Idea for Standoff

[Sharpshooter]

Y'know, I think we're already having enough problems trying to save as many fighters as possible. This has already made me replay some missions quite a lot.
And furthermore, ships can be replaced. Pilots can't be resurrected, and even if it were possible to make pilots killable like you suggested, we wouldn't want the game to be *too*hard, would we? In Prophecy this might have been a good challenge because the game was fairly easy, but Standoff is already hard enough, in my opinion (off-topic : except that mission where you fight Sparrow. That was too easy, but there's not much they could do about it, apparently).
This is, after all, Wing Commander; not Fire Emblem.

 

[Quarto]

Also is it possible to make every mission ejectable? Not like if you jump out as soon as you take off, but while on a mission. If you have more numbers than the enemy on that nav point and you eject, can you be picked up by friendly if you are winning?

Well, we do try to make things more or less logical when it comes to ejection - that is to say, if you eject in friendly space, you'll usually be picked up, and if you eject next-door to a Snakeir... well, that's a little worse. However, we don't go quite as far as you suggest, trying to check precisely what the situation is and who would most likely gain control of the navpoint after the player's ejection in order to determine the results. We could do this - the scripting certainly allows for it. However, this would add even more complication to our mission scripts, which tend to be pretty excessive already. This would mean even more potential bugs and such. All in all, too much work for something that, unfortunately, most people simply wouldn't appreciate - as far as I know, most people simply don't bother ejecting at all, prefering instead to fight to the death and then restart the mission. In order to justify this kind of thing, we'd really need to devise some special patch that not only prevents people from restarting after death, but also deleting their savegames for that character - and I'm not sure how many people would appreciate that. I certainly didn't in X-Wing .

 

[Winnyfred]

Well, in Prophecy, when you ejected next door to the destroyers on the first disc and ejected you were picked up by friendly. Why can't that happen in just one mission? By the way, I always go back and play the ejectable missions, for reasons of my own so I'm not the hero, just the pilot that couldn't fight long enough to hold out and was forced to jump out. You should fly on nightmare, tell me how hard it is to keep your ship in one piece then. On Standoff not Prophecy please.

 

[Sharpshooter]

You should fly on nightmare, tell me how hard it is to keep your ship in one piece then. On Standoff not Prophecy please.

That's like asking whether a volcano is hot.
Though I didn't find Nightmare to be as difficult as I thought it would be. On most missions the hard part seems to be shooting ships fast enough rather than keeping your fighter in good shape. That is, unless you're flying a Gladius.
Nightmare in UE certainly is hard, however. I once got blown up a second or so after launching, on a scramble mission. I'm not even sure what hit me. I guess it was a missile or two.

 

[Eder]

Nightmare is pretty much the only level guaranteed to be harder than the others in Standoff, since the AI "cheats".
On the other levels, sometimes the difficulty of shooting down smarter enemies is compensated by having smarter friendly AI (which may make it easier to keep your wingmen alive, and therefore, to complete the missions).

 

[Dundradal]

Well, considering the nature of the battle, you'll certainly have a hard time achieving this - in the final series, you'll be far too busy trying to save the world to pay attention to what's happening to one of your wingmen. But yes, it will be possible to do this without cheating - all you have to do is pray that when your wingmen get shot up, they manage to eject instead of dying.

Yeah, I have a funny feeling I'm going to care more about staying alive myself and downing kats to care what the hell happens to my wingmen...Earth won't save itself you know.

 

[Thunderbolt]

Nightmare is pretty much the only level guaranteed to be harder than the others in Standoff, since the AI "cheats".

The only thing I found that makes nightmare more difficult is that the kilrathis Sartha's and Drakhri are much much nastier and dont hesitate in launching dumbfires at you and your wingmen. And when your wingmen are flying torpedo runs on carriers and cruisers they are easy target practice for the kilrathi.

Its almost always those damn dumbfires that screw missions up for me

 

[Dundradal]

Its almost always those damn dumbfires that screw missions up for me

I really couldn't agree with you more about that.