having trouble in chapter 5

A

Aeson

Spaceman
Hello everyone,
Im having trouble in the first major strike mission in chapter 5 i can fly either a rapior, crossbow or sabre and no matter how well i do i eventually get worn down my enemy reinforcements. And at best i can only take down one major ship and one little frigate. Then its anti fighter duty. But it seems the bombers never ever kill all of the ships. Any ideas about what im doing wrong? Im racking up some serious kills but i eventually run out of afterburner fuel and then its all over, also enemy reinforcements every 2 minutes makes this one a real bitch. Thanks.
 
This is almost certainly the hardest winning path mission in the game - certainly it's the only one I've not beaten on Nightmare, at any rate. In some ways it's probably slightly too epic a mission in that your success is a bit too dependent on how well your wingmen fly, but you can do a few things to even the odds.

Conventional wisdom is to fly the Sabre on this mission, for all that the Rapier is the better fighter. If you can take down the carrier the Kilrathi get far fewer replacement waves, so it's a good ship to go after. Alternatively, your wingmen suck enormously at correctly torpedoing frigates, so that's not a bad plan either. Ordering your wingmen in on the carrier while you take down Targu-IIs is another option.

Whatever you do volleying off your missiles at fighters first up in order to give Confed some numerical advantage is definitely a good plan.

But overall this mission is just really hard; correct tactics will only get you so far. It's less luck-based than, say, Kurasawa-2, but a lot does come down to wingman competence. The best difficulty level to play on is probably Hero.
 
The Crossbow for the win!!! I thank you for the advice llanin. I didnt get it until I finished the mission. My strategy was the just bully my way through with the crossbow in a series of deadly head on confrontations. All the while I was taking torpedo potshots at bridges on various ships. It seems that bridges have the easiest torpedo angles. All the while I was slowly moving back towards the engines of the carrier as they were the farthest target and made at least some logical sense for me to destroy. That crossbow can take a mountain of hurt before it explodes.

This mission more than any other made me wish for some freespace like commands: ie. target closest enemy, or target enemy targeting me.

On another note did you notice the voice actor from WC Saga on this mission. Im pretty sure its the same guy from the prolog.
 
I don't think it's sensible to call "target closest enemy" a Freespace command since it was in X-Wing in 1993 - also, it's in Standoff. Try the U key.
 
Ilanin said:
I don't think it's sensible to call "target closest enemy" a Freespace command since it was in X-Wing in 1993 - also, it's in Standoff. Try the U key.
Click to expand...

At least starting with *WC4* and included in Prophecy and Secret Ops you have keys for Targeting the the nearest ship (U) and matching the targeted ship's speed (Y). R is for cycling the targeted sub-system (such as turrets and missile launchers).

Privateer 2 has options for cycling forward (A) or backwards (z) through targets, or to target either nearest friendly (s) ship or the nearest hostile (w) ship. Privateer 2 also lets you store a target to a hotkey so you can bring up that specific ship whenever you want.
 
I stand corrected, i guess that there is a readme file I havnt read. I checked the ingame keybindings and didnt find the intructions you were refering to, so thank you guys for bringing me up to speed. Huge dogfights are going to be much easier.

By the way you guys have freakishly good memories. I played that game on floppies! And WC4 was quite a long time ago, still have my disks as well as 3 though I have never succeded in making them work.

Anyway thanks again everyone.

Oh was I right about the voice actor guy who played the instructor in Saga?
 
Destroying turrets may help with removing some of the impediments for the torpedoes to reach their target... but I realise that the enemy fighters are probably higher priority. It's difficult to juggle the multiple objectives.

You'll probably have to ask the Saga folks for an answer to that question, or correlate the credits listings yourself.
 
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