Poll: Still With Us? (August 16, 2015)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
It's time for our annual birthday poll! We know many of you have been around since the beginning, but there are lots of newcomers too. Where do you fit in?



The old poll inquired about the game with the best navigation map. Wing Commander 3/4 just barely edged out Wing Commander 1/2 by a tiny margin, and Privateer was also a very close third. I'm honestly shocked it was close at all. Who used the WC3/4 map for anything? I'd like to hear from people that voted for this option! It was relatively common to reroute nav points in the first WC and Privateer games, but by WC3, most pilots pretty much followed the assigned course. I didn't expect Prophecy and Secret Ops to have as strong a fourth place showing as they did, but the map in that game was actually quite useful for determining which enemy bombers were targeting friendlies during escort missions.

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Original update published on August 16, 2015
 
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Every time I looked at the poll progress I couldn't work out the reasoning either - I was thinking that people might be voting more on emotional attachment than the maps' actual utility. I agree that WC1/2 sometimes made it necessary to manually change your flight plan (and you would sometimes run into trouble if you deviated from your scheduled patrol route!) and Privateer by its inherent free exploration nature made it necessary for you to use the nav map often. I often used the WCP/SO map as my targeting computer, but I honestly can't recall ever having to use the map in WC3/4, other than maybe the last mission of 3, where you would keep getting interrupted by waves of Kilrathi until you engaged your cloak. Sure, having a 3D map was a nice addition, but I didn't really find it that useful.
 
Privateer was my vote, being my first game I could explore a Wing Commander nav chart in a meaningful manner. The fear was palpable if you jumped into a quadrant without a chart. Nothing felt more free than flying through Gemini. The Exploratory Service missions to this day still inspire fear and space is appropriately black.

1/2 I can see as it was the first nav chart but 3/4 eludes me. I think I may have glanced at it once or twice for curiosity and seeing a map of Kilrah land mass. Prophecy/SO almost felt like cheating it was so useful for tracking bogeys. Armada's nav chart was the whole game but you couldn't explore the individual systems beyond jumping between them.
 
I only looked at during the final mission so I'd remember at which nav point to cloak.

Yeah, that was a big problem for me at first. Because I never checked the nav map, I never saw that message and got stuck because I didn't cloak prior to arrival.
 
Yeah, that was a big problem for me at first. Because I never checked the nav map, I never saw that message and got stuck because I didn't cloak prior to arrival.

Yep, exact same problem. I remember beating Hobbes and Thrakhath and wondering why the hell fighters kept spawning. Other than that, I've never looked at it in any other mission.

Besides the requirement of using Privateer's, I used the WCP/SO map a lot for bomber interception. It's almost required for Standoff in some of the defense missions.
 
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