I'm in the process of expanding a mission I authored awhile back. It was way too short to qualify for rewards and needed some more oomph, so I'm adding more to the story.

What I wanted was to give the player the option to follow a safe course and avoid combat, or to choose sides in a battle and have the other side attack the player. I also wanted to fix it so that once the player chose sides, they couldn't go back and also choose the other side. I also wanted to preserve the option to just make a break for the planet.

I tried to keep it simple, I really did. But I kept running into limitations and had to keep reworking the objects, triggers, states, and dialog success/fail.

I finally set it up so that the player has a choice of three satellites to interact with (or even none!), instead of just talking to one contact to set up the logic that triggers the events I want based on a conversation tree. After two days of this, I finally got the basic logic working. I still don't know yet whether I will be able to successfully spawn the friends and enemies the way they need to be. I think it will work -- I hope it will work, because I really don't want to have to tear this down again.

What it boils down to is that the Foundry elements of components and objectives are rather restricted in how they can interact with each other. Component A can change state based on triggers X and Y, but not Z; Component B can only change state with triggers Y and Z, but not X, etc.

We really need better (and less frustrating) ways of setting up branching and optional objectives and to set up decision-making trees in a more logical and less roundabout way. I will say that, in some ways, the Foundry has greatly improved over earlier iterations and I look forward to even greater flexibility and usability in the future. But the limitations are driving me nuts...