The lack of strategy in Wing Commander

MuffinMan

Spaceman
In some hard missions, (like the mission Lashing Out mission) your success can be sometimes based on pure luck. You fail not because you were under-performing but because you wingmen were behaving like idiots and get themselves killed (therefore mission failed due to casualties).

In Lashing out mission (nightmare difficulty), I killed about 20 cats only to find myself failed at the second cap ship because the bomber girls get themselves killed while they were trying to bomb the cap ship. I've repeated the same mission about 5 times so far and the same thing is happening, the only solution would be tweaking the difficulty for this mission and making it dull (duh!!)....not satisfying!

I realized that this happening because there's a lack of strategy element in Wing commander.
Like the commands are really limited (attack my units, form my wing, break and attack), if there were more strategic commands, the game could be more interesting and the play would feel like he's really more of a Wing COMMANDER rather than the hero who kills the most.

Here are some commands that can be really useful:

-Lure enemy fighters away of their capital ship.
- Engage enemy fighters only away of the cap ship (attacking enemies and keeping distance of enemy cap ship).
- Fighters, engage enemy turrets
-Bombers, don't attack cap ship.
-Fighters, protect bombers.
-Bombers, attack capital ship.
-Protect our cap ship of incoming torpedoes. (useful in some escort missions and protecting mother ship missions).
 
Don't forget that you're playing a Wing Commander game (-mod), Standoff offers pretty much every command available in the original games. And as for luck and wingmen AI, well if you've played Wing Commander 1 and 2 you should be used to that.
 
Unfortunately the wingman commands are buried deep within the game code and are difficult to edit. I have successfully completed every mission of Standoff on Nightmare, so just keep trying - it is possible to win. Use your nav map (Ctrl-N) to find enemies who are attacking the bombers and vector after them. Every time you destroy an enemy fighter, re-check the nav map to see what fighters are going after the bombers.
 
Unfortunately the wingman commands are buried deep within the game code and are difficult to edit. I have successfully completed every mission of Standoff on Nightmare, so just keep trying - it is possible to win. Use your nav map (Ctrl-N) to find enemies who are attacking the bombers and vector after them. Every time you destroy an enemy fighter, re-check the nav map to see what fighters are going after the bombers.

I know, sadly, but maybe someone would be able to edit them somehow, or make add-ons commands without editing the initial ones.
 
Lashing Out is one of the harder missions on nightmare (and 20 kills probably isn't enough - my run in the attached video has 28), but it's far from impossible and definitely very strategic.

See, the mission designer played a dirty trick on you in Lashing Out. It's a very clever dirty trick and whoever it was (Quarto? PopsiclePete?) should be proud of themselves.

This is the dirty trick in question:
lDgFD.png


Kilrathi reinforcements arrive in two waves. Three Drakhri arrive from completely the opposite direction to the main reinforcement wave which shows up about 30 seconds later. So if you kill off the initial wave of fighters, both your autotarget function and the wingman AI will go haring off after the Drakhri, and leave the bombers which are at this point probably torpedoing the Ralatha completely uncovered from the second, much larger wave, when it arrives.

Strategy: order "Form on my wing" when everything in the vicinity of the Ralatha goes down, and fly past it's stern or towards the second Kilrathi wave before ordering a break and attack when it arrives.
Like so:
This should get you up to at least around a 40% success rate...

edit: To address the wider point, I sort of agree. Though I tend to think that all we'd really need is an X-Wing style "ignore my target" to solve 95% of the problems. There is a fair degree of variability in terms of how Standoff's large battles go - individual missions can be very hard or very easy depending on how the AI fight goes, but then a lot of the strategy in Standoff involves getting your side on top of the fight at the start. I'd love a more tactical Wing Commander game, but I doubt such a game would ever be made.
 
I seem to recall many of these already being in the game in some form, though some require more micro than others. Are you familiar with the nav map? That seemed quite useful for the more difficult missions.
 
I just wish there was some way (in every Wing Commander game) to tell the damn bombers to stay the hell back until we've actually had time to thin the fighter cover and clear some turrets. Or, at the very least, for the mission planners to launch the "wild weasels" with a 5 to 10 minute head start!
 
Illanin...I love your videos. Your dry delivery is perfect.

Only problem is...this video that you linked to isn't "Lashing Out". It's either "Rearguard Action" or "Holding the Line" (not sure which), the mission one flys immediately after "Lashing Out" (where you have to escort Clydesdales on a minelaying mission).
 
So it is. You'd think I'd have noticed given there's a communication from one of the minelayers in the freeze-frame preview.

For some reason I can't edit the original post. Oh well, here's the video that I should have linked:

I'm glad someone likes the videos, anyway. I'm about to record my version of "Tactical Withdrawal", that should be appearing sometime tomorrow I guess. Eventually I intend to have all the winning path missions and Ep5 losing in video format. I might eventually go back and do the other losing path missions, but that won't happen for a while (the actual Let's Play is being done over at Something Awful, and some of the audience are impatient to get on to WC3 because they want to play at selecting dialogue choices).
 
Hello,
Is there a way to target more easily the bombers or the target to defend ?
In the mission with civilians (22 or 23), there are so many ships that i can't see where are the broadswords, or i waste time to find them. When i use ctrl-N, i can see them, but i dont know where i am in the 3-d map, i m a bit lost... And for the bombers, i have to cycle T very fast to find them. I dont remember in Prophecy, but there wasn't a shorcut for select target bombers and for the torpedoes ?
Anyway, how do you handle these missions ? i always pass trough whitout much problems by shooting the most quickly the light fighter next to me ( target U ). For the bombers, i know where and when they come after some try^^
I still have fun since the release, and i try to improve my result.
 
If you target a fighter in the nav map, it will draw a line from your current position to the fighter you have targeted. I don't think Prophecy has a key for targeting bombers or torpedoes (Starlancer and Freespace have them, but both were released after Prophecy), but you can select any given target in the nav map by right-clicking (I think) on it (except sometimes the game then flips back to the target you had before you loaded the nav map and I have no idea why). As for how I play Standoff, killing the nearest fighter is normally my first approach, and then I refine it based on experience. The tactics discussed in the Episode 5 missions of the Standoff Guide are the ones I use, because I wrote them...eventually the rest of the missions will be updated. Probably. As for the specific mission you're talking about, this is how I did it:
 
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Thanks ! so many years after prophecy i finally understand how work the map :p I should have read the manual more carefully...
 
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