so I can sit in my office while keeping tabs on the action and issuing commands. But since we don't have that many people, every extra person on the front counts, so the more suitable role for me to support the front is as the dropship pilot. If we use the Retaliator for this, it can also double as a torpedo ship to take down enemy A2s and other big ships flying around. And finally, by flying back and forth between the front and the base, I can keep the base "active" so that the Carrack doesn't disappear again like last time. Actually, we aren't sure if it disappeared, and it's not supposed to disappear anymore after Persistent Entity Streaming was added, but Adjudicator couldn't see it after we'd left it for a while, so this is still a concern that we haven't fully figured out. At any rate, it's good to have someone periodically checking up on the base, and the natural person for that is the dropship pilot.

So first we establish a base a solid distance away from Ghost Hollow, and unload there as many ships and vehicles as we can carry. Ideally we would have ALL our ships and vehicles there, well in advance even. And then we fly sorties trying to figure out some tactical plan, since this will be our first crack at it. I suppose we can try bombing the area with the A2 and then rolling in with some vehicles, as in the last JT. This could be our first approach. And then we take it from there. We still don't know how this mission works. I think there's something in the air you have to hold, so we'll also need fighters.

In some ways, this will be a simpler mission than JT. In other ways, it will be more complex. There won't be packages to ferry out and secure in our ship and fly out to be sold. But there will be something in the sky we'll need to protect, so we won't be able to ignore the air dimension and go there without fighters.

Any ideas, post them here. This mission will basically be a Jumptown we can play every Saturday that we aren't playing roleplaying games. It's so exciting.

[shubn]

I have reservations about putting all of our gear on the Carrack. 30ks have been happening quite a bit lately, and if we get hit with one and the "30k protection" doesn't kick in (which it only does sporadically), the Carrack will have to be claimed, meaning we'll lose everything. As for storing it, I believe only the owner can do that. Unless if simply landing it in a hangar will count as storing it.

Regarding the thing in the air you need to hold, you're probably thinking of the Comm Array around microTech. The mission is only available while the Comm Array is down, and it must stay down. It's likely it will already be down, but if it isn't, all you need is an Arrow and a Tigersclaw, and if all goes well, you can be in and out in about 10 minutes. Then the saboteur can either regroup with the rest of the team, or stay there and defend with a railgun for instance (you should be pretty much invisible to any ship if you stay outside in EVA). I don't know what happens if the Comm Array is reactivated while you're withdrawing the money. Maybe you lose the current withdrawal.

[icycalm]

Didn't know about the Tigersclaw. I'll add a bunch to the spec.

It sounds like someone will have to guard the Comm Array. That'll probably be the trickiest part for us.

We'll only take 2 gear sets in the Carrack, plus the 1 we'll be wearing, and leave 2 at Area18 for this Saturday. Once the servers are in a better place, we'll start taking all our gear with us.

Regarding the Carrack-storing issue, for tomorrow, we'll just end the game when Adjudicator has to leave. From next time, I'll be inquiring in advance who can stay the longest, and that person will be taking clone 2 which has a Carrack. Eventually I would like to buy my own Carrack, and take the responsibility of flying it back to myself. Last man on the ship etc. But I don't think I can afford one this ILW. Unless I gamble on KuCoin in the next few days and do well lol. That's also a possibility.

[icycalm]

Alright I got a rough game plan for our first assault.

1. shubn scouts ahead with the Razor EX, then flies it back to our base for safekeeping, hops in his Gladius and goes to hack/guard the Comm Array.

2. ysignal repeats his playbook from last JT: first drops the heavy vehicles within driving distance of Ghost Hollow, then bombs it. He then flies the A2 back to base for safekeeping and I fly him back with the dropship.

3. After the bombing, the ground vehicles—a Nova and a Ballista—move towards Ghost Hollow. Chev has operational command from his Nova, with Adjudicator in the Ballista and Rory and Exiled split between the two. All 4 of them are ready to exit their vehicles if need be and move into the Reclaimer carcass on foot. It all depends on how Chev wants to handle the assault.

4. Supposing the assault is successful, we now go on defense, so someone should man the Nova and someone else the Ballista, while 2-3 people remain on foot inside and close to the terminal.

5. We can switch some roles around for subsequent attempts so that e.g. shubn doesn’t get bored up in space the whole time. Also, we move assets around if need be, depending on where we encounter the most resistance, e.g. if the fight in space is difficult we might use 2 or more fighters, etc.

6. My job is to ferry people from the Carrack as they respawn there, as well as shoot down large ships—all with the Retaliator. I will only go on the ground as a last resort in an emergency. I also need to keep the Carrack alive.

This all presupposes that we bring a shitton of vehicles with us so we can experiment. So the logistics in the first phase will be important: how efficiently can we move a large fleet? We can also have one or two people going back and forth and bringing more vehicles in the middle of the assault if needed.

That’s all I got off the top of my head without having seen the location and not even knowing exactly what the mission entails. Any thoughts, post them here. I can’t wait to explore this mission. It’s essentially a 5th Dynamic Event we can play whenever we want. I’ve been looking forward to it for months ever since it went on the roadmap.

[ChevRage]

I've only just had a chance to check today, and I no longer have the Nova or any of the ground vehicles. I still have the Super Hornet though.

[icycalm]

So first order of business is to buy you a Nova. We should have enough if we pool our money. Then as many Ballistas as we can get for the Inquisitors.

[ysignal]

I have a Nova Chev can use.

[icycalm]

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... _enjoy_the



Cool video someone made on their Ghost Hollow experience.