@CommanderArgelo Adoxa made a few cool mods for me, they’re on his site, they’re called matchjob, matchplayer, and post story diff, get them and read the usage files. They can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

I asked for them because when you finish the story and return to New York it’s no challenge at all, you have to fly to Rheinland to take a mission worth doing. Guy’s a legendary wizard, don’t know what we’d have done without his help for all these years.

You have an awful lot of work to do if you want to try and go deep with manual editing of mission files, it’s a spiders web, and while we have all been down that road at some point, these days we’re not really around to walk people through it.

You’re still going to need to edit equipment files for each base, plus some npc loadouts for police if you want to make a system like New York suitable for a little more difficulty, but with a few little changes like that you can make it more like Kusari space.

@CommanderArgelo Rankdiff.ini and mbases.ini in the missions folder.

@CommanderArgelo Well done, it always feels nice when you start understanding which files relate to others. You just have to remember to keep testing as you go so you don’t do a lot of work that you don’t like afterwards.

I guess you know that placing ; before any line means the line won’t be read, so comment out all those destroy missions except the hardest and then see what happens when you take it. If it turns out that the hardest difficulty against liberty police that only have a single level 1 ship loadout isn’t what you hoped it would be then you’re going to have to fix the problem you just created for yourself.

How would you fix that, by creating more difficult npc ship loadouts for them, but then how do you make them spawn, by increasing the difficulty of in system encounter zones, if you do that what happens when you start a new game and you’re confronted by ships of a much higher level than you are in your starflier.

Missions might spawn several waves of lower difficulty npc’s, or they might just throw a single wave of 2 high level npc’s at you, it’s math based. You might find that a powerful support wing turns up that wipes out your inferior opponent, or vice versa. Weapon platforms could spawn you can’t deal with.

Outcasts and corsairs in particular have the potential to spawn in as very powerful ships that hardly anything in the settled systems can contend with.

I did go some ways down this chain of thought myself a long time ago and then asked Adoxa to help me out because it just didn’t work in single player storyline play. I resorted to waiting until the storyline was finished and then having the changes kick in, the post story difficulty file he made is great for that.

Test, test, test. Backup what works before you make too many changes. Some ideas seem great at the beginning, but at some point we’ve all gone off on a mad editing spree that we later regret. Hope you have fun creating your own version of Freelancer, it’s a really great game to mod.